Children – Page 4 – My Truant Pen

Sea change

“One more chapter!”

“Ok, but then it’s really time to go.”

This is an exchange that could (has) happened between almost any two people in my family (in all versions of family you’d like to consider). (When I say it what I usually actually mean is that we’re not leaving until I’ve finished my book.) Adam and I have long had vacations that consisted of beautiful locations, museums, snorkeling and bevies of books. On our honeymoon I read 11 books – and that was only because I didn’t have room to bring more. When we went to Istanbul, we saw Hagia Sofia. We walked the walls of the Fortress of Europe. We watched night fall over the Bosporous… but a favorite memory for both of us was the morning we went to a little cafe, drank them entirely out of orange juice and both of us finished entire novels. (Mine was Guy Gabriel Kay – great vacation reading!)

Ten years ago at just about this time, I was on this self same island of Cozumel for a week. All my daiquiris were virgin that trip since I was pregnant with the firstborn child who was – would become – Grey. I took refuge in the buoyancy of the water. And we read. A lot. But since then, our reading vacations have been stolen moments (pretty much all during Camp Gramp week). Sure we might sneak in a paltry four or five books on a vacation, but nothing like the epic conquests of yore. Children – especially young children – require slightly more attention it turns out.

When an unexpected opportunity arose for us to go back to Cozumel this April vacation week, I grabbed it with both hands. We returned to the same excellent resort (Presidente Intercontinental, if you’re curious) that we went to last year. A huge part of that was that the kids had loved Keri, who ran the kids club. They happily got dropped off with her after breakfast and picked up sometime in the afternoon. This left Adam and I ample time to follow our true desires: snorkeling, time together, and reading entire novels in one sitting on the beach. SIGN ME UP FOR MORE! We still had plenty of time for adventures and time together, but the surcease from bored children was delightful (and they enjoyed it!)

This time, though, they’ve only spent a few hours there. The only thing nearly as fun as snorkeling along the reefs with my beloved – pointing out the octopus and lionfish and barracuda – is snorkeling along the reefs with my beloveds. Grey has become a fine swimmer and can almost dive with the snorkel. Thane – indomitable Thane – arrived barely swimming and has improved by leaps and bounds since. He insists on swimming (even though he really can’t) and calmly keeps paddling even as the waters close in over his head. He’s unflappable. Add a life vest, and he was perfectly content to come snorkeling with us – even letting go of my hand to go investigate some interesting formation. How much more fun things are when I can do them with my children and yet find them fun for me!!

Then, yesterday, my life changed forever. I think that may not be an understatement.

Thane is in Kindergarten. He has a gift of great focus. He always has – he could do a hundred piece puzzle at three through sheer determination and patience. (Certainly not through optimal strategic choices, assuredly.) The door to reading has finally opened to him. He has many needed words by sight and strong phonetic skills. He still struggles to blow past words he doesn’t know, but he has three of us standing by to tell him that e-n-o-u-g-h is enough.

“Mom” he asked. “Did you bring me any chapter books?” I handed him “A Horse and His Boy”. He gamely worked his way through the first pages. “Mom, do you have anything easier?” Well, no I didn’t. But what I did have is the wonder of technology. I LOVE my Kindle, in part because it means I don’t have to pack an entire suitcase of books. (Yes. We did regularly bring a suitcase for the books and board games.) I just got a new Kindle (backlit, with 3G downloads so I don’t need wifi to buy the next book in the series) but I brought my old Kindle with me in case. In case of what I’m not sure, but in case.

I downloaded Books 1 – 4 of the Magic Treehouse and handed it to him, showing him how to turn the pages. We went to breakfast. And an hour later, he was begging for more time. He’s plowed his way through the first three and a half books (as well as a non-fiction book on Jupiter his dad bought him.) We all sat – at breakfast, in front of the pool, in the beach chairs, at dinner – all reading our books together. It was GLORIOUS. The world has opened up before us, of the quietest and most profound adventures.

Then, as though my heart was not already filled to brimming, my eldest. My beloved. That child I carried with me as a promise ten years ago… started reading Narnia. I read him the first few chapters of “The Horse and His Boy”. (Personally, I think “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” is one of the weaker Narnia books. And “The Horse and His Boy” stands alone best of the rest of them.) He finished. And asked for more. Yesterday he read “Prince Caspian”. Today “The Lion , The Witch and the Wardrobe”. At dinner he downloaded and started “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”.

