I only kind of checked my schedule last week. It’s August and I’m about as untwisted as I’m going to get before I let the new school year frenzy creep up and eat my zen. My kids attend quite a bit of day camp in the summer. There are a lot of awesome opportunities in my town and a lot of them fit my kids’ interest. There’s nature camp, robotics camp, theater camp, Pokemon camp. Every year when the push to sign up comes out in freaking March I wonder if I’m overscheduling my kids. Every year, I remember the summer before and sign up for one more. My kids get a lot out of camp, and I get a lot of them being at camp. (See my previous complaints re: the punching.) It’s nice to have different permutations of family members in the house during the summer. When one kid is at camp, there are special activities for the child at home. When both kids are at camp there are naps and Netflix.
Last week my schedule said that Wes and wizard camp in the morning and Mac had nature camp in the afternoon. Wes and I rolled in to the Community Center and Wes enjoyed the free breakfast provided there while I went to check him in. I was feeling pretty cool. We had attended camp there already this summer and we had a routine we liked. The bemused teenager in charge of the sign-in binder informed me that wizard camp was an afternoon session. Sometimes, when you’re really anxious, and a kind of benin mistake like this happens, it’s a relief. It felt like: oh, good, here is the inevitable mistake, and it’s not a bad one. I have a much higher watermark in this domain. I vowed to come back later, congratulating myself for not having mixed it up in reverse and missed a day of camp by arriving in the afternoon.
So we rerouted the day. We were in the next town over, with Mac at a doctor’s visit because his superpower is being inconveniently ill. It was late morning and we were waiting on the doc when I got a call from the Center for the Arts wondering why Wes wasn’t at wizard camp. I had taken Wes to the wrong facility and I would have figured it out way sooner if we didn’t have a cross town Harry Potter camp rivalry that week. But it wasn’t really fixable at that point. We’d make it to camp the next day. We didn’t have a choice. It didn’t matter how I felt about it.
Two years ago I proudly arrived on Wednesday for a three day camp that I believed ran until Friday. It began on Monday and Wednesday was the last day. We had billed it as the last cool fun thing to do in the summer. Ugh. The picture above is from the awesome, fun adventures we had on the days we had blocked for camp attendance. Wes hit the jackpot on I can’t remember what in the arcade and won a ton of tickets. We went to a million playgrounds. We had a ton of fun, but it wasn’t the purest-spirited bonding time. I felt super guilty and it colors that memory.
Wes was fine. He was fine then, and he was extra fine when I messed it up this time. When he was in Kindergarten, he told the story of my scheduling mistake to other adults who had made a mistake: our photographer when she mixed up the dates, his teacher when she forgot something, everyone. Only Wes could throw me under the bus in such a sweet way. See everyone, if it could happen to my mom, it could happen to anyone. We all make mistakes sometimes. I think the lesson of universal human fallibility is worth taking the time to teach our kids. I think this especially because I very recently fucked up. Nonetheless, I think it’s good for my kids to watch me mess up sometimes. It’s important for them to know that these things happen to everyone. Or they happen to me. And I’m hoping it’s not just me.
