camp

We picked up the boys this morning from camp. After only getting a few short notes from each, I was very curious to see how they had held up for the week away. I know I would have been called if anything serious happened; I gave an involuntary shudder every time the phone rang last week.

We arrived to a camp without any kids present, but mounds of disheveled possessions heaped on the front porches of the cabins.


We sorted through the piles, looking for items that looked vaguely familiar.


We checked our kids out. When we gave their names, the woman in charge exclaimed, "OH! THOSE boys! They got more mail in one week than I get junk mail in a year!" So our campaign to inundate them with mail, which included their parents, brother and grandparents, had worked.


Then we waited by the lake. We heard the kids singing in cadence quite a while before we saw them. It sounded like they were marching two-by-two wearing fatigues, but instead they just ambled in singing something about Bazooka gum at the top of their lungs.


At the end of the closing ceremony, the counselors led them in one last song. ALL the kids, regardless of age and cool-factor, sang along and did the accompanying motions to the tale of "Princess Pat." Apparently, it is a crowd favorite.


And mine haven't stopped singing since they got home. Songs about a little red wagon, and a baby shark, and peanut butter reese's cup, most of which have to be properly sung by two or more people as there is an "echo". They have taught me a card game called "Egyptian Rat Screw" (I cannot figure out why it is called that) and Primo has been busy making friendship bracelets for all of us. Terzo got the first one, and he is already singing about the baby shark.


They have not stopped talking about every little detail of camp, and how wonderful it was, and how they cannot wait to go back next year. I asked both what camp had taught them. Primo, on the cusp of teenagerhood, waxed poetic about how campers were able to show their true inside selves, and do things without fear of people making fun of them. (Presumably, those things included singing songs, with accompanying motions, about someone named Princess Pat.) Secondo, grounded in boyhood, responded that he had learned a lot about shooting an arrow in his archery class.

I think the only reason they were ready to come home was their level of exhaustion. The strategy of camp was apparently to tire the kids out so they more or less collapsed with little fuss at the end of the day. If my two are any judge, the strategy worked perfectly. They even slept on the way home.