Down Two Kids

We’re down two kids for the rest of the week. By Catholic standards, we’re practically childless. My thirteen-year-old, Betsy, and eleven-year-old, Mae, left Sunday for BSA summer camp. They’re in for seven days of enhanced outdoorsiness and reduced hygiene. They’ve been preparing for this moment for months. They fretted over what to pack and what merit badge courses to sign up for. Our younger two kids, Lucy, nine, and Waffle, seven, have been doing just as much plotting to decide how to use their brief window of freedom. Undoubtedly, Lucy will become a tyrant and rule over her one remaining sibling with an iron fist. Power abhors a vacuum. It’s going to be a strange week for all of us. The big girls have only been gone for a few hours and our family dynamics are already thrown off. Our live-in babysitters are gone. Rooms are empty. Little kids are acting like big kids. Cats and dogs are friends. That last one isn’t true. We don’t have a cat, and our dog is just as distrustful of the pigs as ever. Interspecies rivalries always endure. No matter how you look at it, this week is going to be interesting. And by interesting, I mean “a disaster.”

None of our kids have ever been away from home for this long. Thankfully, there was a built-in mechanism to make our goodbyes easier. It’s called packing, and the stress of it made us all not want to talk to each other ever again. The big girls were justifiably concerned over what to take. We tend to bring too much stuff even for a one-night stay in a hotel. Asking them to gather together enough gear for a week in a tent was begging for overkill. When I went to scout camp in approximately 10,000 BC, our most luxurious amenity was wood. We brought giant slabs of plywood and a bunch of 2x4s. Those formed the floor of our army surplus canvas tents. It kept our living spaces gloriously dry during even the heaviest of rains. The downside was each sheet of plywood weighed as much as a small car and showered us with splinters. All these years later, just thinking about carrying those boards makes my hands hurt. I never once thought to wear gloves. They hadn’t been invented yet. I was lucky I got to sleep in a tent instead of a cave.

Outdoor adventuring has advanced a bit since then. Betsy and Mae didn’t have to haul half a lumber yard with them. Instead, the troop bought everyone plastic tackle boxes. That’s not the right term, but it’s what they look like, only five times larger. It’s a Tupperware container for everything in their bedroom. They each jammed thirty pounds worth of clothing and accessories inside their respective plastic footlockers and then slapped a padlock on the outside. Not only will their stuff stay dry all week, but it will also be theft-proof. Unless the thief just picks up the whole plastic container and walks away with it. That’s why you surround your tent with bamboo spike traps. When the scouts say, “Be prepared,” they mean it.

They’re more ready for camping than I ever was in caveman times. I didn’t have a cell phone. I think the scoutmaster had one in his car in case some of us got eaten by a bear. Even then, they probably wouldn’t have used it. It would be much politer to notify our next of kin by mail. Now, the kids can count on their leader to provide them with a communal charging station. When Betsy and Mae were going through their list of items to pack, I also distinctly heard one of them mention a loofah. I didn’t even know what a loofah was until I was in my thirties, and even now, I’m still not sure if my definition is right. When I went to camp, if we started to smell too bad, they just sprayed us down with a fire hose. It’s possible I’m confusing summer camp with a prison riot. They have a lot more in common than you think.

There were of course several last-second crises as the girls packed for their big week. I had to rush out to buy more sunscreen. I’m not sure what this “sun” is, but if you go outside, there’s supposedly a lot of it. We also had a situation with hiking boots. We didn’t buy any for our kids. If running shoes are good enough to run in, surely they’re good enough to cover the same distance at scout camp, but at much slower speeds. The issue was horseback riding. Back in the Stone Age, we didn’t have horses at scout camp. We hadn’t yet unlocked that part of the technology tree. If we saw a giant four-hoofed beast, we would have hunted it with spears. This newfangled scout camp has horseback riding as a regular feature. For some reason, this requires boots. You would think your footwear wouldn’t matter since the horse is doing all the walking for you. I really wouldn’t care what shoes I was wearing if somebody offered to carry me. The camp counselors have a different idea. Boots are required. I had a moment of panic when I thought we were going to have to drive out on a Saturday night ten minutes before all the stores closed to find boots for both girls. Then we got an email from the scoutmaster that said they could rent boots at camp. Bowling alleys aren’t the only places with gross communal footwear. Hopefully the first aid merit badge includes a section about fighting foot fungus.

