Because of Camp

If you watch enough Hulu, you will eventually encounter the commercial for an association known as Because of Camp. It's an alliance of camps throughout the U.S., and their commercial features a cavalcade of B-list celebrities who tell us about the life-changing benefits they reaped from their own camp experiences. Singer Lisa Loeb* tells us, "Because of camp, I learned to play the guitar." Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug** says, "Because of camp, I learned to be a team player." The guy who plays Alex on Grey's Anatomy says, "Because of camp, I'm sending my kids to camp this summer."

Well, after my two-week experience of sending Nathan to a day camp with the park district, I can add my own:

Because of camp, I am totally and completely bat-shit insane.

Day camp seemed like a simple enough proposition. Five days a week, Nathan would get a fun, enriching experience with other kids. He would get to do activities like crafts, singing, and sticking his hand in a vat of rice, all of which are things I would gladly pay other people to organize for my child. I would get several hours to myself, several days in a row. And we would get all this enrichment/fun/babysitting for approximately $3.25 an hour.

Here's what I didn't realize: camp is sort of like school. I mean, not so much in terms of its educational-ness, but in terms of it being a formalized group situation where you just drop off your kid and he is expected to conform to a series of policies, and you have no control over what he does there.

Honestly, I didn't expect this to be such a Big Deal. But from the day the stupid 12-page camp parent handbook camp, I found myself a little terrified to be on the parent side of the parent-teacher relationship. (Though obviously in this case the "teacher" is a 21-year-old camp counselor.) The handbook had explicit instructions about what you should and should not bring. I went out to Target and spent a lot of money getting exactly what they said, along with a new backpack big enough for all the stuff to fit in. I labeled everything, including socks and underwear. When my husband suggested that maybe a 3-year-old didn't need to bring his own separate bottle of bug spray in his backpack (and that presumably this item was on there because they use the same list for every single camp they offer, including the ones where 10-year-olds go galavanting around the wilderness), I was all, "No, we must get bug spray and label it with his name! It's on THE LIST! We don't want to be the problem parents."

And when that very same troublemaker of a husband told Nathan to wear a hat to camp for sun protection, I hesitated because a hat was on neither the "what to bring" nor the "what not to bring" lists.

Then we got to camp and some girl's mom actually had the audacity to put her kid's belongings in a tote bag. A tote bag! The list specifically said a backpack!

Anyway, on Day 1 I picked up my kid amid a sea of other little campers, all of whom were wearing paper visors that they had decorated with roller-ball paint pens. Nathan's hat was blank. "I didn't want to decorate it," he said.

Day 2, each kid had been given a piece of rectangular paper on which the counselors had glued a race-specific blank outline of the child's face. The children were supposed to add facial features and hair. Now, obviously most 3-year-olds are only able to draw scribbles, but that would have been a welcome change from the completely blank face my kid went home with.

Day 3: the craft was decorating camp pennants with stickers. Nathan's pennant: You guessed it, blank.

Bill and I were not sure if this constituted an Issue or not. The counselor told us that Nathan really just wanted to play with toys instead of doing a craft. We weren't sure if this was some kind of willful disobedience or if the craft was merely presented as an optional alternative to free play. We talked and talked and talked to Nathan about this issue. "DO THE CRAFT!" we said when dropping him off on Day 4.

He actually did the damn craft. It was a paper kite on which he had smeared one blob of paint, but it was a start. We displayed it prominently in our home and made a big fuss over it.

So, it was Friday, and all camp problems were solved, right? No, because Friday began the great peeing disaster.

The thing is, Nathan has not been potty-trained for very long. He still has daily accidents, but they are almost always in the evenings when he's tired and uncooperative. I figured he would be fine at camp, and for the first 4 days, he was. Then Friday I picked him up and he was wearing his hideous extra outfit I had packed (and labeled!) in his backpack.

Monday, same problem.

Tuesday was Day 3 of peeing on the camp bathroom floor. Apparently the boy was waiting too long to go to the bathroom. "It's really becoming kind of an issue," the camp counselor said. I really had no idea what that meant, so I asked if we were kicked out of camp. She said no, but we should keep an eye on it.

Now, here is where I began what I can only imagine is several years of payback for the bad karma I amassed while hating on my students' parents back in my teaching days. I used to get so worked up about these people and the anxiety they had over their inability to control every detail of their kids' school lives. This anxiety translated into their expectation that I, as the adult present at school all day, should be the one working to control every single detail of their kids' school lives, and that I should do it for every single kid in my classroom. "Could you just check his backpack every day for his homework, because he forgets to turn it in?" one parent of a fifth grader asked me once.

