I had my first “big girl job” this summer, working for a month as a counselor at a girls’ camp in the Texas hill country. When I wasn’t teaching activities or writing parent reports, I was in the cabin with the four 11-year-old girls I was responsible for, settling disputes over mail duty and showering lineups and helping them convert our limited space into a spa. The girls were incredibly sweet and mostly responsible, but, needless to say, it was still quite a learning experience for me. Whenever I had a few spare minutes, I jotted down all the comical moments. Once I got home, pulled out my little notebook and started reading back over all of my rookie mistakes and laughable experiences, I thought they might be fun to share. Maybe they’re only funny to me and others who can relate to the unique combination of 24/7 work and fun that being a camp counselor entails, but regardless, here they are:
1. You’re a first-year counselor and the campers know more about how camp works than you do, so you keep asking them questions until you realize that some of the things they’re telling you, like “oh yeah, we can eat in the cabin all the time,” probably aren’t entirely accurate.
2. You’re perfectly content to spend your siesta going to Chick-fil-A by yourself and eating chicken in the parking lot with tie-dye-stained hands
3. When your siesta and night off fall in the same night, you’re completely unashamed about going to Starbucks twice in the same day.
4. You almost cry tears of joy because while you were gone, your campers cleared your cabin’s sink drain that had been stopped up and stinking for three-plus weeks.
5. You’re sad about leaving your kids for your 12 hours off, but they respond with, “It’s really just until tomorrow?”
6. You’re actually excited to come back from your trip to Walmart just so you can show your girls the cheap bath rug you bought for the floor of your cabin's tiny bathroom, which always manages to be soaking wet after shower time.
7. You realize you’ve worn the same T-shirt every one of the three times you’ve been to Fuddruckers on your time off. (I promise I washed it between visits!)
8. You’re initially worried about leaving your clothes at the laundromat, but then you realize that no one really wants your counselor uniform anyway
9. You tell the girls at your mealtime table that they have to try three bites of every food, but surreptitiously avoid putting pinto beans on your own plate every time.
10. You realize you’ve gotten into the mindset of thinking that it’s perfectly acceptable to eat ice cream at least twice every day.
11. You constantly have to deflect curious 10 and 11-year-olds’ questions about whether or not you have a boyfriend.
12. You have to pretend not to be offended when one of your girls tells you that it’s kind of strange that you put mascara on your bottom eyelashes (what?) and another says your eyes look weird/scary in one of the pictures you have hanging up by your bed (which also happens to be one of my favorite pictures).
13. You realize the reason you’re probably more excited about your drama classes performing scenes from “High School Musical” than they are is because the first movie came out before a lot of them were born.
14. You have severe brown and yellow bruising in more than one area and have no idea how it got there.
15. You wake up in the middle of the night sure that the camper tossing and turning in the top bunk is going to fall off, but when you jump out of bed and go to her, she’s actually lying motionless.
16. No matter how many times you politely ask her not to, a camper insists on continually placing things on your bed as she’s getting ready.
17. You fall down on your job and forget to put in a supply request for graham crackers and chocolate for s’mores, so your cabin has to settle for just roasting marshmallows.
18. Your entire cabin, which consists of five people, proceeds to eat an entire bag of marshmallows by itself in one night.
19. You have to take your campers’ advice on how to start a fire because you’ve literally never done it before by yourself and they’ve “done it all the time in Girl Scouts.”
20. Then you go through about 50 matches trying to start said fire until you realize that it’s not catching because the wood is dead.
21. You’re on the way to fill up your half-full water bottle when you trip on a trunk and spill it all over the hallway in front of rooms that aren't yours, then can’t find a mop to clean it up.
22. You stain your white counselor shirt during a meal and realize you’re no better than the 6 and 7-year-old campers.
23. Your patience is severely tested when not once, but twice, young campers run up behind you and jump onto your back, just as you were about to take a sip from your freshly poured coffee.
24. You come back from your day off and forget that your cabin is supposed to serve breakfast, and you fail to wake them up early so they end up with only 10 minutes to get ready and clean the cabin… and they won’t let you forget about it for the rest of your time at camp.
25. Other cabins have a relaxed spa night for their “tepee night,” but your cabin votes to have a shaving cream fight. (In their defense, they did vote for a spa night the next tepee night.)
26. Then, when all of your girls are sufficiently covered in shaving cream, you have to maneuver a sprinkler to rinse your kids off because you’re not a lifeguard, so they can’t go jump in the river to wash off.
27. Your kids are more effective at unclogging the toilet than you are.
