First Day of Camp

The first day of camp is here.

'N' and I (and baby X) started the day by going to breakfast to celebrate Father's Day and then it was time for our pre-camp staff meeting and waiting for the bus to arrive. Today was HOT. I was sweaty almost immediately. But I'd rather be hot than have it rain, so I was counting my blessings for the weather.

It was a very smooth first day. The staff were calm and looked prepared before kids arrived. 2 busses arrived and 90 kids tumbled out. Over half of the kids are returners, so it was fun to greet familiar faces. It's also nice because they know what they are doing and how camp works. It was your typical first day chaos- the counselors went from calm and confident before kids arrived to a sort of stunned look of shock as actual kids are so much different than just talking about kids in staff training. Dinner was a little hectic as the schedules had been printed incorrectly and everyone showed up early.

But overall, for the first day it was really smooth, really uneventful...

And then it wasn't.

After dinner I'd gone back to my trailer to give X a bath and put him to bed. I was going to work on emails, the camp blog, schedules, etc and then nanny was going to come when the opening campfire started so I could go. X had a bath, video-chatted with Grandma, had some milk and went right to sleep. I was working on my computer when the thunder started.

Over the walkie talkies, we decided to move the campfire into the basement of the dining hall. No fire, but you can still sing all the songs, watch the skits and do all of the same things that you do at a campfire.

Because it was raining, I told 'A' to keep nanny and I'd skip the "fire" so neither of us would have to run across camp in the rain.

The tornado warning alert came on my phone about a second before the sirens started going off. The wind was BLOWING and the rain was getting heavier. It only took me a few seconds to grab X's bag, throw a bottle into it, RUN to my van, back it up to my door, grab the carseat, gently lift a sleeping baby out of his crib and put him in his carseat, cover the carseat in my rain coat, run the few steps to my van (while simultaneously urging a fat bulldog to run as fast as she could to the van (she seemed to sense the urgency and she was very fast), and speed across camp to the dining hall. 'A' was standing outside, ready to meet me and help me wrangle a bulldog while I ran a baby inside. Start to finish, it took me about 2 minutes to flee across camp.

We sat in the staff locker room, which is separated from the main room of the basement by a partial wall. The kids were singing loudly, unaware we were in a tornado warning. X was his typical good natured self, looking around in awe, smiling at everyone and calm, despite the LOUD singing on the other side of the wall. Olivia was upset she couldn't be with the kids, so she spent some of the time barking. 'A' and I sat and looked at every weather app we both had and kept shaking our heads.

We were only in the basement about 30 minutes and then everything was clear, the sun came out and the rain stopped and I took my baby back to his bed in our little tin can of a home.

This is the first time in 9 summers that we've actually had a tornado warning and had to be in the basement. I guess we are starting the summer with a bang.