Both girls are extremely excited about the camp out. Betsy joined the troop in the fall after summer camp was already over, so this is the first week-long adventure for both girls. Betsy is actually the senior scout in the troop, even though she hasn’t been in it quite a year. It’s a relatively new all-girl Boy Scout troop, and she’s the only eighth grader. I trust she will wield that authority with the same light touch she uses at home with her sisters. By the end of the first day, she’ll declare herself dictator for life. Betsy and Mae have done several weekend campouts but nothing longer. To my surprise, they loved all of them. That’s different from my camping experience, when I counted down the hours until I could return to electricity and indoor plumbing. Mae was up until midnight Saturday night because she couldn’t sleep with the big campout the next morning. I helped cause some of that insomnia. The girls had a series of chores they needed to complete before they could leave. Predictably, they did none of them. I made them get out of bed to do the dishes half an hour after bedtime. Really, they played me. They got to stay up late without wasting any of their normal daylight hours on boring household tasks. I could learn a thing or two from them.

With our two oldest kids gone for the week, we’ll finally have empirical evidence about what they really do around here. The most obvious contribution is child care. I work a hybrid schedule, while Lola works out of the house 100 percent of the time. For whatever reason, her lab doesn’t want her taking dangerous chemicals home at night. Those childhood chemistry sets really set us up for disappointment. After we compared schedules, we were left with two days where we didn’t have anyone to watch Lucy and Waffle. Lola’s mom offered to fill in the gaps, by which I mean we guilted her into it. Being retired means having more time for family members to take advantage of you. Thanks to her reluctant contribution, we’ll make it through a second summer in a row without paying a single penny for child care. That assumes you don’t count the cost of repairing the damage when the kids watch themselves. All those mysterious holes in the drywall start adding up.

The big girls also take care of their guinea pigs—sometimes. It’s usually good to remind them a few thousand times a day. Lucy and Waffle are supposed to take over in their absence. We’ll see if that actually happens. By the end of the week, the guinea pigs might have a mound of poop so big they can build a ramp and climb out of their cage. If you hear something in the news this week about a guinea pig insurrection, you’ll know why.

While the big girls contribute to the chores, they also add to the mess. I have a feeling they tip the balance a lot more in one direction than the other. It’s amazing what kind of a debris field you can get from a teenager and an almost-teenager. They’ll spend an entire weekend “cleaning” their room, yet, by Monday, it’s already dirty enough that I can’t walk through it without breaking an ankle. The main problem is their organizational system. They have one compartment where they put everything. It’s called “the floor,” and they consider it a valid storage space for every object in the known universe. Any drawer or shelf you see in the room is just there for decoration. With the big girls gone, the mess in their room should at least be held in stasis. As a parent, sometimes the best you can hope for is for things to not get actively worse.

Wednesday is parents’ night. It’s our chance to go down and visit the girls at camp. We’re not going. Does that make us terrible people? Probably. But scout camp is an hour and a half away, which would mean a three-hour round trip after work with two small kids in the van. Plus it can be traumatic for the scouts themselves. Lola is friends with an experienced scoutmaster in a different all-girl BSA troop. She said that her group abolished parents’ nights because the girls whose parents came were upset that they couldn’t go home with them, and the girls whose parents didn’t come were upset that they had been abandoned. When I was a kid, our summer camp also had a parents’ night, but none of us even considered going home. My house was only twenty-five minutes away. More importantly, my parents had paid to get rid of me for the entire week. There was no way they were letting me escape in their minivan. Since my kids have cell phones, we’ll do a video call with them halfway through the week. That way, escape isn’t dangled in front of them as an option. Also, if they get upset when they remember we exist, we can just hang up. I feel bad for their scoutmaster.

In reality, they’ll probably be glad to forget they have parents. They’ll have so much fun that they won’t want to come home. They will return, though, because we only paid for the week. The day after they get back, we’re setting out on our week-long family vacation. Next Saturday is going to be an intense day of laundry and packing. Betsy and Mae won’t even remember what it’s like to live in their own house. That’s a sign of a good summer—or maybe just an overscheduled one.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James