Girl Scout Day Camp: Day 5

I had intended to write about our last day at camp this past Friday evening, but I was unbelievably worn out - I felt like I had just completed the longest race of my life.  And then I made the mistake of opening my email first, before writing, and read a nasty-tempered girl scout-related email. I felt it was unsafe to even entertain the thought of writing a blog post at that point- I might loose all self-control and well.. it wouldn't be pretty.  And that just about sums up what this first year of scouts has been like for me in the first place:  an entire year of stuffing it down.

Our last day was hot, dry and very windy.  We took down our pop-up shade covers, cleaned up our site and madly tried to finish up the projects that we had planned to do with the kids.  I sent Jordan to the daily opening ceremony to take pictures.

Rylan and her unit got to model some vintage Brownie uniforms at the opening.

And then I took the rest...

We had some fun with shaving cream.  Owen loved, loved, loved playing in it.  For those teachers out there, this is an excellent way to clean desks at the end of the year.  It cleans off the pencil grime, and it smells nice!

I figured Colin would be totally into it, but this is as far as he got.  He is a funny kid - he doesn't like having messy hands.  His face and clothing however, are a completely different matter.

We hid plastic gold coins in the shaving cream.  When each kid found one, they turned it in for a prize.  The coins were so huge, there was no real challenge here...

These three went a little crazy with the cream...

Then I sent Owen (covered in cream) to chase down his older brother and hug him.  That's Jordan running away in the blue...

Later I heard a lot of yelling and whooping - turned around and Jordan had caught his first-ever fish!

We broke a pinata.  This one is an owl, made out of a paper bag and covered with strips of tissue paper, notched with scissors to resemble feathers.  The top is stapled and reinforced with duct tape.  It lasted through one round..

Near the end of the day, the entire camp gathered to do SWAPS, songs and skits.  This cupcake SWAP was Rylan's favorite.

Oh look!  It 's the crazy patch lady!!!  And look at that - she's already attached the birthday cake patch for Summer Day Camp!  (I wish you could see the back of the bag.  It's a work of art...)

This is the 100th year of Girl Scouts - so the theme for this year's camp was "Birthday Party".

The end of the day... happy to be here, but happy to be done.

I have to say that the day camp was one very well organized entity.  We were want for nothing.  I was immediately reimbursed for the items that I purchased for our mini-campers.  They provided cold drinks for the adult volunteers, and there was always someone stopping by to see if we needed anything.  The oldest scouts: the PA's, were mostly awesome.  A couple just dragged around and did nothing while they were doing their shift at the mini camp, but otherwise the girls were fun and played with the kids.  I knew we were not the only ones suffering in the heat... several of those poor girls had soccer games and the like after a long, hot day at camp.  They had my utmost sympathy.  It was all I could do to drag myself and the kids home, shower them off and put them to bed.  It took a tremendous amount of brain effort to remember to unpack the cooler and load more water bottles in the freezer for the next day.  I only forgot once...

We were one of the last of the campers to leave, since we had to wait for everyone else to pick up their kids and the play equipment that they donated for the week.  Our camp was situated alongside a dirt road, and the dust was horrendous as each exiting car passed by- typically at a high rate of speed - which is inexcusable to me when the drivers could plainly see that there were small children playing not twenty feet from the road.  And then there were the arrive-late-leave-earlies.  I have never felt comfortable being one of the first to leave - I am typically the last, as I make the rounds to see if anyone else needs help.  I am thankful that there were at least a few others like that - stopping by to see if we or anybody else needed help.  We need more people like that in this world!!

We have a few mementos from camp.  Rylan has a bag full of SWAPS to pin to her Daisy vest, and several pictures that one of her Unit leaders (the Blue Belles) posted to Shutterfly - (almost 500!)  Rylan swears she caught a fish, but there is no picture of it, which makes me sad.  That was one of the hard things about camp - I only caught a glimpse of her every-so-often as she came and went with her unit. So I selected about 15 pictures or so and ordered prints.  I'll make her a photo album that she can have to remember camp and all of the new friends she made.  Owen and Colin have albums of their own, made by one of the other mini camp leaders.  Each photo is glued to cardstock and then she wrote a caption on it.  Each photo was placed in a Ziploc sandwich bag, along with a sprinkle of confetti and then closed.  All of the bags were then put in a stack, stapled along the seal strip, and then duct tape was used for the binding.  Such a neat project idea!

Colin also came home with a rather unexpected memento: Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease.

I've spent the last 24 hours freaking out that he had the chicken pox.  Which would be just the type of irony in my life that would push me over the edge at this particular moment.  Alas, it was not.  Thank goodness.  Just a viral rash that will go away in about 7 days.  Totally contagious, yet totally harmless.  This is one of those things that can spread through a daycare in a single day.  So, the only possible way he got it is that one of the other mini-campers brought it, and he caught it.  He seemed to be attracted to anything remotely like juice, so if a half-finished, unattended Capri sun could be found, Colin was drinking it before you could even vocalize the word 'No!".

So camp is over, and, just like childbirth, I'll forget how truly stressful it all was and gladly volunteer to do it all over again next year.