Imagine Both My Grandkids at Sleep-Away Camp

By age eight, most of my classmates at PS 196 Queens in New York were spending their summers at sleep-away camp. I, too, wanted to go, but my parents had too much separation anxiety to cut the apron strings. I had fun at my grandparents' summer home in Lake Mahopac, spending many a day making prank calls at the home of a friend left in the care of a housekeeper, listening to the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and learning to make cigarette smoke come out of my nose by the time I was 13.?

On the other hand, my first husband Jerry, loved overnight camp, and felt it was essential for fostering independence. Our daughter Daphne began spending her summers at a girls' camp in New Hampshire with a magnificent waterfront just before turning nine. She went for several years, and I suspect that in families where at least one parent has gone away to camp and had a good experience, it becomes a tradition.

By the time my grandson, Jack, now 12, entered second grade, he told his parents: "I want to go to sleep-away camp," and after engaging a "camp consultant," they enrolled him at what I would describe as a hippie dippy camp in Maine with too many barnyard animals, a nothing-to-write-home-about waterfront, and much to Jack's despair, no baseball diamond. “Next year I’m going to a different camp,” he announced when Daphne and I came to pick him up.

Re-engage the camp consultant. The following year, Jack went to a boys camp in Maine, one with a fabulous waterfront and a focus on sports. He's a high energy child, and this is his happy place. The counselors are kind and nurturing, and he looks forward to returning this summer, which would be his 4th, but for a summer lost to Covid-19. Jack told me likes the idea of being "one of the older kids," and "knowing how everything works."

Jack's sister, Lucy won't turn nine until after she returns home from her first season at a co-ed camp in the Poconos, a short distance from her home in Philadelphia. Unlike Jack, she's hesitant about going for the entire summer, and told her parents: "I'll go for four weeks, and if I like it, I'll go for the whole summer the next year."

Ever the fashionista, Lucy loved going on an online shopping spree for personalized camp gear with Daphne. "I'm going to do a fashion show," she told me immediately after the boxes arrived. Mostly I remember a hoodie and shorts emblazoned with the name of her camp. "It's adjustable," she told me of the camp hat that swallowed up her face.

Because some of Lucy's cabin mates started camp at age seven, she will be the "new kid on the block," something that makes her a tad nervous. I plan to tell her that when Jack switched camps, he was the "new kid" at first, not knowing that many of the other boys knew each other from the previous summer, knew to bring their favorite stuffed animal, and also a hammock to hang from the trees. That was a period of adjustment, but he had a good summer.?

I hope Lucy's camp puts her in a cabin with a lot of first time campers, and that the counselors are just as caring as they are at Jack's camp. My fantasy is that I can be there to helicopter in if she's feeling homesick, but fortunately for my granddaughter. that's not going to happen.

Lucy plans on doing lots of gymnastics at camp, and told me she wants to do an activity called Aerial Silks. According to Wikipedia, the latter "is a type of performance in which one of more artists perform "aerial acrobatics while hanging from a specialist fabric." At Daphne's insistence, she will also have daily swimming instruction.?

Once upon a time my husband Dennis was a counselor and then a waterfront director at a camp for kids from families of limited means. "The most important thing is for the kids to have fun," he reminds me as I get caught up in gear and facilities.?