Week-long Camp

This week is exhausting already.

I am matched up with the same staff partner I had last week, which is great because we worked together really well. We have 9, 10, and 11 year olds (mostly 11 year olds). Twelve of them. It doesn't sound like a lot, but my last group of campers was 8 kids, and I've been surprised by how much larger the extra four girls make the group feel. It feels like almost double from last week.

I also have discovered that I am not crazy about this age. I miss my seven and eight year olds, who were falling all over themselves to help us, who weren't too cool to sing cheesy camp songs, and who were excited enough about activities that they barely complained about the rain or the mosquitos or wanting to go to bed. Eleven is like the new thirteen; they don't want to help ever, they rarely get excited about things, and they would rather go to bed than take a hike or sing songs around a campfire. Not all of them, but the majority of them. Sometimes once they are actually engaged in the activity, they find that little-kid sense of excitement for what they're doing. But it kind of sucks feeling like they're just barely tolerating things I spent a lot of time planning.

Of course, this week was off to a weird start anyway. I had 7 girls from the same Girl Scout troop, and 5 girls that didn't know each other. It took forever to make tent assignments because we do the best we can to accommodate friends who want to be together (there are 6 to a tent). But one girl, who we'll call Sarah, arrived with a mother who had other plans. She came in, saw which tent Sarah was assigned to and who was staying in it with her, and didn't like it. Later I would find out it was because she didn't like one of the girls that was in the tent with her, who we'll call Mary. Mary had not arrived yet at this point.

So Sarah's mom gets there, sees the tent assignments, and is unhappy that two girls from their troop are in different groups from the rest of the troop. I kind of understand that, especially once she explained that six of the girls were "PCSing", which I have no idea what that is, but apparently is a military thing where they are being relocated to other states, so this is the last week that the 9 close friends will have together. However I have no power to get the other girls moved into my group, so I send Sarah's mom to the camp director.

She comes back a few minutes later and says that two girls are being removed from my group so that the two from the troop can join. This now puts us at 9 girls who know each other, and 3 girls that don't. It also obviously messes up the tent assignments. Sarah's mom tells me that the camp director said to tell me to put the tents however Sarah's mom wanted. So she tells me that Mary is best friend with Becca, who is in the other tent, and that they really really wanted to be together. So I move Mary to the other tent and reassign the girls the way Sarah's mom wants, thinking that's what I was supposed to do.

Well, Sarah's mom asked me to please take down the cardboard signs we'd made fir each tent, letting arriving girls know where they would be sleeping. That made sense, since they were no longer correct, so we took them down and put them next to us at a picnic table, face-up. Sarah's mom then asks me to flip the signs over so that the original assignments were not displayed, saying that some parents get upset at those kinds of things and it'd be easier if they just didn't know. That sounded stupid, but whatever, I flipped the signs over to make her happy, leaving me with just a half sheet of paper that I'd figured out the tent assignments on. Names were crossed out and moved around all over the paper.

So Sarah's mom leaves, and Mary arrives with her mom, who is instantly angry about the tent assignments. She said this was the second year in a row that Mary had been split from her requested "buddy", Ashley. But Sarah and Ashley had requested each other; Ashley did not request Mary, so they were split up. Mary's mom starts demanding to know if another parent had made me change the assignments, and sees my paper with Mary's name crossed off from being in Ashley and Sarah's tent, and moved to the other one. I didn't know what to do so I said no, sensing I'd just suddenly been thrown into some mom drama. I said I thought Mary and Becca were best friends so I put them together, and Mary's mom told me that no, Ashley is Sarah's best friend. I found out later that the camp director had not told Sarah's mom she could decide the tent assignments; she had blatantly lied to me in order to get Mary moved out of Sarah's tent and get Ashley in there without Mary. I have no idea why, but for whatever reason she wanted Sarah to have Ashley to herself rather than have to share her with Ashley.

So I now have a pissed off parent, a tearful Mary, and Ashley stuck in the middle. The assignments stayed the way they were, with Mary separated from Ashley, but apparently there is still some hurt feelings over all this, and I got a request today to change around the assignments. But we had had a very stressful dinner, followed by getting stuck out in the rain for an hour, plus me generally feeling a bit down about the entire day, and I didn't want to deal with it and told them we'd talk about it tomorrow.

There's more stuff going on that I wanted to write about, but the mom drama ended up being a way longer story than I thought and I'm practically falling asleep writing this, so it will have to wait. I'm about to attempt to get some sleep while the loons are calling like crazy outside...which is kind of one of the coolest sentences I've ever written.