There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

Those books were my gateway to this wondrous world, my friends. They initiated me in the arts of the fantastical. I remember the realization crashing on me that ASLAN was like JESUS. (How much more precious is an allegory when discovered by a reader instead of explained!) It was a short hop for me from Lewis to his dear friend Tolkien. And that’s a world my imagination has never fully left behind.

This marks, I think, the beginning of a new phase of my life. I have long left behind parenting babies. My feet are crossing over from parenting young children (that stage where your greatest wonder is how the heck you’re going to keep them entertained so you can do things). I enter through the doors of parenting all elementary children. Already I can sleep in. Already they dress themselves. Grey puts on his own sunscreen – hallelujah. And now, my sons will begin to go on the greatest adventures between the pages of books. Some they will share with me. Others they will venture on alone. But their journeys have begun.

White and Nerdy

Friday I was done with my old employer, and my husband was out of pocket. I was faced with a night where I had responsibilities – but I knew I would likely feel a little unmoored. I was contemplating this problem when my son walked by singing about tinfoil.

“Hmmmmm” I pondered. “Has this Weird Al obsessed generation actually seen UHF? Does my son know that red snapper is very tasty, and turtles are nature’s suction cups?” I decided the only thing to do was to watch it with the boys. Better yet – I figured – throw in two similarly obsessed friends and make it a sleepover! (I am full of brilliant ideas.) Better better yet, maybe I could document it and create one of those musical montages people do for birthdays that always make me tear up.

I made it happen. A few notes:
– Even young boys can demolish their body weight in pigs-in-a-blanket
– The nice thing about little kids is that they don’t understand the point of a sleepover is to drive parents nuts and never go to sleep. They all conked out right when I told them to, much to my surprise
– UHF is still a brilliant movie
– I can’t figure out how one procures music that isn’t blocked by DRM for this. I tried downloading from Google figuring if I kept this all in the Google suite of tools they’d let me. I was wrong. I had to pick a piece from the one Weird Al album we actually physically own. Advice is welcome.
– This is a very bad first try. My photography is clearly rusty, my story telling needs work, and it really helps if you know what you’re doing. Still – bad first tries are where we start, right?

So with no further ado….

Sick of this

On Thursday morning, I woke up to a kid who was super sick. He’d been throwing up all night, and had been too tired to even interrupt my sleep to inform me. (Considerate child!) I worked from home for the third day of the week to tend to him. It wasn’t too hard – he spent the entire day on the couch reading Harry Potter IV. But a day spent not in motion by a nine year old boy is a day he was really sick.

I didn’t think too much of it. It’s pretty frequent for the kids to bring stuff home that Adam and I have already had, and we don’t get it. Plus Grey has the super touchy stomach of doooooom, so something that made him barfy might barely affect me! I was glad to see he was well enough for school on Friday and headed into work feeling Just Fine (not even thinking about it, I was feeling so fine).

At noon, my lunch didn’t sit quite right.

At 3 I warned my meeting companion that I wasn’t feeling well, and she might not want to sit too close to me.

At 3:30 I had to leave a meeting, urgently.

Now, here’s the trick. I carpool. And my carpool buddy had a huge project due and was leaving on a week’s vacation. I know this wasn’t going to be a day we could leave at 3:30. So I gritted my teeth and endured. Your choices in these circumstances are rather limited. What should you do? That ride home was hair-raising. I was *SICK*. In fact, I think it was a very lucky thing I did have a carpool, as I was in absolutely no condition to drive myself home. I’m not quite sure what I would’ve done. My carpool partner gets a million kudos for getting me safely home. I struggled to even get out of my boots and into bed. I slept from then until this morning at 9 am – a full 16 hour snooze with brief breaks for water. (I had a massage scheduled. Cancelled! Argh.)

I was touched by the tenderness of the men in my life. Adam attended me with solicitous and loving care. Thane offered to let me sleep with Wolfie. Grey plied me with blankets, a stuffed creeper (“Which is worse? Throwing up, or being blown up?”) and two books. I was in good hands.

But now I’m all done! Feeling better! And watching my husband and youngest son with a gimlet eye.

Meanwhile, outside the house….

We actually went to Ikea today. You could argue it wasn’t a great idea. It probably wasn’t. But Einstein’s Workshop classes for today were cancelled (a bit preemptively – I think they could’ve done it). And I’d been wanting to go to Ikea for quite a while. For being under a blizzard warning, we had considerable company at Ikea. We got the stuff we wanted to redo our mudroom (might be my Thursday post) and made it back before anyone else got sick or the snow started getting heavy.