Plus, in talking to the counselors, I pulled the argument that I absolutely hated to hear from parents back in my teaching days: "But he never does that at home!"

I told Nathan that if he had an accident the following day, which was Wednesday, he wouldn't go back to camp Thursday and Friday. The counselor looked mildly sad for him, but I didn't see her vehemently disagreeing with me.

I went home Wednesday night and actually cried about this issue. I felt like such a bad mom for sending my kid to camp without being fully potty-trained. I felt like the camp counselors hated me. I figured they thought I was a totally negligent parent who had no control over her child. And to be honest, I felt like a totally negligent parent who had no control over her child.

Making things worse, AND YES, I AM TYPING THIS SO IT IS PRESERVED FOR ALL OF POSTERITY TO HUMILIATE THE CRAP OUT OF MY CHILD, we went to the pool right after camp, and the counselor was there. And Nathan, I kid you not, got out of the pool and squatted down and peed right on the concrete right in front of her. Except I'm not sure if she saw him, which meant that I was very quiet in my reprimanding of him, so as not to call attention to this. If she did see it, I'm sure she and the other counselor had a good laugh about it, which makes me sad because the other counselor is a woman from my running class and also will be Nathan's teacher for preschool next year. Maybe we should just move out of town now.

So, okay, Wednesday was the moment of truth. I was actually nervous when I picked Nathan up, but it turned out he had stayed dry all day!

Today is Thursday, and I threatened him with skipping camp Friday if he had an accident. Friday is the big camp field trip to the Dairy Queen, so that's a pretty big incentive.

Now, I should note that I typed the previous paragraphs before picking him up from camp. In typing them, I became so nervous about The Pee-Pee Issue that I couldn't write any more until I picked Nathan up and got a verdict.

And the verdict is ...

???

I pulled into the parking lot and saw him wearing the tell-tale red shorts from his emergency bag. Nooooooooooooooooooooo! But then the counselor told me that she thinks he may have actually peed on his clothes during the process of using the toilet because males, especially little ones, have very poor aim. So, that's kind of a gray area. Technically it isn't really an accident. But I don't know if the whole "peed on his clothes while using the toilet" story is actually true. I attempted to ask him, but have you ever tried to get a clear response out of a toddler? Toddler answers are so cryptic that army generals have used toddlers to transmit war secrets. Except that there isn't anybody on the other end who can translate for them, so Operation Elmo was quickly scrapped.

Anyway, I think I'm going to let him go to camp tomorrow. Even if he technically had an accident, I think the message got through to him that he shouldn't wait to go to the bathroom.

Tomorrow is the last day of the two weeks we were signed up for, though technically he's on the books for a week in mid-July as well. I'm gonna see how things go and then decide if we're still going to do that one.

In a way, it's sort of a shame that he isn't going next week, after we went through all this transitional hassle. Besides the crafts and the peeing, I am also concerned that he isn't a good cleaner, either. He says, "When it's time to clean up, I don't want to," which could mean anything from a mild disappointment-but-ultimate-acceptance, to a full-out inappropriate refusal to clean.

It has truly been a big transition for me. And if it seems like a big deal to this grown adult who is very capable (possibly overly capable) of assessing/managing her own emotions, I can only imagine what a big transition it is for a toddler whose response to something new and overwhelming is just to get mad and throw a tantrum. Nathan is just coming off of the bulk of his potty-training, and he's dealing with some major bedtime/nap issues, and now I'm sending him off to camp several hours a day? No wonder he seems so uncooperative and frazzled.

I have come to three realizations in the last two weeks: (1) I cannot control what my kid does when I'm not there,(2) I have to get over the fact that the camp counselors are probably hating/judging me, and (3) Formalized educational institutions exist so that your child can learn appropriate behaviors, not so he/she can come in and get them right the first time.

On that third point, I think if in two weeks my kid improved on the arts & crafts, potty-training, and cleaning fronts, that is a successful educational experience. And, that, quite frankly, my kid is a freakin' genius.

* "Stay" is still the best "belt it out in the car until you trip on your words and/or can't breathe" song ever written.

** Am I the only one who thinks that Kerri's "camp" probably consisted of a little less s'more-roasting and lanyard-making, and a little more "go do 100 pushups because you gained 3/4 of an ounce"?