Midsummer

After a very quiet and very boring week with no kids, I picked them up from camp today. It’s always funny to see how they return after being left to their own devices for a week. After teasing them about it relentlessly from last year, this year they did not return with one pair of dirty underwear and six pairs of clean underwear (!) - they actually used the laundry bags I sent - but they did return with very dirty hair and ankles and unused flossers. I guess a water pipe broke the first day of camp so showers were hard to come by. So they claim. 

I was talking to one of the counselors and apparently there were only about 48 kids there, less than half their pre-pandemic numbers. I see I’m not alone in this. I hope they don’t fold. The camps are all over the country, and the northern CA version runs for two weeks. I suppose I could look into that one if this one ceases to exist; or any other camp, really, but I like this one’s focus on science and critical thinking. 

But today I drove an hour and a half into the mountains, picked up the boys, took them to in-n-out, got us home, threw everything in the washing machine, went out to get groceries for our trip, made dinner for someone else for the first time in a week, got them showered, and now will soon go to bed. Tomorrow I’ll continue packing and food prepping, then Monday we leave on our week long campervan adventure across Arizona. Personally I can’t wait for the change of scenery. 

It’s only mid summer but I can feel it slipping through my fingers like sand. I tried to make the most of my week of freedom by seeing friends for lunch and not worrying about when I would get home…but truth be told it was mostly boring and lonely. I mostly worked, doing incredibly tedious work on spreadsheets and schedules, once for six hours at a stretch, and cursed how much I still have to labor over these things that I once thought would be completely automated by now. I hustled to get things out of the way before our trip, and mostly accomplished that. But when we get home I’m just one month out - the boys have two more weeks at their rec center camp, and then, school, and our lives change forever. Getting up early, getting supplies, learning new systems, figuring out afterschool, homework, early bed times. I’m not ready for all that again. Thankfully we have three more weeks before all that starts happening. I see moms posting in the local mom group about our old school and it stabs me in the heart a little bit. Soon they’ll be posting the class lists up on the office billboard and all the parents will stream up to take pictures and share with other parents…and for the first time, we won’t be any part of that, and we almost were. The school will go on without us. This thought is strangely unbearable to me. And so it goes. 

Today I tried to make a list of things to cut from next year’s event in an attempt at saving a little money. It’s frustrating how few areas can actually be trimmed, and how little money can actually be saved even by cutting budgets in every area - it’s just a couple thousand here, a few hundred there…barely worth it. But it does all add up. I think I could trim $20,000 next year, which doesn’t help much, but is better than doing nothing. And the good news is if the event suddenly starts looking better I can always add those things back in. But I don’t think next year will look better. I think next year will look worse, and will continue to until things around the world look better. We’re in for a long rebuilding period, I’m afraid, so I need to buckle up. Winter is coming.