Camping Right Along

Last week was another week of camps. This time, Smunch was at baseball camp from 9 to 3:30 every day. And it was HOT. And there wasn't a lot of shade. After the first day, I took to sending him with three water bottles. That seemed to do it. As you can see, he was a little guy at camp. This camp was for 7 to 12-year-olds, so he was on the young side and he's always been on the small side for his age. He wasn't the smallest kid there, but he was certainly a shrimp.

It didn't seem to make a big difference. The second day, he wore his Chicago White Sox jersey that his great Uncle Quentin sent him. It has his last name on the back with the number 20 (random number as far as I know). From that day on, you could hear all the other kids talking about Ryder doing this or that. It was cute and it was clear that he'd be accepted, even though he didn't know any of the other boys before the start of camp. Smunch was also named "camper of the day" on Tuesday. He was so thrilled! And I was thrilled for him. Unfortunately, things kind of went downhill from there.

By the end of the week, he wasn't so sure that he liked baseball camp after all. He hated all the warm-up running they had to do each morning. I tried to tell him that running is part of the life of a baseball player. He still says he's going to be a major league baseball player when he grows up. Guess he's going to have to learn to run.

Mam, on the other hand, had a completely different kind of week with an animal-themed camp at her former preschool. She was gone from 9 to 11:30 every day, knew several kids in her class and came home with all kinds of art projects and stories. She got to see a walking stick, a hedgehog and a parrot show. Beyond that, I know very little about what happened. There were no pictures, but hopefully for her, there were lots of great memories.

For me, I spent what little free time I had between getting home from dropping Smunch off and picking up Mam by trying to think about our next big trip and what we needed. Either I'm overthinking things because camping trips are so much work (and we've done a lot of that lately) or I've failed entirely to get it together for this trip. At least we'll be in cities and hotels this time around, so we may be able to make up for all my packing failures. I guess we'll find out!