But now, it’s heavy snow. Tonight it will get heavier, and start blowing hard. Tomorrow – another day – it will be in the negative temperatures and low visibility and a foot or so of snow. Church is already cancelled. We’re trapped again. I have had three day weekends I’ve looked forward to more than this one. There isn’t even the feeling we’re almost done. There’s more arctic air in the forecast (the highest temperature in the next week is 7 days) and there may be another storm on the way midweek. Our backs are sore. Our roofs have ice dams. Our schools may have to run until July. We’ve done all the fun storm activities, and all that’s left is the drudgery. Hopefully we can find some fun and magic in this, our fourth blizzard… but I’m not so sure.

On the upside, it’s Valentine’s Day! I found the perfectest gift ever for my husband, a periodical of Medieval Warfare, assuming our mail ever gets delivered again. I was the recipient of a Kindle that does all the things I want my Kindle to do, like 3G and backlighting. Ahhhhhh…. I’ve been on his account on my Kindle, and it means I can’t sync to my other apps, so I decided to forge ahead and order on my own for this one. Very exciting. I gave the boys meaningful and heartfelt homemade cards. I’m so very lucky to have three such wonderful Valentines!

Raising New Englanders

I am not a New Englander. I visited New England once when I was 14. Then again – for colleges – when I was 17. Most of my New England knowledge came from a weird combination of books and stereotypes. (Little Women, Daddy Long-Legs, Hawkeye from M*A*S*H … I would say the LL Bean catalog, but we actually didn’t get it.) Then, I came here for college. Early in the process I was targeting Pennsylvania. My first choice school was Williams, in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. But I found myself, a hot August day, in a double-dorm-room in a hundred-year-old stone building in historic New London with a roommate who was profoundly *from* a town fifteen miles away.

Since then, I have acclimated. I remember the shock and horror with which I discovered Dunkin’ Donuts doesn’t carry maple bars. (A fact which still mystifies me – why they’re a regional delicacy of a place with no maple tradition and entirely unknown in Vermont/New Hampshire/Montreal.) I mastered rotaries. I cheered on the Red Sox to their World Series pennants. I learned that “Wooster” and “Worcester” were in fact the same place. I have eaten lobstah in Glostah (Gloucester), listened to the Boston Symphony in Symphony Hall, developed a finely honed snow shoveling methodology, consider stop signs advisory and can’t help raising my fist to the chorus of “SO GOOD!”

But in one way, I remain distinctly un-New England. My junior year of college, I was invited with my college friends on a ski trip. They’d gone the prior year. I don’t remember why I didn’t go (it was probably some rot about seeing my parents more than twice a year). It felt deliciously grownup to be invited. I distinctly recall that we drove the Kankamagus – home to my frequent summer journeys in my adult life – in the crystalline snow of February. I’d never gone skiing before, despite living in close proximity to epic mountains. We rented equipment (I following the advise of my long time boyfriend) and hit the slopes.

Adam gave me a few lessons – which I accomplished well. After an hour or so, he deemed me ready to hit the slopes of Loon and try my first modest trail. The first few minutes of your first skiing ever are more terrifying than exhilarating, and I comforted myself that this was a thing people did. Look at all the people around me, skiing? Seconds in to the trip, I took a turn wrong. My leg did something wrong. I don’t clearly remember too much of what happened next. The ski patrol. The sled. The inability to hold weight on my leg. I limped back to our condo and have never – since that day – gone skiing again. I had torn my ACL – it took months before I could walk without limping. I tore my MCLS also later, and had major knee surgery and still feel my knee as an alertness of the possibility of pain. I will never ski again.

But.

I’m raising New Englanders. Grey and Thane are locals. They were *born* here. They belong here. They are from here in a way I will never be. And New Englanders? LOVE winter sports. There are ice rinks all over the place. It seems like every car has ski racks. To be from the New England suburbs (I don’t pretend that this is not a combination of both location AND privilege, because it certainly is) and not ski, or know how to skate well… not cool. Not cool at all.

So I was *thrilled* when our YMCA afterschool program offered (get this) SKIING LESSONS! I signed up before they even had official signups. They pick the kids up from school and take them directly to Nashoba Valley for ski lessons. The kids return around 7, having had an amazing adventure with their friends. Apparently Grey & Thane have been improving in their three lessons already, and there has been pretty much no whining. (I thought that 18 degree weather and a hard new skills would equal whining. I was wrong.)

