Category: Kid's Adventures

Summer Camp. With wine.

4/25/2015

Throughout my childhood, my mom worked for the school district. Her time off mirrored ours which meant that our summers and breaks were well-supervised. By well-supervised, I mean she did what all moms in the '70s and '80s did; she sent our hyper little buttocks outside to play and generally left us to our own frenetic devices.

Let's just say my mom wasn't pouring over the internet for "Summer Boredom Busters." Mostly because there was no internet, but also because if you even hinted at being bored you'd be saddled with a list of chores that would make Cinderella blanch. There were no guided craft projects or pre-arranged play dates. And certainly no camps. Educational or otherwise.

Ours was a world of spontaneity, creativity, imagination, and occasional deep boredom. We spent many an hour on our banana-seat bikes impressing mostly ourselves with our jumps and tricks. ("Look, no hands!") Our boundary was from the stop sign at one end of the lane to the barrier that designated to all but the most drunk or stupid that it was a dead end.

We ruthlessly guarded our turf from outsiders -- aka old people who were lost and accidentally turned on our lane. And by ruthlessly, I mean, we'd graciously pull our bikes to the side and help them with directions.

My mom if you mentioned being bored. (And a meme from one of my favorite people, Jenny Lawson, of thebloggess.com and "Let's Pretend this Never Happened.")

We might spend the day in our steamy kitchen canning green beans, beets, apples, pears and jams. Pretty much anything that could be squished into a Mason jar was fair game. When we ran out of "convenient" things to preserve, my mom would drive us deep into the mountain where we'd painstakingly fill our crafty homemade coffee can/belt, hands-free "bucket" with blackberries. The first rule of blackberry picking was that if you saw a snake, you needed to redirect it while shouting a loud warning to my mom so that she could get an "I've never seen Mom run so fast" head start to the car. The second rule was get more blackberries in the bucket than in your mouth.

When my mom was especially intent on getting rid of us for the day, we'd find ourselves hired out to the grandparents to weed their huge garden or gather the pine cones that fell from their half-ish acre "forest" of tall trees. Twelve was the "magical" age when we were shuttled to our first "real" job, picking strawberries for the local farm. We made $1.25 a flat, paid at the end of the season based on how many flats had been tallied on our punch card. The $50 or $60 I made for weeks of agricultural drudgery was quickly spent at the local mall on highly desirable stylish painter's pants, striped knee-high cotton socks, a Peter Frampton t-shirt, and a Barry Manilow cassette tape.

My kids are past the "need to be supervised to ensure the house isn't burned down" phase. But their earlier summers were anything but spontaneous. We were told on good authority that we couldn't just leave them to fend for themselves (aka "Lord of the Flies") while my husband and I were at work. Creativity? All mine, as I frantically searched the internet, local family magazines, and newspaper lists to find the perfect pieces to my puzzle of summer care.

"Carefree" summers were meticulously laid out on a spreadsheet detailing every camp, vacation, special event, and grandparent availability. Each kid had their personalized column full of camp dates, locations, prices, and drop-off and pick up times. These spreadsheets were the equivalent of our war plan and handed out ceremoniously to the village tasked with helping us raise our children. We single-handedly drove up stock prices for refrigerator magnets.

Yeah, it really did seem this complicated.

We started with "general" camps. These were the easiest to schedule and frankly, the most affordable. They were offered by organizations such as the YMCA, or the Boys & Girls Club. The organizers clearly spent a lot of time coming up with thrilling ways to entertain our children with themed weeks such as "Under the Sea" or "Barnyard Palooza." (Or, more likely, they copied and pasted last summer's schedule.) Regardless of the theme, the weeks looked remarkably similar. There was usually a swim day or two, bowling day, maybe some gymnastics, but mostly lots of "free choice" where the kids chased each other with glue bottles, glitter, and scissors. My children didn't like these camps much. They were used to a very structured school setting, and got a bit lost in the general mayhem.

So we moved on to camps that were more specific to their interests, or -- if I'm totally honest -- interests that I was hoping my kids would embrace. Some of the camps became annual attractions, others were one time, "please don't make me go back" events. There were many weeks of horse camp, sports camps (taekwondo, baseball, basketball, volleyball, soccer, rowing/small watercraft sports, tennis, and swimming), music, theater, Spanish, writing, circus, science, Harry Potter, and sewing camps, Our youngest even spent six weeks at a camp intensely preparing for an epic production of Les Miserables. There was nothing "casual" or unstructured about most of these camps.

One year, during "camp planning season," one of our daughters dared ask, with a bit of a whine, about the camp schedule. I told her that I was signing her up for "Coal Mining Camp." She'd be flying out to West Virginia where she'd spend 10 hours a day working in the coal mines and the rest of the time living with a local family of strangers. When I finally told her it wasn't real, she was actually disappointed. Because volleyball? Boring. Black lung? Woot!

Brochure for Coal Mining Camp

It seems to me that with the predominance of dual income families, camps have become a huge business. In our "brain trust" belt of Silicon Valley, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, people have very high expectations. If you think I'm exaggerating, I've pulled a sampling of camps from our local university. These are meant for 4th-9th graders. Guess which are real and which one(s) I made up.

