A Camp With a Purpose

When John and Susan Yates decided to host all of their grandchildren for a few days of cousins camp, they realized they were choosing one thing over another. The reality is in today's world we are overwhelmed with options.

There are way too many good options. And so as parents we have to think, okay, in the long term, ten years from now, is it going to be more important that we spend time with cousins or more important that we were there for them? That we were there for that last baseball game.

Ten years from now, which choice is going to make the biggest and most lasting difference? This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. I'm Bob Lapine.

You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. So I know you got a lot of questions. How would we pull this off?

What would you do each day? All of the questions about cousins camp. We're going to get some answers for you today from Susan Yates. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. I noticed this week as we were talking about cousins camp, I noticed your wife. I'm watching the kind of wheel spinning in her head. Were you seeing it? I don't even have to look. I can smell it over there.

It's going to happen. Already been talking to Susan because she's a personal hero of mine, a mentor over years from a distance. I love being with her periodically because I get to ask her all the questions. So I was asking her questions about this camp because I already want to start.

Oh, it's in your DNA. It is. The Susan you're talking about is our friend Susan Yates who joins us again on Family Life Today. Welcome back. Oh, thanks.

It's so much fun to be with you all. Susan is a writer, a speaker for years. She and her husband John spoke at our weekend to remember marriage getaways.

He was the senior pastor at the Falls Church in Virginia. She has just written a book where she is giving a play-by-play for all of us on how to do a cousins camp. Get the grandkids together, the cousins, and let grandma and grandpa, now in your case it's Poppy and... Gee. Gee? Gee.

The first grandchild names you. You're Gee? I'm Gee. I was going to just be grand and she couldn't say it, so it came out Gee, which is G-H-E-E, which means fat butter. So I'm fat butter. All right.

Butter is always good. Bob, what are you? I am, and I picked this myself. I didn't let the kids do it. I picked G-Daddy for myself. G-Daddy? G-Daddy.

And the reason I did that was because I wanted to be the cool, hip kind of rap star. And my daughter Amy said, I am not letting my kids call you G-Daddy. And I said, you know, it doesn't matter what you let them call me, because when they're here and I say, do you want G-Daddy to take you to Walmart and buy you something, they're going to call me G-Daddy at that point.

So it's worked out just fine. So I'm G-Daddy and Marianne's Mimi, and you are? I'm Poppy. That's what my husband is, Poppy. He didn't start out as Poppy. He wanted to be Pops or Poppa, but it turned into Poppy.

Poppy, yeah. And you are? I'm Nonnie. Nonnie. All right. I'm being Nonnie. Well, we're talking about how Poppies and Nonnies and Gs and G-Daddies can all get the grandkids together. You do have the coolest name.

Thanks. Yeah. You can have an event, a camp for the kids, and some people will hear it and be immediately overwhelmed. We've talked about that.

It can be simple. You've said there are really two goals in all of this. Goal number one is to cultivate a relationship between the grandkids, the cousins, and goal number two is for you to be able to pour into them some things, reinforce what mom and dad are saying but coming from a different perspective, and for you to be able to be involved in discipling your kids. And Susan, I think the Bible paints pictures for us of the older generation being actively involved in their kids' and grandkids' lives. I think a lot of us have this idea that when you get to the grandparenting years, it's all about you. It's not, is it? No, it's really not. It's about the next generation.

I think just in life, for all of us, it's always about the next generation and then the subsequent ones. So this is an investment of time. It's an investment of money because the kids have got to travel to get their grandkids there. If you're buying arts and crafts, how much money do you spend? I want to know how much this costs.

What's the budget for this? I don't know, but it's not a big budget because, again, we do simple food. We do sandwiches and salads during the day. We do simple things like chicken nuggets and hot dogs and hamburgers at night.

It's not about the food. And with the crafts, they're simple crafts. One of my greatest finds is usually before camp, I scour the neighborhood, and I find a house under construction, and I go to the builders and say, Would you save me a pile in the corner of little pieces of wood?

They're always shaving off things. And then I go back and I collect the wood. I have about five hammers, and I buy nails with big heads, and that becomes a construction project. So just tons of boxes of carpentry stuff out to our little farm, and that's one of our greatest crafts. The kids create the most amazing things from airplanes to a puzzle with nails down it, and then you just have paints.

And so it's simple. It's not fancy. Now, in our later years, I have two granddaughters who are very crafty. They're better than I am, and I'm not crafty. Their mom, my daughter-in-law, is real crafty, so I've turned over the planning of all the crafts to them.

