Fun, Interrupted & Restarted

I am working from home today.

Originally I had signed the C up into The Camp That Was To Be Awesome. TCTWTBA had field trips to Discovery Park and Snoqualmie Falls and promised a diversity of kids, etc. It was to be 6 solid hours of crazy exhausting fun for everyone, at a 4 kids to 1 counselor ratio, and I paid accordingly.

I brought him to the "pick up" location at 8:45, 15 minutes early because I didn't want to be late. By 9 most of the other kids had shown up, and they were diverse all right: between the ages of 10 and 16. There were maybe 3 kids total under that age, one of whom (not mine) picked up a racquet ball paddle and insisted on drumming on the table, despite the protestation and condemnation of his mother and the counselors.

The next wave of kids showed up in the official Van. This was the Van, you see, that was to whisk them off to Discovery Park. It took the next hour for the two counselorettes (and there was a male volunteer counselor) to figure out that 18 kids and 3 adults can't fit into a 12 person Van.

So Discovery Park did not happen, and the C was crying as I left, and I left with severe disappointment. When I came to pick him up, he had had a good day, except for the 10 year old who hit him on the head twice with the plastic bat and the fact that no one wanted to play with him.

I pulled him out of the camp, and found another one where he will be mixed with kids his own age for the next session. In the meantime, he is home with me, squealing (literally, a couple of times) with delight at the antique transformers his Crazy Uncle Dan bestowed on him. Since Crazy Uncle Dan was a meticulous collector of all things legos, transformers, and Star Wars, and has ceded his 5-7 year collection from 1982-1988 to the boy, I expect the squealing to continue...