6 days until camp twitch and shout!

6 days until I leave for camp twitch and shout! I'm so excited, but my anxiety seems to be kicking up as well. I thought that because I am just so darn excited that maybe I wouldn't have much anxiety, but I should know myself better than that at this point! Any trip, vacation, or camping experience, no matter how excited I am causes my anxiety to make its presence known. My heightened anxiety then by default makes my OCD and tics worse. It helps so much to know that mostly everyone at camp, even most of the counselors, know exactly what this is like. That fact alone is helping me feel less anxious. I have never really been in an environment before where mostly around me knows what it's like to have this kind of bad anxiety which makes your OCD and tics act up even more than usual.

I am trying my best to just ignore my anxiety though. The advantage of knowing what anxiety is and how it works is that you know it's normal for you and you can say to yourself "this is just my anxiety acting up" and then try to get on with the day! Easier said than done of course and i'm still working on trying to master this, but the more I try to recognize my anxiety as simply a false alarm the better.

So i'm trying right now to ignore my anxiety and just focus on the great time I am going to have at camp and how much fun i'm having getting ready for camp! I've been doing a lot of preparation for camp which is of course lots of fun! Camp shopping is awesome and I have almost checked off everything on shopping list for camp except for a few things. I will do more shopping this week. I need to get more of my OCD medicine, call the gastroenterologist to get some emergency stomach relaxant medication just in case my anxiety acts up and makes me stomach upset, and I need to get a one piece swim suit, a shower bucket, some shower shoes, and possibly a few more fun costume items like cat ears and a witch hat!

Also the theme this year at camp is Disney. Every year they pick a different theme! So to go with the camp 2013 Disney theme, my co-counselors are I decided to make our cabin theme Alice in Wonderland. We came up with a bunch of great decoration ideas and I started working on some decorations for our cabin yesterday. So far they are looking pretty good! Basically they are plates I designed with silhouettes of different Alice in Wonderland themed characters on them! My plan right now is to make these into welcome name plates. So we will put a campers name on each of them and then put them up in the cabin either in the entry way or on the campers bunks. It takes a lot of patience, careful cutting out of the silhouettes, and lots of taping to make these but I love seeing the end product when I finish a plate and hopefully my campers will appreciate them. The picture is of the three that I made yesterday. My two newest ones that I made today are of the Alice in Wonderland caterpillar and the red queen.