More About Day Camp

I pick Max up Tuesday afternoon and he has with him....his towel. In the morning I'd sent him with a sack lunch (Getting the sack back would be great, Max! We're getting low.), a swim suit, goggles and a towel. Plus, ya know, he was dressed. He was still dressed when he came home, in addition to having the towel, so there's that, I guess.

He told me he'd lost his swim suit and goggles because there was a hole in his bag. He was using a plastic Target shopping bag after having left his backpack in the front yard in a fit on the last day of school. Apparently, on the way to lunch, they'd fallen out of his bag. Now. I can actually see goggles falling out of the hole, but it's a bit of a stretch to imagine the swim trunks falling out. Any-who. He was all pissed that I made him wear his swim trunks to camp the next day. I told him he could change into dry shorts when he got home. They swim at the very end of the day.

We get to camp Wednesday morning and the councilor says that he knew he'd lost his swim trunks, but he'd let her believe he'd lost them after swimming. He even went back into the locker room to try to find them. Funny, that. After all, he'd lost them well before swimming and had swum in his shorts. Finding his swim trunks in the locker room seems like it might not quite work, if you know what I mean.

Wednesday was field trip day. They went to a park where they ate lunch and played then went to Skate World to, you guessed it, ride motorcycles. No, really, it was to skate. Max met me after camp with swim trunks from the day before in tow and the orange slices from his lunch (which he attempted to leave behind on the ground) that he'd made a nice juice out of. Oh, yeah, and his towel. The councilor had found his swim trunks in lost and found for him. She seems like a nice girl.

Max told me excitedly that he'd eaten all of his lunch except for the oranges. He hungrily scarfed down a banana in the car on the way to the park where the kids and I were having a picnic dinner (Anthony came home late last night due to a retirement party at work). He then proceeded to work his way through his share of dinner (minuses the corn on the cob and salad) and complain mightily about not having any more to eat.

Now, this morning, it all makes sense. His councilor greeted him this morning with, "Is that your lunch, Max? Don't loose it today!"

Max admitted to loosing his lunch. "My backpack was open and I didn't know how to close it!" he angrily accused me. He said that a friend had shared lunch with him. I told him, in front of the councilor, who nodded along, that his lunch was his responsibility. It isn't okay to eat someone else's lunch and, if he looses it again, he'll just have to wait until he gets home to eat more.

A couple of loose ends about it all, though, are that he found those orange slices, which were his, in the van. How did those end up out of the lunch sack I'm wondering? And, this morning, he thanked me for the Sun Chips I put in his bag. So, did he eat all the "good stuff" out of his lunch and then "loose" it? I don't know.

I'm also worried for Davan's sake. She got him, with her own money, a Spiderman reusable lunch sack with two Spiderman containers, a set of Spiderman sandwich baggies and a Spiderman water bottle for his birthday tomorrow. She's so excited to give them to him in the morning so he can have his lunch packed in them for his birthday. I have fears that he won't bring them home, either, and she'll be disappointed. I did warn her that could happen.

She's been excitedly planning how she'll present them for days now. Yesterday after messing with them a little and talking about how fun it'll be, she said to me, "I do hope he at least brings them home on his birthday. Although, I suppose it shouldn't matter to me."

What great opportunities Max provides for learning about disappointment. Yeah. That's why I wanted a second child in the family.