Paid To Sit On The Beach - Weekly Roundup 1

This was the first week of 'actual' camp, when I got my first group of girls. We had moved up to Ojakle, another unit on camp property:

The programs we were in charge of were Saddle Up, which is a horse-riding program, and Road Trip, which is exactly as it sounds. We had 18 girls overall and, as well as me, the unit staff was Sunny, Phelps, Zenny, Ducky, Burnzy and Luna, a truly great bunch ♥ The highlights from this week included:

• On the first morning, Sunny had to wake up one of our campers, who was a heavy sleeper. She did so by going into her tent and singing opera.
• One of my campers handed me some cute purple flowers that she'd found. I wore them in my buttonhole all day. Three of them always wanted to sit with me at meals, and one liked to hold my hand as we walked to different activities.
• Staff skits - This was a lot of fun; the staff all had to come up with something to introduce our units to the kids. The waterfront staff ran through the audience with squeeze bottles and soaked all of us. My unit re-wrote Justin Bieber's 'Baby' (Sunny's idea) to be about the programs we were running. At the end of it, all the staff sang the staff song (the Friends theme); the whole thing was so much fun.
• Ducky and I were 'on taps' on Tuesday, which means that we're responsible if the kids need us between 9pm and midnight. We were sitting in the pitch dark unit shelter with an eerie red glow coming from the lantern we had under a towel. We ended up scaring ourselves talking about the 'Lady with the Lamp', camp's resident ghost. The night before I had seen something weird in the Sky Meadow, so we were both so jumpy!
• On Wednesday, I was paid to go to Hampton Beach with my road trip girls. Omega drove us as she's a lifeguard; she and I sat on the beach and watched the girls play in the sea for ages. It was so warm and relaxing, even if there was a thunderstorm on the way back. Also I got Dunkin' Donuts, wahoooo!

• The Ben & Jerry's factory - I couldn't be in Vermont without visiting the birthplace of my favourite ice cream. The tour was interesting, and made even better at the end when we got to sample a prototype flavour. We also visited the 'Flavor Graveyard' and mourned the discontinued flavours.

• Our overnight being a washout again. I'm convinced some higher power doesn't want me to have a successful campout. We cooked dinner in the fireplace in one of the cabins, I saw a cute mouse scurrying around, and we had to be rescued again by Cookie as there was a big thunderstorm. We spent the night in the Ev - Sunny sang and played guitar for us and we were all bundled up in our sleeping bags. It was like a huge slumber party.
• July 4th was a bit rubbish for me because I was unwell in the morning - Cookie (my boss) maintained that I was bitter over America gaining independence. I told her that the English are still cross about them throwing all our teabags into the ocean. The day picked up in the afternoon when we had an indoor footie game between the USA and international staff - it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen because everyone was scooting around on their hands and feet, the audience got really into it, and Jen scored the most epic goal for the Internationals without even looking.
• Helping Luna and Judge weed one of the campfire sites for our closing campfire - this involved us just uprooting weeds and lobbing them into the nearby bushes. Luna made me take a bite of a plant, which turned out to be lemongrass - it was actually really nice!
• Saying goodnight to my kids for the last time; I was actually pretty sad about it! I didn't think I'd miss any kids this summer but you do end up becoming fond of them.

That's it for the weekly roundup. I hope that I will get to write another one next weekend, when I should be getting a 24-hour break - in this job, 24 hours feels like a huge break because this is literally a 24/7 job. There's basically no such thing as being 'off the clock' here, which might explain why the days went so quickly.