As I wrote last week we started our camp season off this year by dropping our oldest off at App State for their forensic science camp.  We picked him up on Saturday and learned that he was one of 6 boys out of 23 total attendees.  In other words there was almost a 3-1 girl to boy ratio.  We also learned that he is inordinately honest and blunt when he’s sleep-deprived because before he passed out on the drive home he told us that he’d stayed up to all hours the last two nights of the camp, and that he and some of his new friends had "played a game called 10 fingers and another nasty game you don’t want me to tell you about."  Celeste is now convinced that he is eternally changed by the camp experience and that he lost his innocence while cavorting in the mountains.  She also implored me to talk to him and inform him that he is in no way to share his newfound games with his siblings or neighborhood friends.  Personally I think there’s lots of trouble in the neighborhood that we just haven’t heard about, and that if we deprived our kids of sleep for two days we’d find out all about it.   I’m not suggesting we do that because if we do Celeste will never let the kids leave the house again, and if there’s anything I fear more than teenage mischief it’s being stuck in the house with them on a full time basis.

Making matters more stressful this weekend was our daughter’s revisiting that teenage daughter zone known as "TheWorldRevolvesAroundMe-Ville" and the equally distressing tin ear she has to her parents’ displeasure.  The boys seem able to recognize the signs that they’re ticking their parents off and will back off of making "Can I …" requests.  Not our daughter.  Just moments after being rather harshly rebuked for making a presumptive request via cell phone at 12:30 p.m. for a ride home from a sleepover at precisely 1 p.m. on Sunday, and being told that said ride wasn’t going to happen because she was within easy walking distance of home and her family was at that moment waiting to be served their post-church lunch at IHOP, she promptly called back to see if we’d bring her bathing suit to her at the pool after we got home from lunch, that way she wouldn’t have to walk home and walk to the pool.  Unfortunately she hadn’t seemed to pick up on the harsh part of the rebuke, a talent unique to her in our gaggle of kids, so the doubly harsh rebuke she got induced a bout of pouting felt by her father sitting in the greasy spoon five miles away.  I don’t react well to pouting so I was ready to ground her for months, but I’d already hung up so I let it go.

To provide some context we had a little mother-daughter encounter on Saturday when the younger of the two asked the older if she had any more razor refills because she needed to shave her legs before the big weekend.  Mother informed daughter that all the refills were gone because someone had used most of the six pack.  Daughter replied that she’d only used one, to which mother replied, "Well I’ve only used one so I wonder who used the rest?"  Daughter, instead of backing off, gives that ever so annoying teenage shrug and says, "I dunno."  This happens on a recurring basis in our house as the daughter seems to think that her Mom’s store of female related stuff is her own personal RiteAid.  If she wants to set a bomb off in Mom’s head that’s how she does it, but tragically she doesn’t intend to do it, she just does it and then stares gape-mouthed at us as we chew her out.  The girl was on thin ice from that point on.

Thankfully our daughter stayed at another friend’s house last night and that friend’s Mom dropped them both off at camp this morning.  That created a natural cease fire in the house and the resident Mom has already graduated from offpissedness to worried-and-missing-her mode.  Dad’s just as befuddled as he always is.

I truly don’t know how we’re going to survive the next 10 years.

Well, summer camp season officially dawned for us this morning.  Celeste and I got up at 5:00 to roust our oldest child Michael from bed so we could drive him to Appalachian State University for a four day camp that focuses on forensic science.  Essentially it’s a "CSI" camp, and after seeing the agenda I’m highly jealous that I don’t get to spend four days at App State studying fingerprints, DNA extraction, arson, etc.

Actually, there’s another very good reason I’m jealous of Michael.  You see when I went to camp it was pretty much all guys.  I went to Wes Unseld’s basketball camp for a week when I was 12 and it was all guys.  I went to Camp Minnehaha in the mountains of West Virginia for a month one summer in my early teen years and it was all guys.  So we’re pulling away from the dorm that Michael’s staying in and what do we see but a boatload of cheerleaders crossing the street on their way to the big athletic field house that happens to be next door to Michael’s dorm.  Michael’s camp coincides with a cheerleader camp!  The boy is 15?!  I’m thinking that DNA extraction might be the last thing he’s thinking about studying.

On the flip side, he’s staying in a dorm room that if I’m any judge is about 25 years old.  No AC, although up in the mountains I don’t think it will be that big a deal, but it still has that old dorm smell.  Think high school football player’s locker at the end of the season and add a touch of river mud and you’ll be close.

Next week our middle child, Erin, leaves for a week long camp that is exactly five minutes from our house.  Not sure if that actually counts as "going to camp" but she’ll be out from under our roof so I guess it should.  Then in the third week of July all three kids will be heading to Laurel Ridge with our church youth group for mission camp.  Who do you think is having a party that week?