Paper Jam

Here's the scene: it's my bedroom. The bed, to be exact. Nicely made, every thing looking normal, except there's a very large and disorderly pile of papers on the bed. Very, very large.

Suddenly the pile of paper moves. It breathes. It coughs. A voice can be heard from inside the pile of papers - my voice - exclaiming at the volume of paper, the quantity of paper, the sheer duplicative quantity of paper.

Of course - it's the camp paperwork and I've gotten buried beneath it.

My kids have gone to the same summer day camp almost every summer for the last six or seven years. The first year the amount of paperwork was a terrible surprise. I paid the camp fees, filled out a nice little two-sided sheet with our family information and a credit card number and, with a smile on my face, prepared to walk away. Suddenly I was handed a brick of paperwork and told to complete the forms contained in it for each child and then registration would be complete.

There's the normal stuff in there, like the contact sheet with phone numbers, and then there's stuff like the "Get to know your camper" sheet where I have to tell them about my children's psychological foibles to maybe smooth their way through their weeks there. Husband and I have had no small amount of fun over the years imagining what we'd really like to write under "Child's Three Favorite Activities" as opposed to what we actually write there. Not to mention the "Three characteristics that best describe your child." There's the challah order form, the lunch order form, the aftercare form - which needs to be filled out whether we use aftercare or not - and the friend request form. Then there's the one form I have to fill out twice: the medical/immunization form.

I've come to realize this form is created only to torture me since I must obtain my children's immunization records and then transpose those records onto the form. Each year I peer quizzically at the immunization form from the doctor's office, where they've abbreviated certain shots under one name, and tried to match them up to the form, where they've abbreviated them another.

As the years have gone by, my dread of doing this paperwork has sometimes become a deciding factor in whether my kids will go to camp, kind of like the "Sponge-worthy" Seinfeld episode. Is it paperwork-worthy? Is one week of camp worth it to fill out the paperwork? A resounding no. Two weeks? Three?

I jump back in the pile, pick up my pen with my claw-like hand, and finish the task.

Are your kids in summer camp? How voluminous are the enrollment forms? Every get overwhelmed and discouraged by paperwork?

The Womb is Closed

I'm an old parent. A lot of women of forty-nine have grandchildren. But, due to the miracles of an early marriage that wasted five and a half years of my life, two years in Jewish Singles looking for Husband #2, and then infertility, I have a fourteen-year-old and a ten-year-old. Basically, my life has been played backwards: instead of having kids young and then seeing them off to college when I'm forty, I had freedom up until age thirty-five and will see them off to college at the sprightly age of about eighty.

These kids of mine are very attached to Husband and me, especially Daughter. Bar Mitzvahzilla likes us well enough, but if he's tempted with certain things - let's say a game truck, an Airsoft gun, or any video game, any time - he'll leave our house and never look back.

Daughter's a different matter. If she had her choice she would probably crawl back in my womb.

I have some evidence. She hasn't slept out since she was six, except for when we sent her to camp this summer. After that, I had to practically wear her like a necklace for a week. She prefers that all playdates occur at our house, even if someone offers to take her to a water park - and we live in Arizona. She loves nothing better than a day with Mom, eating sushi and then off to the antique malls. She will even sit on my bed for hours watching HGTV reruns.

I don't know what this says about the future because, according to my calculations, in eight years she'll be leaving for college. Like to live in a dorm at college, not to live at home and commute to college.

I'll just have to tell her the womb is closed. Or change the locks.

The Camper Returns

Bar Mitzvahzilla came back from camp on Sunday. I had gotten a Twitter update that the camp buses left early, so I was stalking the parking lot they'd be pulling into, hovering there for my boy. Two buses pulled in. I stood there, watching the doors of both buses, a smile frozen on my face, my head flipping from side to side - one bus, then the other bus, one bus, then the other bus- when suddenly both were empty. No Bar Mitzvahzilla. Then someone told me there was a third bus that had pulled in while I was watching the first two.

Of course, I missed him completely. I found him over by the mountain of duffel bags -and his lone rolling suitcase - standing there, dirty, with a weird-looking medieval monk-type haircut. It was his hair but with three and a half weeks of grease in it.

Still, there he was! My boy! The joy! The relief! The love!

Then things got back to normal.

Here's what he did immediately. Since he knew Husband and I were pretty much complete blithering wrecks after him away, and after getting his increasingly harrowing letters about camp life ("Mom, this place is like the Holocaust: Never Again."), he pressed his advantage, asking if he could get access to his banned electronics for the night. We caved. So much for a joy-filled evening of camp stories.

In the middle of his anguished month away, when I was afraid to open his letters because of his pleas for me to come get him ("Again, Mom, could you please come pick me up?"), and in order to make sure he wanted to survive camp and live long enough to come home, I promised Bar Mitzvahzilla two things in my return letters: a completely redone bedroom and a night over at his cousins' house before we leave on vacation.

I'm not going to go into a big description of what his bedroom looked like before but let's just say that if I stood at one end of our pretty long hallway with his room at the far end, I could smell it. Also, it was like a museum of his childhood. I guess we just hadn't sorted through the toys for a few years. We had sorted through them back when the Power Rangers had to go, but we hadn't sorted ever since Spiderman had to go. And we had never sorted through the books. I mean, Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear? was in there.