1) Build Your Own Website
2) Jr. Biotech
3) 3D Animation with Autodesk 3DS Max
4) Lego Robotics
5) Pre-Med for Kids
6) Exploring Shakespeare
7) Farm to Table

If you guessed that they're ALL real, then you guessed right. At the "Excel" camp where your kids are apparently on the fast track to an Ivy League scholarship, your aspiring 5th grader can learn "How to Run a Successful Business" in the morning session, and be singing about the sun coming out tomorrow in "Annie: The Mini Musical" afternoon class.

I was always a little jealous that my kids were lucky enough to spend their summers at all these cool camps. So, I'm proposing summer camps for adults. I'm ready to spend a week playing volleyball, learning all the best wizard spells, or trying my hand at building a robot out of Legos. Add some wine, and I think I've got a winning business plan. You in?

This is the robot I'd build. If I didn't get too drunk. (www.gismondionwine.com)

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That Time I Almost Killed My Sister

3/17/2015

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We are not a gun family. I'd personally like to see all guns repurposed as beautiful art, but I am distinctly aware of the second amendment and the current right to own guns, so if you're a gun zealot, don't be hating on me. I have legitimate reasons for my aversion.

Images of sculptures made out of guns and bullets by Al Farrow -- www.alfarrow.com

I grew up in a household of guns. My stepdad (aka "Dad") was president of the local gun club where we spent most Sundays and many weeknights. He and my grandpa hunted pheasant in the winter in Eastern Washington. I was never a big fan of these excursions. Not because I was horrified of the resulting bag of dead birds (they usually were served at my favorite birthday meal), but because it was always freezing cold and I personally liked feeling my toes without the pre-hypothermia pins and needles. My dad would occasionally use us kids as "bird dogs" because he was worried about our German Shorthairs getting lost in the maze of corn stalks. We also tended to be better with complicated voice commands -- "more to your left" -- when searching for the downed bird. Come to think of it, I may need to add Bird Dog to my resume.

Some of my fondest memories are of helping my dad load shotgun shells on Monday nights while watching football. (You can tell I might lack the "girly-girl" gene.) Tuesday was a big trap shooting night. The most competitive guys at the club would line up to take turns shooting at clay pigeons flung out of a bunker manned by a teenager who clearly considered the risk of losing a body part as superior to working fast food. The contest was comprised of an elaborate set of rules where upon you could take down three or four of your competitors with one shot. Last man standing won the pot.

My parents started us young on gun safety. We took multi-day classes at the local junior high before we were old enough to attend junior high. (Yes, you read that right. Gun classes at the public school.) We each owned our own BB guns and the adults would set up shooting ranges for us on my grandparents' semi-secluded property. My sisters and I would fire our intimidating rounds of BBs then shout, "cease fire" -- loudly, even though there were only three of us. We were required to lay down our Daisy rifles before any of us were allowed to move beyond the well-defined firing line to check our accuracy on our targets.

We took more safety classes. I'd say we were incredibly gun aware. Which is why firing a "stolen" pistol in a small but populated bedroom seemed like the last thing my nine-year-old self would do.

My younger sister (by a year and a half) and I had come down with some sort of virus that kept us home from school. Both my parents worked, so we were home alone camped in our shared room. The bottom bunk was hers, the top mine. The arrangement made it easier for me to throw stuffed animals at her in the dark of night until she woke up to escort me to the bathroom that was three harrowing steps across the hall.

We heard noises. In hindsight, they were the kind of noises that an old house tends to make when resting its weary bones. But that day, we convinced ourselves that it was the noise of an intruder. Apparently, a very formidable intruder, because we decided that the most prudent thing to do would be to arm ourselves. We ninja'd our way to our parents' room next door and found a pistol in the drawer by their bed. Situated back in our own room, the gun felt scary and powerful at the same time. Ironically, given that my parents were so safety conscious, I was SURE -- 100% confident -- that they wouldn't keep a loaded gun just laying around the house.

So, I pulled the trigger.

I can't even begin to tell you what went through my mind as that bullet ricocheted around our room before finally settling into the wall behind our door. We both heard the whiz of the bullet flash past. Gratefully, its trajectory didn't include two terrified little girls. My stomach still lurches thinking about what could easily have been a very different and tragic ending.

The rest of the day was a blur of anxiety. We tried to figure out how to cover up my incredible mistake until finally realizing (kind of maturely, actually) that we couldn't. My mom turned several shades of pale when we confessed to the alarming events of the day. Though the bullet hadn't killed us, she knew my dad would - so she asked my uncle to patch up the walls before he got home.

Add this all up, and you can see why I had mixed feelings when my 20-year-old daughter asked to go to a firing range for her birthday. She is set on a career in law enforcement and decided it would be reasonable to have some experience handling a gun before she enters the academy. We have a few years until she will be finished earning her criminal justice degree. I selfishly hope in that time that she changes her mind and decides to use that degree on a less dangerous endeavor. But it's her life, I know she'll be amazing, and I'll support her even if it means premature aging on my part.

I paused and did a lot of soul searching. Yes, I have shot handguns on very rare occasions since that fateful day. But I can easily, happily envision a world full of art instead of guns. Maybe someday. Today though, I realized that as much as I wish it weren't so, in our society gun skills are an important requirement for being in law enforcement. I certainly don't want her to be at a disadvantage in a dangerous situation. But, before she picks up a gun, we've signed her up for a safety class. Let's hope she learns more from it than I seemed to.

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Summer Camp. With wine.

That Time I Almost Killed My Sister

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