a week condensed into one post

What a busy last week! It’s been full of moments to share, but I’ve been busy and tired so didn’t get a chance to write until now.

 

Camper shenanigans

 

On Monday I wore my wasabi wabbit shirt, and they thought the rabbits were sooooo cute so I got them to sing the chant with me: wasabi wabbit, boom boom; rakkyo rabbit boom boom; umeboshi bunny boom boom. They became very invested in figuring out which rabbit was the chubbiest/biggest and positing theories for the relation between the bunnies, the consensus was that they are sisters

 

The campers love the goats. Some affectionate names for our rumi friends include: queen of the pasture, president of poop (for a goat kid who had poop down his leg), princess of the pasture. We also did some bailing twine crafting and they created a fishing pole sort of situation to socially distant feed the goats. They are very sad about not being able to touch the goats but I encourage sending air love through air touching. This week we also got very excited about the potential for goat spa day and they made lots of plans for washing and manicures

 

We have some fun conversations, including planning weddings. I have two girls who are best friends and want to get married and I asked about what type of cake they would have….eventually they decided that the best option would be mochi, but with cream cheese frosting. Bc they like both those things, I don’t think they’ve ever actually tried them together

 

On Tuesday we had stuffie day, so I got to meet everyones favorite stuffed animal friends. This became a little chaotic but we had fun with it, ended up giving all the animals a tour of the garden in the child wagon that was lying around the garden.

 

We had lots of time in the garden this week! We harvested vegetables for stone soup on Monday, and also chose 4 special stones for flavor. The inventive minds of my children developed a washing system involving the oscillating sprinkler and getting themselves wet, but it worked well for cleaning the veg I guess? We also made potting soil one day which they enjoyed and then started walking on bc it was squishy.

But my favorite garden activity was MUD PIES! On Friday I whipped out my trophy and informed them that today, we were all going to become mud pie specialists. I was envisioning a great british bake off competition type thing, but they were more into collaborative group cake making and who am I to stop teamwork > competition! My boy campers were less enthused and spent most of the time trying to hide a bucket of sawdust around the garden, but most of the rest of my campers were pretty dedicated to the process of mud cake making, especially decorating with honorably harvested flowers.

 

Octonauts seems to be the educational kids show of choice according to my campers, so I watched a bunch of episodes on Netflix in order to inform myself, and then on Thursday we went on an octonauts mission to explore the tidepools. It wasn’t super guided, but it was met with great enthusiasm

 

Some poop situations arose this week, and by that I mean poop in pants and then quite the ordeal of clean up! Super exciting and chaotic in the moment but makes for hilarious stories now. I was actually intending for Wednesday to be poop day, as we read a book called “the dinosaur who pooped the past” and also were practicing our poop detective skills with the scat on our trail hike, but I guess all this poop energy got the bowels a little too excited for my youngest camper…oh man oh man it was a mess!

 

I had a more challenging week in some ways, two of my campers decided to be intentionally disrupsitve a fair bit and liked to bring up topics that they know are not camp appropriate: fortnite/violence, guns, and beer (specifically 805, not sure why). I tried to address things in kind teacher way as much as possible but after the poop situation I was feeling very worn thin so I started speaking in pig latin in order to voice my complaints/rant without the campers knowing, it really just confused them and they decided to create their own language, z language. Zou zalk zin z zanguage zy zinging zall ze zirst zetters zof zeach zord zo z. It was silly and fun. We also had a shout hike, which consisted of us loudly shouting everything we saw! Meant to get out shout energy, keep kids moving on trail, and practice some nature ID (like plants and such) skills.

 

We’ve been thinking about some big world questions and reading picture books, the Quiltmaker was our friend this week and reminded us that we don’t need things to be happy and that generosity is important! There also seems to be a strong sentiment among the group that we shouldn’t cut down trees. One creative camper, in response to giving things to those who have less, wants to create a machine that sanitizes your leftover food and then sends it to people who don’t have enough to eat

 

Frump the fairy was finally spotted! (it was another teacher in borrowed dress up clothes that I provided). I think my campers were really confused bc they were expecting a small fairy, and then saw a human sized person who they sort of recognized…so they were sort of disillusioned but also quick to theorize that this was a frump impersonator and that the real frump is still out there? It was all very chaotic and mysterious

In non camp news, this week was great for food!

Our cook night was spearheaded by me, with the goal of using lots of veggies. We made chickpea cauliflower potato curry (aloo gobi vibes), sesame miso roast broccoli shitake and eggplant, ginger bok choy, vegetarian egg rolls, zucchini pancakes, and minty salad. I also made dan tat egg tarts with laminated dough that I made over the weekend!

Other folks also did cooking wonders this week, we had a tomato pesto quiche as well as a divine peach pie with super flaky crust, and Friday was the last day of the session so there was another pie, brownies, ice cream, and take-out food too. I also made chocolate zucchini cake

 

Whale watching has been great this week! It’s truly been one of the best parts of this experience, and I wasn’t expecting it at all! We also saw a shark one day

 

I’ve been pretty tired so running has been slow and not quite as long, but on Friday after work one of my coworkers and I went on a lovely evening hike into Muir Woods from the back end to avoid the entrance. It was amazing weather and super not busy, we had the forest to ourselves and it was gorgeous! As we were hiking back out we got lovely foggy sunset views and both of us felt very glad to be outside in our beloved Bay Area