The Y teachers/ski instructors are freaking saints. My two lunatics are on the left.

I was feeling all satisfied by having done New-England-right by my kids using the proxy of the Y, when somehow word came to my husband? Kids? That there’s an open skate time in the Stoneham Arena on Sunday from 4:00 – 5:30. The kids begged. Adam took them. I had a quiet ninety minutes. They have, by husbandly reports, improved by leaps and bounds.

Truthfully, I confess to be a little bit ashamed of how scared my knee makes me to do things like this. I mean, professional athletes have the same surgery, and they’re back smashing into each other scant months later. (See also: Gronk). But I think I might have a legitimate panic attack if I ever strapped on skis again. Even having my children doing it is easier if I don’t think too hard about it. The slicing and twisting nature of skates (did I mention I’ve only been skating two or three times? I’m a better roller-skater) makes me uneasy. My knee throbs just thinking about it. My failure to responsibly overcome this fear is no testament to me. But I’m extremely grateful that despite my unease, my children are learning to love snow and ice, and to be – well – real New Englanders.

I have just uploaded my January pictures. We had a great adventure in Cambridge at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. I also got some more great blizzard-day pics!

The Birthday of Ten Thousand Pieces (or Thane Turns Six)

Thane as a gigantic, nearly grown person

At some point after Thane’s birthday, I did a mental count of the number of individual pieces he got. Two tubs of Perler Beads (one regular and one glow in the dark) – 12,000 pieces. 200 piece puzzle. Four Lego sets (~1000 pieces). Box of actual sand (gazillion pieces). In truth, it was probably the birthday of 20,000 pieces, but that’s far less poetic.

Scientist Thane investigates the shells.

It is, however, very much Thane. From the first, he would patiently try to force tiny fingers into minute actions far too finicky for toddlers. He would try persistently, over and over, until he got it to his satisfaction. He still does. He sat down and did two “6 – 12” Lego sets, back to back. He created completely symmetrical designs with his beads. He has this capacity for quiet, by himself play that still astonishes me.

He holds his own with the big brother contingent.

One of his favorite gifts from his birthday was a Science Kit. For quite a while he was going to be a Chef/Scientist/Judge. He’s sort of settled on Scientist now, so he was super excited for the Science Kit. As we walked to the Library on Monday, he told me about how his laboratory was going to be right next to the Library so he could get science books to do experiments. It was an awesome plan.

Even on a cold October day, I could not keep Thane out of the water.

I asked Thane the other day (in a fit of trying out various cameras) how Kindergarten was going. He said, “Well… it’s so-so.” He’s actually doing very well. His writing is emerging out of appalling and into almost legible. (That whole forcing your hands to do the small motor things you desperately want? He’s never really wanted to write legibly.) He writes his full name, which still looks strange to me. (He went through a phase of wanting to be called “Nathan” at home. Although I like the name Nathan very much, I was pleased that he wasn’t very adamant and I still get to call him my sweet Thane.) He does not like to color much, I think. His reading is coming well. The books he can read get longer and harder, although it still seems very tiring to him. He is making good friends at school, and has emerged with a new best friend (whom I haven’t even met yet!)

His creations are usually very innovative.

We’re currently between obsessions. He told me, disdainfully, that he doesn’t like Scooby Doo. DOESN’T LIKE SCOOBY?!?!?! He’s spent most of his life completely obsessed with Scooby. There isn’t a Scooby episode, toy, book, spinoff series or live action theater event in the last four years that we haven’t been in the throes of. No Scooby? He’s always had an area of massive interest: Scooby, puzzles, dinosaurs. Legos, of course, persist. I have to guess that he’ll discover a new passion soon. Perhaps Science?

Soccer this fall went much better than in the Spring. This year, he was a big kid who actually kind of knew what he was doing. (Attending each of his big brother’s practices was a completely unfair advantage overlooked in second sons.) He’s incredibly tough and shrugs off physical discomfort. He ran fast and strong, although he does not seem to like the sensation of physical exertion. He’s looking forward to it in the spring, which is indeed progress!

He loves games. He’s been working his way on reading all the cards in King of Tokyo.

He’s still a homebody. He’d far rather hang out in his room doing Legos than go on whatever crazy adventure you’re proposing now MOM. Once we cajole him into the adventure, though, he usually ends up enjoying it quite a bit. He’s still often very glad to return to his own bed and his own Puppy. For a long time we were putting he and Grey to bed at the same time. Now we’ve separated the boys’ bedtimes, he falls asleep much more quickly and easily. He doesn’t even protest the injustice as much as, well, I would’ve at his age.

