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So every 6 months 6-8 families, including ours, all meet up and hang out. The parents all own businesses, and three of us have blogs, and 5 of us are writing a cookbook together.
We all book a really big house and the parents take turns cooking and we all take turns cleaning up. We go to a new place every year.The parents have "mastermind sessions" which means they each present a problem from their business, and everybody else helps them solve it.
While the adults do that, us kids create something called Terabithia. Terabithia is basically a village that we create made out of wood, sticks, leaves, and whatever else we can find in the woods. We have team and government, just like a real country. Like The Queen (me), Army and Army General (Will), Hospital Crew (kind of everybody), Church and Head of Church (usually Paul or Tony, because they are the only Catholics), search crew (usually younger kids), government officers (Caden, Paul, Tony, Will), and sometimes more. And no, we do not have enough people for all of those jobs, usually, we each have more than one job. Sometimes we even have more than one city.
We have done 4 Terabithia's so far, although some were better than others. We are about to meet up again to do another one. You will hear all about them in more detail later, but here is an over view of all of them.
Mastermind #1
This was our first mastermind. Nobody really knew each other except for the parents and some of them didn't even know each other. So anyway, we started off the mastermind really bored because we had nothing to do.
We watched a movie every night, we talked every day, and we play Foosball and stuff, but most of the time we were really bored. Our parents get nanny's for us so that they can talk and stuff. so the nanny's tried to help us find something to do, so they started taking out jump ropes and chalk and a couple of other things.
We started to do races and jump rope, but then somebody decided to try to block the road so that the parents couldn't go anywhere. So we started to build, but then somebody found a wooded area, and somehow everybody started building. But as we build people got disorganized and a little frustrated at each other. So somebody suggested a queen. And I know queens don't get elected, but we are kids, cut us some slack! So they elected me as queen and started treating me really fancy. So we worked on it every day and wouldn't come in until we absolutely HAD to!!
Mastermind #2
The first 2 days we were discouraged because we couldn't find any wood to build a house or building. We searched and searched and searched, but all we found was a couple of measly sticks, a couple of metal parts that someone must have left in the woods (including a carabiner) and some thatch-like material. Well, I had with me this tool which had a saw like an end on it, sharp enough to cut through the thatch, which we later discovered was cattail plant with no flower (the part that looks like a corn dog). There were two marshy areas that had this plant and we cut a bunch of it and started using as a sort of insulator, which we had never done before.Soon we had created this sort of race. There was this really big rock that we had to climb up to get onto it. Actually, here is a picture:
We had someone at the top (usually Paul, the one with the head back, because he was the best at climbing) hold a rope in the middle so that people could climb up. We found an area to use as a house/fort and when we didn't want people to know what we were talking about we called it the banana house, and then it kind of stuck. So for the obstacle course thing we made up it went like this: You had to run to one swamp area starting from the top of the rock and use the cutter thing to cut 5 pieces of thatch, then you had to run to the other one and get 5 more pieces, then you had to go down the zip line we made (with the carabiner and some string we found) and then climb back up to the banana house, but on your way there you had to find 3 sticks to bring there. Then, with all of our thatch and sticks, we had to drop off the supplies and put them in the banana house, and then run back to the rock and touch somebody's hand. We had to do this while being timed, and I will say, all of those things were not close together! It was hard, but we did have a champion who we all aspired to be like by the end of the week: Paul. Next up was me, then Tony, then Caden, my brother, and last but not least, Katy! Usually, it took about 3-4 minutes. Some of us got down to 3, and Paul got down to 1.50ish one time! And we were on a mountain, so it made the challenge twice as hard because we had to work harder to get sufficient oxygen. Terabithia #3
Now for #3. Well, as with the other ones, we were a bit disappointed with the building area near the big house we rented, so we talked and watched TV and played with the exercise machines for a little bit, but as soon as one of the kids was going too fast, slipped while the treadmill was still going, got a couple rug-burns, and then crashed into the wall, we thought we would take another look outside and see if there was anything at all that we could do. Well, as always, there was, and we started building right away. First, we started on the palace and used sticks (weaving) mud and leaves to waterproof it and give it its bones. It the end it held up even during rain, which was awesome and made us feel really happy about our success! Then we made a couple other buildings, but after we had no more building space, and started to feel bored again. But what we didn't realize was there was a whole world of fun, right in front of our eyes!! The river/stream was super awesome in the end. First, me, Tony, Paul, Will, and Caden all went chest deep into the freezing water for 15 minutes in the end. We all were like "I'm going to get out now" but nobody else wanted to lose, so we all said "Just one more minute and then we will all get out together so nobody will lose" But then we thought about it and trying isn't the same as winning, or as nice, so we all just stood there, freezing for so long and then finally people started getting out, but I don't remember who won. And then we did something awesome called bottle racing. We found old bottles, put the caps on them, and then raced them down the river. About halfway down was a natural dam so we didn't litter and we got to reuse the bottles. We named the bottles, and then we had two race officials whole were the only ones that could touch the bottles. If a bottle got stuck, they had to wait for that bottle to be in the last place before giving it a helping hand. Whoever got to the dam first won! I mean bottles. Soon we started clearing the leaves and sticks out of the water as well as creating our own obstacles. It was super fun!
Mastermind #4
At mastermind #4 we thought we wouldn't be able to have a Terabithia because we were at a resort, so it was fenced off to any nature. I mean it was a nice resort, but we wanted nature. We found a way to get out of the resort with out anyone seeing (people knew where we were going) and found a really hot area that could possibly be a Terabithia. It wasn't the perfect picture, but it was better than nothing. So we got to work gathering wood. The only problem? There was none. I mean NONE. We had to pull up weeds and plants to get anything resembling wood. So for a while, we kind of gave up. There was a bar at the resort where we could get as many smoothies or drinks (no alcoholic of course) that we wanted. So for a while, we worked on Rubik's Cubes and drank smoothies. But then we went out there again and found this really awesome pre-made building, we shade from the sun!! We took it and made it the Palace. A couple of the other kids claimed parts of the other area and created shops and things, but it wasn't really building, it was just putting stuff on rocks and calling it a store. But for the people that made the store, it was really helpful. After that, we also found a ledge/cliff thing and used it as a hang-out area.When we were up there we looked right down on the resort, and so we started calling it The Land of Unlimited Drinks.After we got bored of that and started working on Rubik's Cubes a lot. Timing ourselves, learning new cubes, and beating records. It was fun, but I don't think (despite the resort) that it was the best one ever.
I hope you enjoyed hearing about our adventure in Terabithia, and hope you got inspired to create your own outdoor village.
Until next time,
Crazy Abbie Out!