Happy Trails

Will headed off to his first session of YMCA resident camp today. He is a bit young compared to the campers that Paul and I had at camp in Minnesota but this is a shorter session, smaller cabin group and the sister camp to the main tripping camp so it seems to cater more to the younger crowd. Camp Colman is a beautiful camp though situationed along a mile of beachfront and over 100 forested acres of Washington's Key peninsula.

He left Paul without even a hug or kiss today--seemingly thrilled for his big long "sleepover" at camp. Clearly it was much harder on us than him as we now are left missing him and wondering to ourselves what he is doing and how things are going. Is he going to remember to change his underwear and put on sunscreen each day? Will he make friends? Will he try new things? What skit will he do at the campfire?

Apparently the only thing that Will was not looking forward to was some kind of icebreaker where you are basically playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with your body. Yeah, sure, I know that one! Who knows what Will doesn't like about it but he informed his dad that he would have been "very displeased" if they had played that game. Little does he know that he has another four days in which to encounter the game...

What I was not looking forward to was the possibility that he would be the only boy in the cabin who did not come with a friend. Thankfully though, right away as Will was moving into his cabin there was another little boy who travelled to camp from Denver and he did not come with a friend. What a relief!

But camp sure has changed in the past ten or so years. Now you can email your child (daily!) and they have a blog with photos of the camp sessions along with some kind of program called Mugshots where you can purchase photos of your child doing camp activities. Wow, the only thing that is next is a webcam and then we may have completely catered to the "helicopter parent" mentality. Paul and I are going to send him one email but land sakes... we've got to be able to let go for a few days here. As much as we miss him I think we can all survive four days without constant communication!