July 1 2024
Cell phones used to be cool “must-have” accessories. I remember the day I bought a Motorola Razor as one of the most satisfying purchases of my 30 years to that point. It was the coolest thing I ever bought… campers felt the same way about their phones. Back then, phones were universally coveted as a cool gadget. Campers would hide them on opening day, and counselors would relentlessly seek them in a week-long cat-and-mouse game that always ended with the phone being found and put into the safe (you can’t keep a thing secret at camp).
This gradually changed starting in 2009, when Steve Jobs (the coolest nerd ever) made a ground breaking announcement about a new kind of phone. We didn’t know it at the time, but the iphone was about to change the world. Smart phones are now a universally adopted part of life and there is no going back… but it sure is nice that they are not allowed in camp. This opinion is held by parents, campers, and counselors alike… I don’t know who feels it most passionately, but it might be the campers. They no longer hide their phones on opening day but immediately hand them over without hesitation or regret.
You can imagine how appealing a phone-free month is at camp. While I do not advocate bubbles for adults, I certainly do for children. It is hugely beneficial to take the crutch of a phone away and drop a crowd of girls into a place like camp. The shock of this change seems to activate a part of the brain that is not used that much anymore. The part of the brain that LOVES conversation, imagination, dance, reading, writing, art, singing, laughing, thinking, running, swimming, climbing, making friends, and simply living with people who are not always distracted by their phones. Preaching to the choir here… I bet we have a unanimous consensus on the point.
So I’ll move on to something more “interesting”. This morning we changed seating assignments in the dining hall. Today we did something new… sorting the girls into tables by first name, alphabetically. We didn’t warn the girls of the plan, so imagine how delightful it was when a table discovered that every person at the table had the same name (Caroline, Jane, Anna, Catherine… all of these had big numbers). Little things like the dining room assignment for the week are big news at camp. Now you know.
Our last talk on Social Confidence was on kindness… specifically, being confident in kindness. Often we are not confident enough to be kind. We hesitate when the circumstance arises (there could be a thousand reasons to not act… we lean into not acting as the easier path most of the time). We encouraged the girls to live lives marked by kindness, which means they will have to become confident in acts of kindness. Camp is a great place to practice, by the time they go home they will be experts!
Tonight will be an EP that divides the camp into two groups, each group given a fun activity. The girls will either be in the water (Waterpark, Pool, & Putt Cove) or at the “Masked Singer” contest in the FORT. In another EP we will swap groups so nobody is left out of any of the fun activities.
Natalie Layne performed a great concert under difficult circumstances last night. We had to quickly move the venue from the spacious, cool shade of the pageant court to the more crowded but still beloved pavilion due to a fast-developing thunderstorm. Everyone was singing and dancing when the rain hit with a fury. We laughed as the sound and the fury of the storm quickly passed. Our concert ended right on time, and we finished another great day with crackers as normal. I congratulate the campers and counselors (who adapted without drama) and the sound team (who broke down and set up two venues in ten minutes)! Well Done, Everyone!
Details of the Day
- Breakfast Eggs, Sausage Links, Grits
- Breakfast Club Finished Social Growth theme
- Joke A Little Horse
- Weather Partly Cloudy, 87, slight chance of rain.
- Lunch Shaved Pork Sandwiches, snickerdoodle cookies
- Dinner Fusili Norcia (pasta recipe from Sandi Taylor)
- EP Rotating Groups