Summer camp sign-up vent

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Op here, my oldest one did Bar-T ranch & Bar-T mountainside before, and he is over it. He finds it boring because they repeats the schedules and activities week by week. A lot of camps he likes are 9am to 3pm which I hates the most and my work flexibility does not give me the flex to be able to do the full summer like that. I cannot afford multi weeks of sleepaway camp which is too costly. So for this child, I rely a lot of camp busing (if available) to different county/state or drive for 15 min to 30 min one way for drop off/pick up to get him to different camp locations. The other kids are too young to follow him like that, so they go to other camps. They have different interests.

I would hire a sitter to take care of the smaller kids and drive the older one back and forth to the camps he wants to go to.
Sign up the little ones for swim team and tennis lessons so they aren’t sitting inside all day, but otherwise let them sleep in.

[Anonymous]

No kid wants to hear their parents fighting because of them. If you know that your child can’t go to a camp because you don’t have transportation, then just say ‘no.’ You know that your husband who works until 6pm during the school year isn’t suddenly going to be able to leave work at 2:30pm in the summer. Don’t make your kid feel like a heel for even asking because now they have caused marital discord.
It doesn’t work for you. It’s fine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My kids go to ES aftercare like Bar-T, so I try to explore different types of camps in summer week by week at different locations. They also explore different EC during school years. Many families in my neighborhood ( mostly white) send their kids to the same summer camps every years for many weeks or they spend some weeks at beach. And, they say it is convenient, stay with the school friends signing up same camps every summer etc. When I talk to other families in other school district (mostly asians) like in W neighborhood, they are like me sending their kids to different locations week by week. Is it culture thing that Asian families normally like to dig into exploring different types of summer camps compared to other races?

My DH (born here) has the same mentality and nag at me that why I go through the troubles spending a lot money to plan on different types of summer camps at each week, and it is a pain to work out on drop off/pick up on multiple kids. He says that his summer at childhood was just staying at home watching tv, playing in neighborhood and go to cheap county camps at most. I work full time, so I need his help for a few weeks to do split the responsibilities for multiple kids drop off/pick up because our kids do not attend same camps each week. Our kids enjoy doing different things at each week. Is he right or he is right that I am planning too much?

WTF? This is not a racial thing, it's a neighborhood thing. Everyone we know sends their kids to different camps every week outside the one weird family who still sends their 6th grader to daycare for summer camp..

[Anonymous]

At my kid’s MoCo private school, popular summer camps include:

- Calleva
- programs at private schools (Holton, Bullis, Landon, Green Acres)
- Imagination Stage
- various sleepaway camps

My kid is going to a combination of weeklong camps, sleepaway camp, and a couple of family vacations.