So again, it's always sort of turning things over. Have there been some things you've done where you've said, Okay, we're doing that now every year. It's an annual part of Cousins Camp.

Yeah, one of the things that we do every year, and usually it's at the last night, is I bought a gutter, a roof gutter from the hardware store, and we line it with aluminum foil. And our county is called Warren County, and it becomes Warren County's largest banana split. Guinness Book of World Records type. And we line the whole thing with ice cream. How long is this thing?

Oh my goodness, probably 18 feet. Because you have 21 kids, right? Kids, yeah.

But we didn't in the beginning. And at this point, the parents are usually there. And then we line it with ice cream and all the different kinds of toppings. And in the early years, I thought it'd be really fun to make them eat without their hands. So the first year, they had to just stick their faces in and eat, and then the kids decided that was really unsanitary. So subsequent years, we let them use spoons, and it always winds up somebody gets whipped cream mashed in their face.

But the banana split, gutter banana split is always a staple. That's one fun thing we do. Another thing that has been a big surprise to me that's been one of the more popular things has been our buddy system.

And we started this at our first camp. Every older kid has a younger buddy. And your job as the buddy is to teach the younger ones, you know, here's where you go to get water. You don't all crowd at the kitchen sink. You don't all ask Gee or Poppy for water. So everybody has their own water bottle with a self-attached top.

It's cheap. And the big buddies take the kids into the bathroom, pull out the stool, teach them how to get their own water. And then we keep the water bottles in a big bucket. They have their names on them. The buddies also help the little ones write in their journals. They help them with crafts. They help them with anything that they need help with.

And we did this just sort of out of self-preservation in the beginning. But what was so amazing to me was how it built the relationships between the older ones and the younger ones. And inevitably, every year, just kind of before cousin camp, I'll get a call from one of the grandchildren, Gee, who's going to be my big buddy this year? Or whose buddy can I be? And it's not their brother or sister. It's a cousin.

Oh, no. We separate siblings. And are you purposeful who you put them with? We try to be really purposeful. Now we have a big pool to fit from. And we try to match girls up with girls.

But that doesn't always work because we have 13 grandsons and 8 granddaughters. So we're heavy on the guys. And sometimes we double up. But what has been so great is to see that we never expected this to be a big deal to the kids.

But it's a very big deal. And it's the first thing they want to know when they come in. So I post—this is another little thing we've learned—is we post the schedule. We post whose buddy is whose. We post everything.

So you aren't answering the same question a thousand times. So they race into the kitchen. And they're on the kitchen cupboard are the buddy lists.

And that's a big celebration, finding out whose buddy they get to be or whose buddy they are. Have you ever had one of your kids say—because I can imagine this happening in this culture with sports— We can't come. We've got baseball. And school just ended. And I know this is really important.

But this is more important. Or have you had people, your family, go, nope, this trumps everything. We're going to be there. Because we started when they were young and it became so popular amongst the kids, it's been more the kids pressuring the parents. So we haven't had to say that. It's inconvenient for everybody, but the parents have just made it a priority. And I'm guessing they're saying, yeah, we're going to miss baseball this week. Right.

And we'll be there next week. And I think our job as parents is to think long-term perspective and to ask the question, in the long term, is it going to be more important that we spent time with cousins or more important that we were there for that last baseball game? Ten years from now, which is going to be more important? So that's just a question that helps in parenting no matter what you're considering. Because the reality is in today's world, we are overwhelmed with options.

There are way too many good options. And so as parents, we have to think, okay, ten years from now, which choice is going to make the biggest and most lasting difference? We had a former Detroit Lions player that Ann and I mentored over the seasons. Now he's a coach in Chicago for the Bears. And his wife texted you or Facebooked you about their sons now are playing basketball, or I think it was basketball, and they're really good athletes. You know, their dad was an NFL player. And they wanted to go with mom to an away game that dad would be coaching at.

And she texted Ann, right, and said, what do I do? Because all the parents of the basketball team were like, you cannot miss this game. We'll lose the game if your kids don't play. And what did you tell her?

I told her her husband is her first priority. And for the kids, this will be a memory that they're going to have so many basketball games, but this opportunity with their dad, you don't know how many times they'll get to do that. So choose that. And they took some heat, and they lost without them. And who's going to remember that in ten years, right?

Yeah, nobody. Cousin camp's the same thing. It's like this is a memory that's building values.

