To read part eight of day ten, click here.

I started gathering a pile of things I could use. It was a pitiful pile – all I could find was sticks, rocks, and rhododendron leaves. But it was all I could find, so it was what I had to work with.

I groaned and got to work. After trying a couple of designs, I just made a box. I outlined a square with sticks, and filled the bottom with rhododendron leaves.

Katie had said that it didn’t need to be fancy, and I wasn’t going to waste time on something I wasn’t going to really use. I scattered the rest of my pile of materials before sitting back down on my mat.

I sat with my journal for a few more minutes, coming up with three more things for our “give and take”. At that point I got up and went to my backpack. I started pulling things out, trying to get to the things that I knew were down in the very bottom.

Wow… I’d forgotten there were so many. I started muttering to myself as I looked through the stack of letters I was pulling out of the stack. There were a ton! I had letters from all of my grandparents, letters from four of my Aunts, letters from six of my cousins (all under the age of ten), and the letters that I had already opened from my family.

I picked up the first letter from the stack and opened it, wishing I had my pocketknife with me. It would have made it so much easier!

The letter was from my Grammy. As I read it I remember feeling so grateful for my family. All of my extended family means so much to me. There is something that’s almost magical when we all get together. We may not get along all of the time, but we’re family. And because we’re a family, we’re stuck with each other.

Maybe someday I will have that kind of relationship with my siblings. Because right now, we act like normal siblings. We fight, and we don’t like each other all the time. There have been people who say “we act perfectly all the time” and I just laugh inside, because we don’t. We’re normal people with normal qualities.

I just pray that someday I’ll have a better relationship with my siblings. I already have a good one with them. But right now, there are definitely some things we can work on in our relationship. 🙂

I put down the letter from Grammy and picked up the next one on the stack. It was also from Grammy! I opened it up and pulled out the letter to open it. As I was pulling the letter out, another slip of paper fell to the ground.

Click here to read the next part of Day Ten.

*Everything here is from my own memory and may not be correct. Outward Bound is not responsible for anything I post here. Thanks too NCOBS for letting me use their photos.*