Here’s a piece of advice, if you’re sending your kids to summer camps — find one that starts in the afternoon. Or at least after 11am.
Our two are in an adventure centre camp this week.
It
starts at 10am. We reckoned getting up at 8.30am would give us plenty of time to get them fed and out the door with their lunches. We reckoned wrong.
Our mistake was to assume that breakfast table-to-car-time is the same during the summer and the school year. It isn’t. First of all, like many kids, our kids are reverse vampires and refuse to go to sleep when it’s bright outside. That’s fine for most of the school year, but right now it means they’re still staring at the ceiling at 11pm.
We’re in the front room 90 minutes after putting them to bed when the door swings open and one of them strolls in to ask us a question/ask for a hug/ask why that man and woman are hugging naked on Netflix. It’s ruining our summer telly watching. We’re scrambling around for the remote at the slightest hint of telly sex, so we can turn it off when the door creaks open
.
The bigger problem is the next morning though when it’s like at the breakfast table. A sedated zombie would eat a bowl of porridge faster than our sleep-deprived kids these mornings. We’re tempted to whip out the chocolate-flavoured cereal until they return to school, but they had a mountain of sugar on our holidays away, and I don’t want an attack of ‘the guilts’, as my wife calls them.
We send our kids to adventure camp for four hours every day. They love it and end up haring around the place trying to kill each other. (It sounds like a re-enactment of
—
they take
each
other prisoner with guards and everything.) But how come they’re not more wrecked at night with all that running around? And why do they keep all that tiredness for the next morning, when we’re trying to get them out the door? Big questions. The only solution is to get up earlier, so now the alarm is going off at 8am.
My wife and I work from home — we can go straight from the breakfast table to our desks. There should be no getting up at 8am, to endure an hour of stress and lumpy porridge before the kids head off on their adventure.
There’s only one solution — move to the States. From what I can make out, American kids go to actual camps, where they disappear for weeks on end, so their hard-pushed parents don’t have to put up with them wrecking breakfast or our nighttime TV.
Enough of this four hours a day camp thing we have to put up with over here. It’s more like two hours a day if you have to travel any distance to drop them and pick them up.
It’s not just that we see too much of our kids in this country — they see too much of us. After two years of Covid and longer-than-usual vacation, we are too familiar with each other.
So here’s a business idea for those who dare — a one-week holiday camp for young Irish kids, where they don’t get sent home for speaking English. (I can see why people love sending their children to the Gaeltacht, but the zero-tolerance attitude towards language there seems a little harsh.)
Mom and Dad enjoy time to clear their heads. The kids get a prolonged period of time when someone else is telling them to eat their breakfast. When the week ends, we’re all best friends again. I’d make it longer, but then you’re getting into boarding school territory and I’m against boarding school unless I’m using it as a threat.
If someone can make that affordable in 2023, put our two down for a week. It would make our summer.
