MONDAY
Today breakfast was at 8:00 am for the nature activity campers because they were headed to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. I woke up early and helped corral the 4 boys and 2 girls who were headed out on the trip.
I had a little bowl of mini-wheats, but the campers had biscuits and gravy with tater tots and hard boiled eggs. If you haven't read any of my previous posts about breakfast here at camp, it's the meal that comes standard with all of the following menu choices: 8 different types of cold cereal, packaged oatmeal, four types of fruit juice, 2% milk, almond milk, rice milk, or soy milk, fruit, fruit cocktail, yogurt, granola, toast, bagels, cream cheese, peanut butter, jelly, and everyone has to have at least a half cup of water.
I headed out to help the nature trip get safely away from camp before I headed to the Trailmaster activity to teach class for the first session. I really like to move around camp, and the hiking class is a great way for campers to experience the achievement that happens when you literally climb mountains. We had four students today, and all four of them completed the first test hike. It's not easy to walk in a straight line in the dust for an hour, so I was really proud when everyone finished before lunch.
As soon as the trail hikers were done, I ran over to mail center to see if they needed any help with camper mail, but they were already delivering it to the campers. There is a lot of camper mail this week, mostly because we have 160 campers at PSR Camp right now. The mail goes out at 12:40 pm every day, so even though it takes longer to pass out we do our best to make sure it all gets delivered.
Lunch today was something wonderful, I'm sure, but I skipped lunch to check in with our camp nurses, camp office staff, and went to collect a delivery of supplies for the camp. Every lunch period the cafeteria serves at least two entrees, a vegetable, and the following items: A starter salad (with romaine and iceberg lettuce) with 9 different vegetable toppings, two crunchy toppings, three salad dressings, cottage cheese, Jello, fresh fruit, peanut butter and jelly, three types of bread, soda, tea, milk, rice milk, almond milk, and soy milk, along with orange slice and dessert (I heard the entrée was vegetarian chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes, and the vegetable was broccoli. Yum.).
After lunch I spent my quiet period doing camp administrative work, but the campers generally take a short break before their afternoon activities. At 2:40 pm we had a fire drill, and counted everyone again before going to our afternoon rotations. This week is a bit different because everyone at camp has a morning class, and then they all do rotations in their cabins in the afternoon. I was going to take Instagram pictures during rotations, but I ended up calling parents instead regarding campers who wanted to switch activities.
On Monday of Tween Week, about 10 campers every summer want to switch activities. We do our best to contact parents and make it happen for everyone, but some of the activities are different prices, some are 100% full, sometimes we can't reach parents, and sometimes the parents don't want their campers to switch activities. We do our best to make everyone happy, but after tomorrow morning, we won't allow anyone else to switch activities so that we can prepare department awards by the end of the week.
Once I finished calling parents, I went to big event on the field which is a group game we play with everyone who's at camp. You can see the photos (above) were the campers started cheering and yelling for their cabin (or gender) to win each round. This week the campers were a bit more competitive than the previous two sessions, but they also tried to be fair. I saw a cabin call themselves 'out' but then laugh and join in the fun by cheering for another cabin that was still in. We had fun and no one got hurt, a really good thing!
Dinner was taco salad, along with all the toppings and a full salad bar. No soda for dinner this week, otherwise the rest of the menu is similar to lunch. I didn't really have too much time to sit down and enjoy dinner today, but because they create their own taco salad, dinner takes longer than usual.
We lowered the flag at 7:50 pm and Cabin Iroquois helped us bring it down from the flagpole tonight. The nature campers got back tonight around 8:40 pm while the rest of the campers were watching the first night of the Outpost play and everyone was in bed before 10 pm.
It was a bit warmer today than usual, so we took a few more breaks, put on a bit more sunscreen, and drank more water than normal. I hear it's going to be even warmer on Thursday, and the heat can really ruin a perfectly good day out in nature. If the forecast is correct, it's going to be really hot this coming weekend, so I hope you'll join us in praying that something changes and we get a good breeze or cloud cover.
Blessings,
-Jeremy
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