Making the best of a beach closed due to thunder

Thane is still, to my joy, young and snuggly. He’s shy in the face of new people. He holds my hand with this fingers interlaced through mine. He never walks – he bounces, jumps, spins, hops, drags or dances whenever he moves. He likes to play the “line game” which involves jumping over lines and ignoring the fact you’re about to run into traffic. He giggles when you blow on his belly and tells wild tales about how he thinks reality should work (“I don’t think there should be other planets. It’s unfair!”). He sings to himself while he plays. He asks questions, repeatedly, to which he knows the answer without listening for your response. He thinks its hilarious to wear his underwear on his head, but is grown enough to only do that with clean underwear. He carries his heart in his smile, and my heart in his every small, unconscious act of joy.

We’re going to have a great year together, kid.

Thane and his two best preschool friends

PS – I have up pictures from the end of October! You can See them here!

Update on the Stoneham Greenway!

Last night Grey and I got to join a lot of other families in town on our local tv station talking about what the Greenway means to me. Those fresh, young faces really helped remind me what this project is about: doing something awesome to make our town an even better place to live. Check out the video!

For those of you who are dying for more details on exactly where the project stands, what it does (and exactly how much of Rec park would be impacted), the Greenway Site has an excellent update you should review!

I’m excited to work with so many great, excited people to make this happen!

Brenda Flynn

Like a hole in his head

I sent a perfectly intact child to school this morning. The kid I came home to has a hole in his head!

As if I don’t have enough angsty change to deal with, with one of my sweet little babies turning nine, one of my sweet little babies starting Kindergarten, and now a missing tooth! It’s like the universe is trying to tell me that I don’t have any babies, I have boys!

Thane swallowed his tooth. (Rookie move.) I tried to convince him that the tooth fairy would just operate on him in his sleep (he still clearly totally buys the whole tooth fairy thing), but he insisted that his stomach acid would dissolve the tooth. How can a kid be so smart and yet so gullible?

He wrote a note to the tooth fairy, in lieu of the tooth. Being that he’s in his third week in Kindergarten, it’s pretty unreadable. As far as I can tell it says, Dear Tooth Fairy, I lost my too-th. It fell out and I don’t know where my lost tooth is.” He said he wrote it in bands like a rainbow, only this was three bands and rainbows have seven. I think the green thing is a picture of the tooth. I promise that the actual tooth was not green at the time of loss.

Accepted as legal tender by tooth fairies everywhere.

Covered Bridge Campground

By my count, The Flynns have gone to White Lake State Park 20 times. The first time we went was when Thane was hardly 9 months old. We had been camping only a handful of times in our misspent non-parenthood. I suddenly had some sort of fit when I realized that this was actually my life, and if I didn’t go camping I would be a person who never camps. We put a pack and play and some miscellaneous junk into the car, picked a campground and random, and started a family tradition.

My dearest husband has this great t-shirt from White Lake that says, “Extreme Outdoor Adventure”. Less true words have never been printed on a t-shirt. White Lake has an excellent lake with a sandy beach, two camp stores, coin-operated showers, playgrounds, perfect cell phone access and near immediate access to a Dunkin’ Donuts. You can get pizza delivered. It’s a pretty fantastic place to go with your three year old and six year old. If you read my last musing on Mt. Rainier, you’re likely to accurately guess that it doesn’t QUITE scratch my itch for wilderness.

So this year, for our third and final camping trip of the year, I decided to get crazy and try (GASP) a new campground. On one of our prior visits, on our near-traditional “Car Walk” across the Kankamagus, we scoped out several of the National Forest campgrounds as possibilities for our “level up” camping trip. I settled on Covered Bridge. I liked how much more space there was between the sites – enough to feel like you weren’t actually in the pockets of your neighbors. I like the boulders for climbing and woods for exploring. It’s near the scenic Swift River, enticing with it’s clear running water and scrambly rocks.

Climbing into the car on Friday noon, headed north, I wondered how much resistance I’d get when it dawned on my children that we were not going to White Lake. Would they wail? Would they spend the entire time talking about how much better White Lake is?

