Category Archives: parenting

Coping with the changes of camp

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This morning was one of the tougher ones to drop off dd at camp; she was nearly inconsolable. Clearly, some of this is related to her being SO INCREDIBLY TIRED from running around all day. She’s used to the more quiet, academically-focused day care environment she spent the last five years cloistered away in. Now, she’s in a day camp that spends the majority of its time outside, playing sports or swimming. It’s not that she’s led a completely inactive or sedentary life; she had some measure of time outside playing back when she was at day care. It’s just that this is so much more concentrated active outside time, and her brother’s still at day care, so she can’t see him whenever she wants.

So, while I have yet to see her do the legendary “face plant into the dinner plate” I heard so much about, she’s coming home beyond tired, and that exhaustion breeds a massive sensitivity that seems to turn her into a great melty mess. Of course, this has then gotten her into whining extensively about how much she wants to go back to day care and how she doesn’t want to go back to camp.

I’m hoping that some of this will be fixed with some sleep, and I’m trying to see if I can work from home on Fridays during the summer so that I can let both kiddos sleep in a little and get picked up a little earlier. There are no guarantees that this will fix everything, but it may make coming into the weekend a little easier. Since it took me nearly 10 minutes to dislodge her iron grip this morning at camp drop-off, I have to figure that there’s more we can do.

We also need to find a way to get her to bed earlier. It’s tough when both parents work full-time and you’re struggling, as it is, to give the kids enough time to eat their dinner and get a bath or some play time before bed. To have to try to push bedtime up to an earlier point is difficult without sacrificing something on the other end. We haven’t yet figured out how we’ll do this, but we need to do something.

I’m open to hearing from those who’ve been through this before, the transition to camp (and kindergarten) after a long stay in day care…maybe we can pick up on something that’ll be a magic bullet to solve this problem, even if it’s only temporary.

Wading in the deep end of the pool

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I’m really incredibly glad that dd appears to be enjoying much of her time at camp. She’s a bit thrown off by the differences between camp and day care (like the fact that they nap on mats instead of on cots), but otherwise she’s been okay. Probably the most unintentionally amusing part of camp is how she’s been coming home in her spare outfit. When I queried her about it this afternoon (“Did your clothes get wet or dirty?”), she just shrugged and moved on. Turns out that she thought having “a change of clothes” meant that she was expected TO change her clothes. So, like the diva-in-training she can sometimes be, she was going through her second wardrobe change of the day (her first being into her swimwear). HIGHLY AMUSING, but since it’s draining her supply of underwear and shorts, we’re asking her to cut it out unless she needs to swap out some clothing.

Where things are less amusing is in the area of time. With a single day care drop-off for the two kids, it was easy enough to drop them off at 7-ish in the morning and pick them up at 5-ish in the evening and hear only mild amounts of complaining. I’ve tried explaining that both dh and I work, and this makes it impossible for us to do late drop-off and early pick-up on a daily basis, but trying to explain this to a 2yo and 5yo is like trying to have a conversation about it with our fish: blank stares if you’re lucky and off to the next interesting thing if you’re not.

Now, we have two drop-offs and two pick-ups. Thankfully, the camp is only a few minutes away from day care, but since camp hours are shorter than day care’s, I’ve been dropping dd off before ds and dh has been picking dd up before picking up ds. This has the dual effect of putting dd into camp when most of the other kids aren’t there (we had to pay extra for before and after care, since regular camp hours are 9:00am-4:00pm, and before/after expands that to 7:00am-6:00pm) and requiring her to go into her former day care to pick up her brother. To hear dh tell it, she’s not responding well to picking up her brother; she’s done with day care and wants to move on. I get that – I really do – but since much of a parent’s life is about controlling and managing the logistics of day-to-day life, as much as I sympathize with her discomfort, I can only tell her to get over it.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t feel awful having either kiddo hanging out there waiting on us to come and get them.

I have some vague memories of being like that when I was younger, too. By the time my mom showed up to pick me up from my babysitter’s house, all I wanted to do was go home. And I was awful. I’d hang on her. I’d pull on her skirt. I’d bug the ever-living crap out of her when all she wanted to do was have a pleasant, adult conversation with my babysitter – her friend (and a woman I truly do consider my second mom). It’s not until you’re a mom and your own children are pulling this same crap on you that you realize how much you have to answer for.

And it’s funny, because I could do something about this. I could work fewer hours and take the commensurate pay and benefits cuts. Or so could dh. But neither of us is interested in entertaining this right now. It wouldn’t buy us enough to do it, and the loss in total compensation could be more problematic than it’s worth. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel guilty.

