Summer Camp, Part 1

This year marks the beginning of what I'm sure will become a summer tradition in our household: summer camp season. Summer camp is a pretty foreign notion to me. I mean, we had our own version of camp growing up. It was called Going Deaf on a Cabless Tractor in 105 Degree Heat for Twelve Hours a Day Throughout Most of the Summer Camp. Beyond that, my only experience with summer camps derives from what I learned from movies like Meatballs and Friday the 13th. Needless to say, when I learned that camps don't always include Bill Murray or the murdering of the promiscuous, I was immediately confused.

But, apparently, when you live in town, you have to pay good money to get rid of your kids so you don't go insane over a summertime. That's a concept I'm just now starting to grasp, also. Summer sucks for a whole new reason now. Even though our kids were only going to preschool two mornings a week, somehow that got them out into the world enough for them to not be insane the entirety of the week. In fact, they were mostly tolerable. But, since they finished up with school, it's like their stir crazy kicked into high gear and now they are both always at each others' throats about everything and fighting and bickering. So I can only imagine what it's going to be like after both kids are used to having school to keep them busy for the better part of each day. I'm mentally preparing myself for the suck already.

Anyway, in the big city, people pay other people to entertain their kids for a few hours a day so those kids aren't in the house anymore. And, frankly, it's awesome! I wish we had unlimited funds so we could stick the kids in camps all summer. They loved it and I loved it. Everyone loved it.  But, sadly, we only had the funds to stick them each into a camp or two this summer, and over the last few weeks, they've both had a camp.

I was originally just going to do another huge post that got both of their camps together, but we have a lot of pictures and videos of their camps, so I will break them up. I'll start with Norah's camp.

Norah did a dance camp--she called it Fairy Princess Dance Camp. It was every morning for a week, and she butt dug it.  They did all sorts of things. I guess. Every day I asked her what she did and she'd say something like "We drew a picture" or "I danced." And that was about all I got out of her. Not much in the way of specifics.

Have I mentioned how well Norah grasps the concept of music? She can pretty nearly carry a tune now. She sings all the time. I guess I have to chalk it up to a natural inclination for music. She has been exposed to exactly the same amount of music as Gabe has been (quite a lot, actually, as I like music and we've always had something playing in their bedroom through the days and nights--and then most pre-k shows these days have some sort of musical element to them). I think Gabe likes music well enough, and he sometimes tries to sing a song here and there, but it certainly seems like he doesn't have a knack for it. But it seems to come pretty naturally for Norah.

Anyway, she loved Fairy Princess Dance Camp because she likes music, she likes dancing, and she loves fairy princessing. At the end of the week they had a recital, which we all were invited to watch. And this was when I was able to get some decent pictures of her doing stuff.

The "costume" she wore for her "recital."

The fairy princess wand Norah helped make during the week.

The recital started with a storytime where everyone involved got to hear one of the interactive stories they had worked on during the week. Something about animals singing or something. Norah sat on the instructor's lap and seemed less than impressed throughout.

 

The dance part of the recital was a story about princesses sleeping and waking up to dance out in the forest. Or something. Princesses dancing is what it boiled down to, and that's all that mattered.

Norah dancing.

Still dancing. The big girl she's dancing with was the "oldest sister" of the dancers. Hmm. First Norah was sitting on the instructor's lap, then she dances with the oldest sister. She seems to be hogging all the important people. I can't say that I'm surprised, though. She is a diva, so paying extra attention to her was probably easier than the alternative.

Still dancing. It was really a quite long dance with lots or moving around in circles around the room.

Finally the sister princesses returned to bed and some authority figure or other came to check their feet to see if they had been out during the night. This family has some trust issues--but I guess considering their feet ended up dirty from dancing in the forest, those trust issues were justified.

 

And then the dance was over and they bowed.

 

Still bowing I guess. Not sure why I included two pictures of basically the same thing. But I did, so here it is.

 

This picture is unrelated to the dance camp, but I thought it was a pretty awesome picture, so I shared it anyway.

And here are the videos from the fairy recital. Again, blogger won't let me split them up and comment on them individually, so I'll just leave them here to finish watching.