by Joe Slade
Senior Assistant Director

This has been a year of great change for me: 12 months ago, my wife Alison and I lived in Atlanta, where I worked at a university, and spent much of my (admittedly limited) free time socializing with friends or riding my bicycles.

To say that things have changed in the last twelve months would be something of an understatement. We’ve moved to Carmel, Indiana; I am now employed as the Senior Assistant Director at GUCI; and we have a beautiful baby girl named Alexandra! I still spend much of my (even more limited) free time riding bikes, so it’s good to know some things in life don’t change.

One of my responsibilities is to travel around the GUCI region and visit congregations, both to reach out and to connect with current campers, staff, and families, and to welcome new members to the GUCI family. In doing so, one of the questions I often heard this fall was “Do you have children?” Each time I shook my head and explained that Alison and I were expecting our first in February. Now, however, I realize the subtext of that question is actually “do you send your children to GUCI?”

I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to speak with a mother who was considering sending her child to GUCI for the first time. One of the questions she asked me was whether or not I had children, and this time, I was proudly able to say yes! While Alexandra isn’t quite old enough for Garin (or even Camp K’ton!) yet, I am so excited for the day when she’s old enough to come to camp, just as my sister Marya and I did. In the meantime, I’m pleased that Alexandra will be the most recent in a long line of staff children who have grown up at camp, loved and cared for by an entire community of people.

So if you see me walking around camp this summer with a sleeping infant on my back, be sure to come introduce yourself! And if I seem a little tired, you’ll know neither of us are sleeping through the night yet.