Camp Tales

This week my daughter went off to camp for the first time. She's a picky eater plus kind of emotional, and those two things didn't sound like a winning combination for a week away from home. We found a way to work around the food issues (take her own food and make friends with the cook when we arrived, plus take her daddy along as the Camp Nurse for the week!) and we poured over the camp brochure and had many talks late into the night to prepare her for what camp would be like.

She seemed good to go, and then we got there.

The brochure said cabins and flush toilets. What she got was a tent on a raised platform, and latrines and outdoor trough sinks.

We were expecting a counselor to be in the cabin with the girls at night. We got a tent for 4 little girls, and counselors in a different tent a little ways away.

Poor kid. She was looking at this situation unfolding as we drove through the camp grounds, saying, "Um, hey--I don't see any cabins."

Yeah. Me neither.

I stifled my instinct to start laughing like a stark raving lunatic, and instead pointed out all of
the great things about the way things were turning out. "Oh, hey, this is WAY better than a cabin. Those cabins get so smelly and tons of spiders live in the cracks and crevaces. This tent will be so much nicer for fresh air!" "Oh look! These latrines are really, really nice ones. They are way better than the ones I had at camp when I was a girl." ugh. Sullen snickered up a storm despite my hairy eyeball warning signals to Shut Up.

Ugh!

But I am very proud of her. Rather than do what she normally would (start crying and demand to be taken home) she held it together and put on a brave face. She allowed herself to accept my positive spin as possible truth. Truly, I think her main motivation for not falling apart was that it is horse camp, and she really, really wanted to ride horses this week.

So, my little girl is out in the woods right now, sleeping just one tarp away from wild animals, hopefully not having to walk over the hill to the latrines til morning..... She isn't the only one for whom this experience is outside of their comfort zone!


Camping