And, to top it all off, dinner has been late both nights this week – the shift in schedule for pick-ups from camp and day care has really messed with our timing. So the kids are exhausted AND out-of-sorts AND hungry-cranky AND AND AND…

I won’t say I’m a bad mom. A bad mom wouldn’t care. It’s just frustrating that there are so few ways to be better at it without making life even more difficult. So I need to figure out how to let go of my stress at coming to work for 8:30am instead of 8:00am. And I need to find a way to make dinners in 20 minutes total instead of 30 minutes total. And I need to just let some stuff go and stop worrying about every little thing. But the nagging little guilt will still be there. There’s a part of me that thinks it’s always there, for every parent, whether they work in or out of the home, whether they send or don’t send their kiddo(s) to camp or day care…it’s just the constant bug in your ear that tells you that you need to be doing a better job. And I’m glad I still care. Now I just need to figure out how to do what I would consider “a better job” and that should help me get some of that stress right out. I hope.

*glub glub*

Confessions of a New Camp Mom

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It’s funny how you don’t really think your life can get upended even MORE when you’re a parent and then, inevitably, something comes along and puts you ass over teakettle. We knew that day was coming later this fall, when dd heads off to Kindergarten; in reality, it started already, since today is her first day at camp.

Naturally, it’s not like we’re packing her off for a few weeks in the Hamptons; she’s heading to a day camp that’s about 5 minutes away from the day care where she was a mainstay (and BGoC) for the last 5 years. Still, it’s a big adjustment. Drop-offs and pickups just got a bit more complicated, since we now have to drop her off before we drop off ds at day care, and then we have to pick her up before we get ds (the hours at the camp, even paying for before and after-care, still run shorter than those of our day care center). She also needs to eat breakfast before she goes to camp, since she won’t be fed when she gets there. As if mornings weren’t difficult enough…

Food is also one of those funny little problems. We’ve been getting off easily for the last half-decade. Ever since she was weaned off the bottle, her breakfast, lunch & snack were taken care of by day care. I consider it baked into the price (no pun intended). Also, given the price we’ve been paying, they had better be feeding the children. This stuff ain’t cheap. But now we have to make sure she’s fed before she goes, make sure she has something to nosh on in the morning and the afternoon, and pack her up with a lunch that’s peanut-free (no worries there; unlike her little brother, she has yet to embrace peanut butter as a food group). You can buy lunch for as little as $4/day, but we wanted to make it possible for her to make and take what she wants.

So, her little (new) soft-sided lunchbox currently has a half-sandwich with tuna salad, a small container packed to the gills with red grapes, and a baggie stuffed with red, yellow and orange peppers (all her choice). Her snacks are a vanilla chip granola bar and a 100 calorie pack of chocolate chip cookies. Because I’m paranoid, I’m also sending her with $10 – enough to purchase a meal if something happens to hers and still have a few bucks left over to raid the snack machine for snacks, too. I felt the hit this week, as our grocery bill went up by several dollars; I’m starting to get a sense of how much we will start to have to pay weekly once she goes off to school in September.

And my biggest worry isn’t even addressed yet: it’s whether or not she’ll be okay. Of course, she WILL be fine. Plenty of kids go to this camp every year, and we have several friends who are sending their kids (dd’s peer group, from prior years at day care). It’s just her introduction into the world of being a little fish in a big pond. And we won’t be there to hold her hand, give her a hug, provide “uppies”, or any of that other stuff. From 7pm – 5-something-pm, she’s very much on her own. I can only hope she makes a friend early on.

DH also noticed that ds was having issues falling asleep last night because he knew a separation was coming, too. For his entire life, he’s had his sister very close by; and, for all but the few months when he was at home right after birth, he’s been able to see her basically whenever he wanted (the teachers at day care were very good about giving them visiting time when they wanted or needed it). This is dress rehearsal time for the Fall, when he won’t see her from early morning until early evening. We’ve had to get used to this, but we’ve got oodles of practice, since she started day care on her 3mo birthday. He has yet to see what this is like, so this should be a challenging week for us all.

Ultimately, I think we’ll all be fine and I think dd will love being at camp. She’ll get tons of outside time (which she didn’t get at day care), she’ll be far more active, and she’ll be challenged in ways that she wasn’t by a structured environment where the structure didn’t vary dramatically year-to-year. We’ll all be fine. Right now, it feels like we’re staring over the edge of a cliff, but I’m sure we’ll all be fine.

Right…?