What My Kid Did This Summer

According to the schedule, this week really should be a long post week.  However, we’ve entered the Virgo birthday season again: this weekend is The Mother‘s birthday weekend, and next weekend will be the eldest spawn’s.  So you’ll need to wait a couple more weeks for something substantial.

In the meantime, I picked up the middle spawn from camp on Friday—I mentioned last week that I thought it was his third year, but it’s actually his fourth.^*  Getting him to tell you what he did at camp is always somewhat painstaking, but the person who does the pick-up has the best shot, so I endeavored to gather all the info I could so I could report back to The Mother.  Here’s what I managed to get out of him:

• He ate pizza a lot.

• He had several counselors who he’d had before, including his lifeguard, codenamed Trillo.  (Counselors at Camp del Corazon, many of whom are medical folks, go by nicknames while at camp, for some reason that has never been completely clear to me.)

• Another of his counselors was an actor who looks like a viking.

• This year he had the camp’s first female doctor; her codename was Snowflake.

• He shot his badge with a BB gun, although he just sort of grazed it so you’d only notice if he specifically points it out.

• He won a competition at “disco bingo” and the prize was that his cabin got to jump off the dock into the water (this is a privelege normally reserved to seniors).

• He kayaked to Spain again.^**

• He went snorkeling and saw Garibaldis and a stingray and a leopard shark.

This is more info than we usually get, so we’re quite excited.  And possibly a bit jealous: I’ve never gotten to see a leopard shark in the wild.


Birthday weekend for The Mother was fairly chill; she and I are wanting less and less to go out and do “exciting” things and more and more just to be able to relax at home.  Sure, you can argue that we’re home all the time, so it’s nothing special to stay home.  But, here’s the thing: under normal circumstances, home is where you have to teach school, and pay bills, and take care of children, and clean up things.  Any time when you can actually just chill out, with your laptop or tablet, maybe hang out in the pool, have a glass of wine or a hard cider, and just do a whole lot of glorious nothing ... those are actually some lovely times.  This year we gave The Mother a hammock and a waterproof case for her Kindle to facilitate the relaxation vibe.  So far it’s been quite nice.


Anyhow, that’s pretty much all I got for this week.  Next week, most likely a brief recap of the next birthday weekend.

__________

* I did say that I was starting to lose track.
** As the story goes—as well as I understand it second-hand from my 13-year-old—there’s one “island” (no more than a large rock, really) that was accidentally omitted from the documents of the sale of Catalina Island.  Therefore, it’s “technically” still owned by Spain, and, thus, you can kayak to Spain from Catalina.