That'll be a lifetime. Well, speaking of memories, have there been some things you've tried one year and you said, boy, we're never doing that again? Any activities that just didn't turn out the way you envisioned them?

Well, yeah, there's several. We thought it would be really fun to have a whipped cream fight with the kids. And we got, you know, hotels give away those shower caps for free in your rooms. So we put shower caps on the kids that wanted shower caps so the hairs wouldn't get sticky. But the first year, I used shaving cream, and it was awful.

You know, it stung, it tasted bad, it was terrible. And the kids groan. The next year, we switched to whipped cream, which they loved. We made that same mistake once, because at the end of the school year, we had a slip and slide. Oh, yeah. Every year.

Every year, and all the neighbor kids would come. And the year that I used the shaving cream, when it gets in their eyes, it hurts. You learn. You learn. That was a learning. That was a real mistake.

One of the things we've had to learn is balancing realistic expectations with surprises. And in the beginning, John, then I thought, oh, this is going to be such a great time for us to bond with each of the grandchildren and to have significant conversations with each of the grandchildren. And I mean, the first year, even with five, that did not happen.

And, you know, I felt like, oh, you know, I'm such a failure. I didn't have a significant conversation with this grandchild. Was that just because it was chaos or the schedule? The schedule, it was mainly because they were much more interested in their cousins than in their grandparents. So that was really an eye-opener, that this is really not about building my relationship with them.

That's not the priority for this time. It's about their relationships with one another. So we had to let go of that expectation and realize that it's during the year when we're with individual families that we work on our individual relationships with those grandchildren, when it's not so overwhelming with all the cousins. Susan, you've got kids who are going to church, raising their kids in the church. There are a lot of folks listening who are thinking, I'd love to do this with our grandkids and have a memory verse and be discipling our kids. I'm not sure my kids would let their kids come if they knew we were trying to indoctrinate them.

Right. What's your advice there? Again, you have to consider the needs of the family coming, and the important thing is that you're getting together. And I tell a lot of stories in the book that are not mine, that are from other people. And I tell the story of one friend of mine who comes from a really painful heritage, and the families disagree on a lot of things. But she still said, I'm going to take a risk, and I am going to have a family reunion. This was a multigenerational one. And the one thing this family has in common is we're all connected to military, most of us in some way, service or siblings who served or different involvements in military. So she had a military theme, and it was just a day-long reunion. And they had competitions, and they talked about character. And people came a little bit hesitant, but they left building new relationships and having taken one step. And she said, you know, you just go with where you can. And the purpose the first time is just to build these relationships.

So I do tell a lot of stories of very different types of family reunions. Because it's going to look different for everybody. It's going to look different for everybody. But the key is, you've modeled it, is get it on the calendar. Get it on the calendar.

If you don't schedule it, it will not happen, especially in our crazy, crazy schedules. I'm thinking of the listener that's wishing that their parents would do something like this. Could you ever see some kids asking their parents, could you do this for us? Yes. I thought you were going to say, could you ever see taking other people's kids and doing it because of camp or something you don't even know? And, you know, there's single parents out there, too. Right. Two answers to that.

One is you have to be careful. You don't want to put a guilt trip or an expectation on your parents that's going to make them uncomfortable. I do have a lot of young moms that I get together with that are dying for their parents to do this. And so I think you have to carefully approach the parents out of your relationship with them and in your own context. And perhaps say something like, hey, Mom, I wanted to just run this idea by you. Would you be willing maybe to bring the grandkids together for one day? And how could we help make this happen?

And how could we support you in this? Or perhaps you are listening and you're a single parent or a single grandparent. Bond with another, another single parent or two-couple family whose kids, grandkids are basically in, you know, sort of the same general age group and do it together. We have a friend who is a single gal. She actually lives in England, and she's never married. She's a lawyer by trade, but she has a passion for animals, and she has a passion for her nieces and nephews. And I tell her story in the book where she had a vision for wanting to bring her nieces and nephews and some also, including some neighborhood children, together to teach them about caring for farm animals.

So she brought them together for farm camp for several days. And she's had a real impact on the next generation as a single, unmarried aunt. So anybody can do it. That's a great word, and I'm thinking of a lot of single aunts or single uncles who could really make this an investment and have a terrific ministry in the lives of their nieces and nephews. Or if you're somebody that doesn't have parents that would ever do this, and there's a lot of people, you could do it.

You could do it yourself. You could just say to your brother or sister, are you okay with me bringing your kids over and getting our kids together and our kids get to know, and you lead it. You lead it. Have you and John ever gotten to the end of cousins camp and looked at each other and say, yeah, this may have been the last year that we do this.

