Our homemade summer camp is one of the best parenting ideas I ever came up with. When Sam was a kid and I was packing the summer calendar with various day camps, there was always a dead week or two with nothing scheduled.
That’s when we put together our homemade summer camp — or boys’ camp, as Sam and his friends called it, when they asked for it each year. Here’s how it worked:
Five kids, one day of chaos at each house
Find five willing families. Each one picks a day to host the kids at their house. The host plans a day’s worth of activities, lunch and snacks. Your kid gets five days of fun. You get a free week of childcare and one day that will completely exhaust you, physically and mentally and in every other way possible.
Every family does their own thing
When it was our day to host, we usually spent most of the day playing crazy rough games in the woods of our backyard. Capture the flag, hide and seek, kick the can, wooden sword fights or lightsaber wars. Because this is Atlanta, and thus hot and humid, we usually added some water activity like a dunk tank or slip and slide or some reason to get wet.
But every family did what worked for them. One mom arranged a tour of the Peachtree-DeKalb airport and had a picnic to watch the planes land and take off. My amazing friend Jenny (and fellow Cub Scout den leader) staged a backyard Olympics. Another mom (who might have been overcompensating because her twin boys were a handful) took all the kids to the Capital City Club and gave them private tennis lessons and an afternoon at the pool with hotdogs and chips from the club’s snack bar.
Heads up: You will be exhausted
One year on the first day of homemade summer camp, all the boys arrived at our house at 9 am. Our first activity was a raucous game that involved hiding big red, blue, yellow and green cardboard bricks throughout the backyard and woods. Sam’s beloved nanny Pete and I divided the kids into two teams and had them build two forts with rope, clothespins and old sheets. The competition was to find the most cardboard bricks and stash them in your tent — and avoid having members of the other team raid your fort to steal your bricks.
Pete blew the whistle, the kids took off through the woods gathering bricks, tossing them in their respective tents, raiding each other’s tents and laughing and screaming. When all the bricks had been found and hoarded, Pete blew the whistle for the end of round one. She and I were both hot, tired, sweaty, dusty and thirsty. Just from standing there, watching the action.
I turned to Pete, already pretty wiped out from the excitement, and asked her what time it was. She gave me the side eye and said, “It’s only 9:45.” Which meant we still had more than seven hours to kill of our homemade summer camp day. But after that — four more days of dropping Sam off at 9 am and picking him up, happy and tired, at 5.
