Day Camp

The boys and I are having a week of day camp this week, me as a counselor and them as campers. This is our second year. For me, the second year is harder than the first because the first year nobody expects you to know what you're doing. The second year, you still don't know what you're doing but everyone figures you do.

We were on our drive out there this morning and I started panicking with questions like: "Guys??? What's the name of that little creature that lives in the tree that the kids write letters to? The one with the eggs?" And of course they had no idea, except that the tree creature was totally different from the egg creature, which was a dragon. (There's a traditional big hunt for the dragon eggs, which are actually watermelons, later in the week). I had to ask another counselor when we got to camp, and he was kind enough to not act like I was a complete idiot for not remembering and also for not knowing where my cabin was and even for not knowing I had a map of the camp in my little handbook. And once I had my little 3rd graders all together, within 5 minutes one of them asked me "What's that one tree where a little elf or something lives?" and I knew the answer because I'm in charge and we leaders know these things.

I also forgot my special sash thing which I'm required to wear, in fact I forgot about the existence of the sashes until we got to camp and all the other counselors had theirs on. So then when we got home I had to turn the closet in the den inside out and upside down hunting for it. Over an hour later I found it, along with a library tape, a head lamp, an old MS DOS book (I threw it away!), and two t-shirts that never got delivered to two kids before they abandoned our club, and which will be the perfect sizes for my boys for the tye-dye project later in the week.

I have a great group of kids, 7 girls and 3 boys full of enthusiasm and fun. I also had 2 different teen helpers at different times who have been coming to camp since they were Evan's age, so we never got lost or even confused and I came home headache-free.