Meanwhile back at camp

My son is a very fit physical being, which fascinates me, given the extent to which I am not. His body works optimally, and I love to watch the way he moves, with such unconscious ease of motion. I am glad he was able to find that particular expression in the gene soup that was given to him. 

Here's my son doing swimming instruction at camp. These were on the camp website this morning. 

And here's one of the goofball we all know and love:

Both kids come home this weekend. Then they have one day to do laundry and pack again before leaving for college (my son) and soccer preseason camp (my daughter). Talk about overscheduled.

My daughter called me this morning for her social security number. She was filling out her very first tax withholding form. I asked her if she missed having down time between Italy and camp so she could process her travel experiences. She said no, it was a good thing that she'd gone right to working at camp. She said the other kids from the trip were feeling very melancholy and wanting to go back to Italy, whereas she was busy and happy in the woods.

Then again, my girl has always had a particular talent for being fully engaged in whatever is happening right now.

Say Cheese

We dropped our daughter off at camp this weekend, and spent most of the day in the woods with her and our son and some of his camp "siblings." It was visiting day for the campers, so most of the kids were off campus with their parents, which left the young adult counselors free to pose for pictures at will. All these kids, now in college (but for my daughter), have sprawled and slept in and filled my living room for years now. They do grow.

Lifeguarding

As we get closer to next Tuesday, when my girl comes home from Italy, I feel my mood lightening. It has been kind of hard to have her so far away, and it will be good to have her back on the same continent. She will only be home for three days before we drive her up to camp for the last two weeks of the summer session. She will be working there as a counselor assistant for the two weeks, a job her brother, who is a full-fledged counselor there, set up for her. He is excited that they will be working together on the same side of the lake. I think he was impressed when he arrived at camp this summer to realize how well loved his sister was by those who got to know her last year. She made her own imprint in a place where he has long ruled—I think he really enjoyed that.

I will really enjoy the two weeks they are away at camp together. Somehow, knowing I can reach them if anything should go awry, knowing that they are only 2 hours away in the Connecticut woods, knowing they are together and among friends, makes me breathe easier. I am glad my girl had Italy, but now I am glad she's coming home.

Below is a picture of my son at twilight. The lake is just lovely at this camp. My son got his lifeguard certification at the start of the summer. He is also certified in CPR, and has been trained to use the defribrillator thingy that zaps the heart back to life, and he also has some other first aid and field emergency training from his sports medicine program at college and fire search and rescue training from his high school days as an FDNY explorer. My son collects first aid and first responder certifications like other people collect stamps. He'd be perfect for medicine, but says he doesn't want to be in an office. He wants to be the one running onto the field to assess and treat the sports injury.

One of the best things my husband and I did was send our son to live in the woods for a few weeks every summer since he was 11. He loves to have the sky above his head and no walls around him. For a few kids who will probably be his lifelong friends, that camp by the lake is "their place."

My son on lifeguard duty at camp.

Color Olympics

I found some pictures on the website of the camp where my son is working as a counselor this summer. If I look carefully through the photos, I find my son in the center of things, rallying the kids, leading activities. Here is a pic that was posted this morning, after the famous Color Olympics. My son has been a part of this ritual since he was 11 and a camper himself. The kids are divided into different color teams, red, blue, green, black, yellow, and they compete in various contests—swimming, flag raising, archery, sailing, rowing, sand-castle building, foot races, cheer raising, you name it. My son is apparently one of the leaders of the green team this year.

That's my son at center, his head just visible,
with the kid on his shoulders holding the flag.

Nature Girls

Two weekends ago, we spent the day in the woods with our son and daughter during their camp's visiting day. Soon after we arrived, I was in my daughter's tent (see photo above), watching her to sort her rather mud-caked laundry so that she could run it down a rocky wooded hillside to the unit director before we left the camp to resupply at Walmart and have lunch in the nearest town.

