This is Why I Love Gymnastics Camp

Although I’m nowhere near done posting about Jerusalem, I have to take a slight detour to share in the hilarity that is preschool snack time.

This week, I ran a gymnastics camp for 4-6 year-olds. It isn’t so much gymnastics as it is watching small children almost kill themselves as they careen through the air off a spring board (narrowly missing, or sometimes hitting another kid), or teeter across a balance beam while looking sideways and saying in their non-inside voice “Hey, Teacher! Watch me!”

You quickly realize that saying those two words “be careful” has no merit whatsoever, and that when worse comes to worst, you just play a rousing game of “shipwrecked,” because at least it corrals them in the same general area.

My favorite part of camp is always snack time for the following reasons:

1. Snack, duh

2. The kids are sitting in chairs (for the most part)

3. The conversation

Snack time brings out the real kid inside the kid because they’re forced to sit there and just talk to each other. One of my favorite things to do is watch them talk and eat, and imagine a bunch of middle-aged guys in button-down shirts and ties at lunch hour doing and saying the exact same things. It’s really quite hysterical. You get the random screamings, the dreadful knock-knock jokes, the awkward comments about how another kid has boogers running out his nose, the folded arms and stern proclamation that none of the jokes were funny or worthy of laughter, and the revealing of too much information about their parents that would embarrass them to no end. Sometimes I stare at them and just start laughing because the visual is too much to handle.

This conversation, however, beat them all:

Kid #1: (leaning in towards kid #2 very closely) “Did you know you can die?”

Kid #2:  “Jesus died.”

Kid #1: (taken aback) “No, my mom said he’s still alive.”

Kid #2: “Nuh uh, he died a long time ago.”

Kid #1: “He’s dead here but alive in heaven.”

Kid #2: “Well, my grandpa died.”

Kid #3: (finding this conversation much more intriguing than any other) “Hey, my dad is really old. And he has a MUSTACHE!”

I'm not really sure what that had to do with anything, but I loved it anyway.

And here's a picture of a sweet mustache I found in Jerusalem, just for good measure.