Camp!!!

Ack!

My baby girl is at sleepaway camp ALL BY HERSELF. I mean, all by herself, the ten other girls in her unit and three counselors...plus however many other girls and staff are at the campground for the various other half-week camps going on.

But still.

The primary issue I'm having with this has to do with my inherent selfishness. I do the Girl Scout leader thing not (not only) because I love organizing activities and going on adventures and doing construciton paper crafts...it's mostly because I loved Girl Scouts and I have great memories of it...I want Carly to have awesome Girl Scout memories too, but I want to be in them. And the memories she'll be making over the next couple of days have nothing to do with me. So that's really the problem here. Plus the house is really weird two people down.

So, enough about me!

This is Carly and her friend Tindra outside the gate. Tindra's mom had to work this afternoon so she came up with us. Poor kids had the sun right in their faces! 

Now for a little look around the camp if you're interested...

It's a small place, which is good for my girl's first overnighter. This is the dining hall which looks out over the lake. The showers are located in this building as well. Doesn't it just look so campgroundy?

To the rigth of that building are the arts and crafts shelter and the fire ring. There are a bunch of stumps for seating...this is where we had our evening event with the troop earlier this year. I could make up something about that blue building but honestly, I forgot what its use is. =)

Carly's cabin, from about halfway between the cabin itself and the dining hall. Her group is made up of mostly first-timers, so they are housed close to the main buildings of camp. The cabin has some kind of goofy name - honestly that's the one thing about Girl Scouts that I haven't really gotten all that into. For example, one of the cabin counselors' is going by Tinkerbell and another by Key Lime. It's kind of weird. You should have seen Carly's practical little face when they told her their camp names! She just kind of looked at them trying to figure out if they were lying.

Being greeted at the cabin! The one counselor leaning over is a Girl Guide from Ireland so she had a great accent. She was checking out Carly's daddy doll...we've started calling him Fluffy Daddy, which is probably not going to be Paul-approved...while the other counselor is helping Tindra carry that giant backpack. Oh and notice Bree elbowing her way between Carly and Some-Crazy-Nickname to get up the ramp. =)

Getting settled in!

Carly took out her daddy doll right after we signed her in and she started to feel a little nervous about staying without me. (A little gratification for me right there? Absolutely!) She felt a little better when we got her all set up. Then, because I luckily remembered at the last minute to have her make swaps (little doo-dads girls pin on hats or backpacks) for her new friends and she got to hand those out which helped ease the transition too. Then we hugged Carly and high-fived Tindra and got out of there. I left her with two disposable cameras, and I can't wait to see what will be on them!

The girls' first activity was to make bead necklaces with their names on them, so it is my hope that Carly got absorbed in that, had a great time with whatever afternoon activity was next and started building some of those independent memories of which I'm so jealous, I'm still up at a quarter to midnight talking about it. =)