So I spent days crawling on my belly with a crevice tool, wearing a chemical poisoning suit from head to toe to grab his bedding and throw it out, and, finally, to reassemble the room as no longer that of a boy, but of a teenager.

He came home and walked in there, mesmerized. A double bed. A macho comforter -not Sponge Bob anymore - toys cleared out except for age-appropriate weaponry hidden underneath the bed. There's a chair and ottoman, so he can entertain.

And then he laid around like a bum. He watched too many DVDs. He monopolized the computer. He had to look through every little thing I bought him from his school supply list to make sure all of it met his exacting requirements to be both macho and cool because, apparently, certain colors need not apply. He was hungry on the hour and ate food by swallowing it whole, but anything he did manage to chew ended up on the floor.

Just when I was starting to get just the tiniest bit impatient with him, he charged up his dormant cell phone and called in the second part of my promise, the night over at his cousins' house. And now? Gone.

Carrying Baggage

Since neither my husband nor I ever went to overnight camp as kids, we kind of botched up a few things as we sent our kids off last Thursday.

First of all we sent the kids with real luggage, like the rolling king of luggage you would take on an airplane. We got to the the synagogue rendezvous point and, trust me, there was no baggage like this besides our kids'. Their bags stood there - green, bulky and square, with roller wheels on the bottom - while every other bag was a soft-side duffel. When they head off on their camping trips into the forest, my children will need a valet.

I can't help it that I was raised like a wolf. My mother's idea of summer camp in Skokie was to shoo me and my six sisters out of the house into the garage to play all day. We'd wait for the milkman; then we'd wait for the pop man. Or maybe some boys would ride by from the other school district and we would chase them - that one activity could occupy us until school started in September. That was a typical summer.

Since my parents were Holocaust Survivors, they didn't quite understand the concept of summer camp. First of all, the word "camp?" Not good. Concentration Camp, Displaced Persons Camp, Labor Camp - those were camps. After all, they had both come out of the DP camps after the war. Were they expected to send their own children there on purpose? Of course not. Also, it cost money. My parents only spent money on food and shelter. If there was any money left over, my dad bought a new station wagon.

My parents also couldn't understand why we'd be interested in the deprivations of camp. Why would I want to give up living in the lap of luxury in Skokie in a three-bedroom house with nine people, sharing a bedroom with four sisters and sharing the bathroom with seven? How could I give up the authentic immigrant feistiness of my family - the fistfights over a salami, murder over a matzo ball - to go live among American strangers?

But on camp drop-off day, my kids are oblivious. Even paranoid Bar Mitzvahzilla, who will micromanage his underwear, doesn't care about having baggage that clearly shows not only is he a novice at this, but his parents? Novices too.

Their bags get on the bus, they get on the bus, and they're gone.

Underwear Trauma

The packing list for camp says that we should send 10 pairs of underwear, but I know my boy. In 24 days of camp he will change his underwear once. Still, I'll be optimistic and send 8 pairs, one for every three days. Bar Mitzvahzilla was specific on one thing, though. I needed to buy him real boxers, not boxer/briefs and not, for goodness sakes, briefs. Boys are apparently standing by, ready to sound the alert if he's wearing the wrong underwear.

My daughter, on the other hand, was planning to go to camp wearing her size 4 Toddler underwear from 5 years ago which still fits because she is a Skinny Stick. Everyone tells me she gets this from my husband's side of the family since I'm obviously some kind of hippopotamus who could never have provided genes to such a skinny child. All of her good genes are assumed to have come from Who Knows Where? But not from me. So Daughter was oblivious, planning to pack these Dora The Explorer, Strawberry Shortcake, even Monsters, Inc., underwear and go off to camp with kids who, yes, would be watching her underwear too.

Underwear is a topic I understand because I have traumatic underwear memories. I may have grown up in Skokie with Jewish parents, which should mean that I was coddled somewhat, but my parents were Holocaust Survivors. Holocaust Survivors don't coddle their children. They know children are resilient - mine both lived through the war as children - so they coddle other things, like briskets and the living room couch, which they carefully cover in plastic. In our household, money was spent on food. If there was anything left over, it was spent on decorating. Not underwear.

Because of this, I'm a little underwear-sensitive.

In 6th grade we had to change for gym class every day in the locker rooms in my junior high in Evanston. Little did I know it, but my underwear were being monitored very closely by some of my classmates. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday - yes - each day of the week, the same pair of underwear, until they hooted and hollered about it. Luckily, someone even poorer than me came to my defense. She said, "Linda probably just has a bunch of underwear that all looks the same." I looked over to see if they believed her because, of course, it was a lie, and they did. But I knew that it was the only free pass I was ever going to get.

I can't have my daughter live through any underwear trauma, and also, at the rate she gains weight, she could just possibly go off to college still wearing her Care Bears. I have to put a stop to it. So I take her to Gap and show her what real 9-year-olds wear for underwear (well, she actually wears the size for 6-7 year-olds). Then I show her the underwear with the days of the week on them. Her mouth hangs open. We buy a lot of underwear. When we get home, she empties all the Toddler ones out of her drawer.

Now that I've got the underwear issue handled, I can move onto the next item on the list. Socks. Certainly socks can't cause me as much trouble as underwear. Can they?