Yes. As a matter of fact, we have finished. After 11 years, and now that our grandkids are bigger, you always want to quit when you're winning, and you don't want your kids to feel stuck coming to something. So we had our last one at year 11, and our children said, what if instead of cousins camp, also we were tired, quite honestly. We were tired. But our kids said, what if we begin as a family to commit to meeting over Labor Day?

We can pull little kids out of school Friday, we can come in Thursday, stay till Monday, so we have just a big family camp. And so I think you have to be wise about when you've done it long enough, and now our oldest is 21, so it's time for a change. It's time for a change. So you have to realize that. And we have to recognize that as grandparents, as we get older, our stamina, it's just the reality of aging. Things we were able to do 10 years ago, we may not be physically able to do with young grandkids, especially 21. I'm imagining you and your 21 grandkids. That's just a part of the reality of aging, isn't it?

It is, and most people don't have 21 grandchildren. So this book is not written for somebody in our situation necessarily. But one of the things that we've done in the book is the middle chapter is about creating your own camp. Because I've found so often, as you all know, you'll read a book and you'll just be overwhelmed. There's too many ideas, there's too much stuff, I can't do all of this. And you get to the end of the book and you're discouraged. And you sort of want to throw it on the couch or in the trash. So what I've done in this book is I've stopped in the middle, which is chapter five, and said, okay, now given what we've laid out, this is your chapter to begin to design your own camp or family reunions.

There's a lot in here about family reunions according to your needs. And so it's a working chapter right in the middle of the book. And then we go on with other ideas, with the idea that you can circle what you're going to read in the subsequent chapters and then go back and enter it in chapter five.

So the purpose of that is to keep anybody from feeling overwhelmed and to enable everybody to design what's right for them, because no two families are alike. Well, the exciting thing for me, I'm not kidding, sitting here is I'm inspired to do it. And I can actually say, I'm younger.

Got a little more energy? I mean, no, I'm thinking my oldest grandchild is four. Yeah. Is she five yet? She's five. She's five now. But so if I did one this year, and I'm saying I would do it, Ann would do it, who are we kidding, but there'd be one grandchild.

So I'm going to have to wait a few years, but now I can, aren't you excited? It's like we can start planning this thing. And you can start at three. You don't have to wait until four. That's just what we did.

So again, everybody's different. And I would just want to say one thing about marriage, because what Joni and I had to realize early on is we have to be careful. We are going to get tired. That's a given. We're going to get irritable. That's a given. We are going to get put out with some different children. That's a given. We're going to feel like failures. That's a given. Things aren't going to go the way we had planned.

That's a given. So what do we do when this hits in our marriage? And we have to learn that we are not competing with each other, but we're completing each other. So when I am about done, I say, honey, I'm done.

I need you to take over. And he does the same thing. So I think it's a great lesson in how to work together in your marriage and play to one another's strengths. I'm assuming after 11 years, you've had some sweet moments, some hard moments. Do you recall some moments that when you and John went to bed that night, you were like, wow, that was really amazing what God had done?

Yeah. I think our last camp probably is the one that had us in tears, because with older children, again, the philosophy of having the kids speak into the younger kids' life. We have a special ceremony that marks the end of camp.

It's called the Bach ceremony, which stands for band of cousins. And we process with candles to an outdoor area on our property, and it's a solemn processions, and the kids have made a cross with all the carpentry stuff. And we have the little ones say a pledge. We pledge to love the Lord and take care of each other forever. That's our pledge. And so the new ones are initiated into the pledge, and everyone claps. Well, over the years now, because they're older, everybody's been initiated. So we think, okay, what can we do?

And Johnny always gives a little mini message, I mean like four minutes on what this means. And what can we do as they get a bit older? And so this past year, we asked our 11 oldest, they were all 10 or up, to take some sharing time during the Bach ceremony and share three things. And again, I pulled them together, positive peer pressure at work here, I pulled them together, and I said, I would like for you all to share three things. The first thing is, what is your favorite verse?

What is one thing you want God to do in your life in the coming year? And then three, what is a piece of advice you have for your younger cousins? And we had no idea what they would say.

It was unrehearsed, and it was just those very simple questions. And what they shared was amazing. One of my grandsons shared the verse in Proverbs about iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. That was his favorite verse.

