Today I’m linking up with Marsha for the 10 on the 10th link up. This month she has given us a prompt – 10 Special Summer Memories. I can probably list 10 memories from my childhood day camp – have I ever talked about that here? I loved it there and was thinking how amazing it would have been if it had been a sleepaway camp. It wasn’t, but it was still so much fun.
1. I started going to this camp when I was 6. I don’t remember much about my first summer there, but the next summer, I was placed with slightly older kids – because I was young for my grade, I guess they put me with my age kids the first year and my grade kids the second. I came home and told my mom I wanted to be with my friends from the summer before. She hadn’t been aware that I had made friends! I was happy to be switched to be with them and they were happy too.
2. When I was 8, I had my first crush on a 13 year old who was on my bus to camp. He seemed so grown up and I can’t believe he was only 13! He was pretty nice to me, although I think I annoyed him!
3. We had clubs after lunch where we could participate in various activities. I liked the creative writing club. We put together little books and wrote stories from prompts. The most popular clubs were drama and softball. I tried both at various times but neither were for me!
4. I was quite attached to my counselors each summer. I still remember a lot of them and how they really effected my life by just being role models and being kind.
5. Every summer, each group did a skit and at the end of the summer there was a talent show. One summer, I was bus friends with two girls who could sing, and they let me join them in the talent show even though I couldn’t sing at all.
6. I was known for making friendship bracelets and the summer I was 12, I must have made over 100 of them, for whoever asked me to.
7. We swam twice a day, even when it was freezing in the mornings, which we hated. Free swim in the afternoon was much more fun. We also had tennis, which made me think I could play on my high school team, arts and crafts, and nature.
8. When I was 13, I became an aide, which is like a CIT, but I wasn’t assigned to a group. I was the office aide, which meant I collected attendance sheets and delivered messages to the counselors. That summer I knew everyone at camp and I loved it.
9. My camp friends and I wrote letters to each other during the school year. When we were older, we’d get together as well. Those original camp friends from when I was 6 were my friends all the way through, although they didn’t all attend every summer, and we added a new girl to our group when we were 12!
10. Growing up and becoming a counselor there kind of put a damper on my experience. There were a lot of hard parts to that job, especially working with some of the older counselors. Being a counselor along with some of those who had been counselors when I was a kid was hard, because they still saw me as a kid! I do have fond memories of spending about 10 summers of my life at that camp.
Did you attend a summer camp growing up?