I am, this very moment, sitting in a gracious beech forest at the foot of a granite mountain – which we climbed yesterday. Behind the camp site 15 feet, in the woods, is a six foot mound of granite that has made for a perfect castle for the laird and thane. There’s the slightest rain tapping on one of Adam’s exquisitely hung tarps, and a roaring fire in the firepit preparing to be excellent cooking coals in an hour. (It’s not a Flynn New Hampshire camping trip if it doesn’t rain. This one is mild – there have been no extreme weather alerts yet!) My sons and I spent a cheerful two hours in that rushing Swift River, pretending to be the lords and ladies of Michisle (Think Mike-Isle) and finding the magic stones that will grant us the power to protect our kingdom. (We liked the Heart Stone so much we brought it back.) Adam got in a first rate nap. It’s been excellent.

I even got my level up on camping – the toilets are pit toilets and the water is a glorified rerouted creek. There’s even a rather creepy cemetery at the entrance with ominous 19th century inscriptions.

I asked the boys (currently reading/playing Legos in the tent after a very active day’s play) what they thought of the campground. “We should definitely come back again!” We’ll still head to White Lake – I’ve already gotten our Memorial Day reservations. But I’m excited for a future where I can get my sons to join me on the slopes of mountain adventures!

Camp Gramp: Day 1 2014

Editor’s Note: My parents take all their grandchildren for a week every summer for a hedonistic weekend called Camp Gramp. It includes Lucky Charms, adventures, tents and connection with family. We parental units are released on our own recognizance, and my mother sends out updates to assure us we can continue to ignore our progeny happily. I repost her updates, when I’m not on Mt. Rainier. Here’s the first.

Camp Gramp! Day One
It is a miracle! The children are nestled all snug in their beds — I can’t vouch for what is dancing around in their heads, but they all seem to be asleep without the usual 13 trips to remind them that tomorrow is another day. This could be because the Flynn crew were up early this morning. However it happened, it has been a good start.
Camp Gramp t-shirts are all tie dyed and tucked in their plastic bags for a night of getting more intense.

The tents are all up. The kids are getting to be a much better help in that capacity.

Much laughing and giggling and “Let’s pretending” has already gone on.

On the down side, poor Papapa has pneumonia and is feeling far from well. Hopefully his medicine will kick in soon. It is discouraging to feel worse after the doctor.

Brenda and Adam are going tomorrow morning to try for camping spots for Mt. Rainier.

I am headed for bed. My day hasn’t been quite as long, but it has been busy, and those kids are getting a head start on me.

I promise to get out the camera tomorrow.

Beyond the rain-drenched streets

It’s pouring out right now, which is kind of soothing actually. I get the feeling that we will have a cool rainy summer to follow our cold, snowy winter. But while I’m watching the rain, I am thinking about my little boy in a cabin and really, really hoping that he’s either getting better weather, or enjoying his stormy weather with some new BFFs.

I’ve sent Grey away before. Camp Gramp started when he was like 2 years old. I’ve cheerfully bundled him off with my parents and only had light levels of “aw, I miss my boys”. He’s been at daycare since he was 8 weeks old. I’m a pro at parting, solid in the assurance that I’ll see him soon and he’ll have had a great time. So I didn’t anticipate much problem with this whole Summer Camp plan. I’d send him. He’d have a great time and learn a lot and make friends and grow up in new and amazing ways. I’d spend extra time with Thane – the younger, quieter child.

But man, I’m suffering. We’ve had no news since Sunday – which is good. No news means no problems that the counselors haven’t been able to help him with. They had cell phones, those wonderful teenage boys, and Grey knows my number. I have enough confidence in his – ahem – effective communication of his desires to believe he could’ve talked one of them into calling me if he really wanted to. So signs point to a great outcome. He’s fine. He’s happy. He’s awesome.

But I don’t KNOW! Before it’s always been someone I know that I left him with, and that he knew. So often I’ve sent them together. I didn’t realize I counted on the fact they had each other. My mom always sends Camp Gramp updates, and we call when we can. Just those 30 seconds of “Hi mom. I’m doing great… (then trailing off as some new fun thing totally distracts him)” put my mind at ease far more than I realized until I didn’t have them. I’m almost happy that the pickup time is at oh-dark-thirty on Saturday, so I don’t have to wait so long to see him.

I’ve been consoling myself by *thoroughly* cleaning his room in his absence. (With his permission.) I think I could entirely recreate his IKEA bunk bed using nothing but Lego bricks. The older the kid, the smaller the toys, the harder to clean. But it’s nice to come home to a clean house, even if you’re an 8 year old. I suspect it serves to make me even snifflier though.

So to console me – tell me about your first time at summer camp!