And he said, you really need to pick good friends and stick with those friends, because you need buddies for your whole life. And I thought, oh my goodness. And one of them shared that he wanted God to give him patience.

That was his prayer for the coming months. And then another shared to the younger cousins, be thankful to your mom and dad. And I'm thinking, oh my goodness, the parents ought to be here.

They weren't. But that was really special for us, because you don't know, especially as you hit those preteen years, or that 10 or 11-year-old that's really, really reticent to open up, you don't know what's going on inside of them. And we know that if Poppy says that, or Grandpa or Grandma says that, but when a cousin says it. I mean, you know, as a pastor, when somebody comes in and preaches something, everybody goes, oh my goodness, I've been saying that for 10 years.

They never listen, but when the cousin says it and that, it's going to stick. Well, just having this conversation, and it has been motivating and inspiring, and I'm just reminded of what a treasure you are, and how all of us have benefited from your writing over the years. And then I had kids, and then I had grandkids, and the books that you and John have written together, the books you've written, your contribution to the art of parenting, and being a part of that with Dave and Ann. And we're just grateful that you'd be here with us and that you'd keep passing on the wisdom that you— We've got a little bit of cousin's camp right here. Thank you for training and teaching so many. Well, thank you. And you know, we haven't done it perfectly, because again, I just want to leave with one thing.

We're all going to feel like we've ruined our kids, but our ability to ruin our children is not nearly as great as God's power to redeem them. That's great. Thank you, Susan. Thank you.

And thanks for the book, for the manual, for all of us to have a guide for how to do this. The book is called Cousin Camp. You can go to familylifetoday.com to order your copy, or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, the title of the book, Cousin Camp by Susan Yates. Go to familylifetoday.com and order online, or call to order 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY. By the way, Susan has created something special that we want to make available to you. It's a downloadable PDF called Camp at Home, 100 Practical Ideas for Families.

It's free to download. Go to our website, familylifetoday.com, and you can download it from there. Now, I know for many of our listeners, these have been challenging months. I know some folks are facing financial challenges like you've never faced before. And honestly, here at Family Life, we're in a similar situation. The president of Family Life, David Robbins, is here with us today, and this has been a hard couple of months for us. It certainly has been for us, and I want to speak to that.

But I'm motivated by what families are experiencing and how we can help them. I recently sent an email and asked for ways I could pray for listeners of Family Life Today and other people connected to Family Life. And I spent a half a day praying, and here's a few examples. I could use prayer for my marriage. My husband left me two weeks ago. I wrestled with God last night.

Feelings of anger and extreme weariness came over me. I'm grateful my family's healthy, yes, but yesterday my employer cut my position. We are indeed in need of prayers. You can pray for our church. Our pastor died during COVID-19, and we need wisdom for another pastor to lead our church. And it goes on and on, and I was overwhelmed about what families are facing in this season, but yet how intimate God is and how important it is for us to continue to bring help and hope to people, the one guaranteed hope, Jesus himself, and the way he can transform a family. And at Family Life, we are at a unique position. We are in need.

These last few months have been financially hard, as you could expect and could imagine amongst a pandemic. As a donor supported ministry, and we have this unique opportunity with this matching gift to really set the sails for the rest of this year. It is a critical moment, and if you're able, I would ask that you give whatever you can to help us as we continue this year. And with the matching gift, keep in mind any amount you donate right now is going to be matched dollar for dollar, up to a total of $345,000, so it's a great opportunity to see your gift expanded. We'd like to say thank you for any gift you're able to give by sending you a copy of Barbara Rainey's new book, which is called My Heart Ever His. It's our gift of appreciation for your support of this ministry. And if you'd like to join Family Life today as a new legacy partner, a monthly giver, here's what's going to happen. Your first gift, along with every gift you give for the rest of the year, is going to be matched dollar for dollar, up until that total of $345,000 is met. And we're going to send you, as a new legacy partner, a certificate so you and your spouse, or someone you know who you'd like to gift this to, can go to a Weekend to Remember marriage getaway. Yes, those are going to be happening again, and this gift certificate will cover the cost of the registration fee for the weekend to remember. It's our gift to you when you become a new legacy partner during this matching gift season. Go to familylifetoday.com.

You can make your donation online, or you can call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. Thanks in advance for whatever you're able to do during this challenging time. We are grateful for your support. Now tomorrow, we're going to introduce you to a couple who, at one point, their marriage was a real mess.

But God has turned that mess into a mission. We'll meet Tim and Kathy Bush tomorrow. Hope you can join us for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas. A crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.