June 21, 2010

Today was pretty awesome. We got all of our campers today, which was really tight. I got the little six and seven year old first graders with Julie, who is called Ms. Tink by the kids. At first, we only had like three people in our room, and I was like. Ok, whatever. Not too bad, at least I will get to know everyone. But by like half an hour after we got there, we had so stinking many kids. We ended up with like seventeen I’m pretty sure. Since they were like super young, but not too young, they were not as bad as the kinders, but they were HORRIBLE children! I feel like a lot of them are probably never ever ever disciplined at home, or because their home lives are so chaotic from moving or having parents deployed and such they are just not as structured. Whatever the reason, they were absolutely aweful when it came to listening and doing anything that we asked them to do. One kid named Nicolas whined about absolutely everything. We asked the kids to sit down, “I don’t wanna sit, I wanna play,” asked him to color a picture, “I don’t like coloring,” asked him to play a game, “I wanna color my picture. I just wanna sit down here. I don’t wanna play with everyone.” Wah wah wah. And its like super cute though because he drags out the first syllable of the word really really long, so its like we ask him to come with the group, “buuuuuut I don’t wanna.” Why does such an evil little dude have to be so freaking adorable! And he has the cutest curly hair and long eyelashes that get all puppy dog looking when he is whining. No wonder some of them are spoiled when they are so fricken cute. I completely love him and all the other kids even though they gave us so much crap today. And the schedules for everything are so incredibly weird because the kids eat so much. They get breakfast right before we get there at like seven, a morning snack at nine thirty, lunch at noon, afternoon snack at two thirty. And these kids were like packing away food, holy cow. I couldn’t believe that like during lunch and stuff they were all coming up for seconds and thirds and stuff. Julie and I were trying to scarf down our food while the kids were eating and trying to run around with their food and coming asking for milk or water or more food and it was almost impossible to eat. They were so hard to control. We had to get them to sit down with food, stand in lines, etc, etc, etc. The lunch was actually really good though. Like pork stir fry over white rice and pears. Yum. But maybe it just tasted that good because I was so exhausted from working with all the little monsters. And I mean monsters like the adorable ones in Monsters Inc. But seriously, who feeds kids that much? It was nice during the day when we did rotating activities because we got to get some different kids, although when the Kinders rotated into our room it was much worse. You would like ask them to sit and half of them would just stare at you like I am speaking a foreign language or something, and the rest of them were staring at something else like the wall or walking towards a stuffed animal or something. Like literally I don’t think they heard one word any of us said. Some of the groups were good though, mostly the older ones. They listened a lot better, and it was easier to get them to do games. Although one of the guys in room five, which was the eight and older room, said the only reason he did camp was so he could drown a counselor. Don’t think he was serious, but Julie and I were like what the heck? Teenage angst to the max. I also liked when we split up into our clubs for the week. There was art, science, and drama for this week, and I was stuck alone with the art kids since only seven wanted to do that and like fifty of them wanted to be in science. Although none of the supplies that were supposed to be provided were so I had to improvise. And of course Nicolas and Jayquin and Aaron (three of the crazy non-listening boys) ended up in the art and just wanted to throw the balls that they found at the pool tables. Its just like insane. Tomorrow we are going swimming too, so that will be super interesting. I think though that after a week or so of Julie and I implementing the same rules and the same expectations of them they will simmer down and see us as authority figures. Woot, tomorrow should be good.