Outside, I heard one of the girls in her unit sing out, "Hey, a snake!" She was standing a few feet from my daughter's tent, next to a stand of trees roughly equidistant from several other girls' tents. In the next moment, five or six girls, including my daughter jumped from the raised wooden platforms of their tents and raced over to see the snake, which was burrowing into a hole that had previously been disguised by fallen leaves. They oohed and ahhhed and one of them even picked up the poor thing, so that it curled around her fist and forearm as the others yelled at her to let it go, and not a single one of them was afraid.

They didn't seem the slightest bit worried about a snake mere feet away from where they rested their heads at night. It was all just another day in the woods for them.

My husband explained to me that the snakes in this region are not poisonous, so the girls had nothing to fear. They obviously knew that already. Still, I was thoroughly impressed by them.

Into the Woods

My children have been at sleepaway camp for the past three weeks, my daughter as a camper, my son as a counselor. This is the same camp my son has attended for the past six years, and worked at as a counselor assistant last summer. But it is my daughter's first time there, and she is having to overcome the stamp of being somebody's little sister. Or maybe it's an advantage, I don't know. They seem to love my son at that camp. Most of the counselors and the kids all know him from his years there, and he seems to have conducted himself well enough. 

When we drove our girl up to camp, he came along for the ride to see to his old friends. Once there, the camp deputy director and counselors actually cajoled/teased/pleaded with him to come back and work this year. They were understaffed for the first session, and since my son hadn't yet found a summer job in the city, he said yes. (So much for his plans to party in the city his last summer before college.)

They day we drove up, all the girls came running out to meet my daughter (she was late to camp because of her Nana's funeral), or more likely (we suspected) to greet her brother. I had told my son that he needed to be nice to his sister, because all the little 14 and 15 years old girls would queue off how he treated her. I think he got what I was saying. He's seen enough girl wars to understand.

The campers sleep in platform tents in the woods, beside a beautiful lake in which they swim, canoe, kayak, raft, and dive from big blue and yellow water trampolines. They also jump off rock cliffs into the water (that's the lake pictured above). The teen campers, who are together on one side of the lake, cook their own meals over open firepits in the woods. This week, my daughter and several other campers and counselors are on a 6-day bike ride through five northeastern states, cycling all day and sleeping in churches at night. My son did this same trip at my daughter's age, and now, as then, I wake up every morning with a prayer in my throat, asking God to keep those children safe. I am thrilled that my children's teen years can include such an expedition, but my heart seizes all the same. The trick is to keep my fears to myself and let them out into the world to enjoy their lives.

My daughter comes home from camp in two-and-a-half more weeks, after spending six weeks there. My son will be also there until the end of the first session. Since they made him a counselor instead of a counselor assistant, he is getting paid rather well, which will come in handy in the fall. He will come back home for one single week before we have to drive him upstate to college. He is so out in the world now. I hope he is well and truly raised, because our shift is just about over. It's on him to make his life work now. From here on, we're mainly consultants, ready and willing if he turns to us, but no longer directing the show.

God, it was fast.

Merry-Go-Round

Talk about the sandwich generation. Suddenly I have a multitude of forms and documents to fill out, file, send, follow up on, and none of them are for me! Well, except for our taxes, but the reason we have to get those completed pronto is so I can send them to my son's college of choice by May 1 (and of course, the government wants to see that jammy too). 

Then there is the fair hearing to file for my aunt, endless documents to fax to her eldercare lawyer, summer camp forms for my daughter and corresponding health forms (which means making an appointment with her doctor--I forgot that detail), and my aunt's monthly bills (with disbursement forms for each one) to be organized and submitted to her disablity trust, and college deposits to send and room selection forms to be completed, and insurance coverage to be bought in advance of my sons England-France trip tomorrow (talk about procrastination; that call will have to happen this morning), and travel arrangements for my kids visit to their grandmother in St. Lucia in June, and on and on and on. And then there's all the stuff I have to get done at work. My head is spinning. 

My dad used to say, "He who has no memory makes one of paper." Thank God for wise fathers and "to do" lists.