Never again

I spent the last five week days volunteering at Cub Scout day camp and if I have anything to say about it, I will never do that again. I tend to set my expectations for events and people low so that I am not disappointed but this was one of the rare times that I did not set those expectations low enough...it was far far worse than I thought it would be.

I had no idea that when you volunteer for the entire week you usually are assigned the role of walking den leader, which means you walk a group of scouts around to the various activities. Sure enough, I was a co-den leader for thirteen boys and I spent more than six hours each day with them, with very little direction or instruction. And since about 60-70% of the activities took place outside in the Georgia heat, what energy the boys didn't take was sapped by the heat and sun.

Without going into detailed whining, let's just say that any time 300 boys are herded into one place, there will be chaos...especially when a good number of those boys obviously are not made to mind their behavior at home and when a good number of the adult leaders either don't know how to make boys mind or don't care to make them mind. And I was amazed and appalled by the number of adults who came to "help" each day but did little other than sit with their own boy, not helping the den leaders to manage the group as a whole.

If we are still here at this time next year, I doubt we will send Aidan to day camp at all; we were not impressed by the level of (dis)organization or the caliber of the activities. And even if we do send him, I will give them a day or two at most of my time; I do not need to put myself through the hell of five days again.

There were fun and funny moments, of course, and my favorite came from a little dear named A.J., who is a pint-size version of Leif Garrett (isn’t that a blast from the past). I was telling boys to drop some rotting sticks and told them that ticks are often found in dead wood. I asked if they knew what ticks were and they all said yes. As we started walking back to the main building, little A.J. said to me, “My brother once got a tick on his tenders!” I can only imagine what/where the tenders are and I had to laugh out loud!

Rocket boys

Recently I read Rocket Boys, Homer Hickam's account of growing up in a West Virginia coal mining town during the advent of the space race, and how he and his friends decided to send their own rockets into the sky. It was sweet, sad and overall a very enjoyable read.

My own rocket boys sent their rockets towards space today after lunch. James and Aidan built two fairly basic model rockets yesterday and we drove over to Aidan's school to launch them - the big field between the school and the road was the perfect Cape Canaveral for us.

Getting the launch pad set up:


The two proud and able rocket scientists:


And we have lift off!