Most sleepaway summer camps don’t allow campers to bring their own food, especially candy, but there are three things every camper should pack: sunscreen, a hat and bug spray.
Bug spray for sure, explains 11-year-old Olivia Brennan.
“You do not want to get mosquito bites because it’s just another thing to worry about,” she warns.
And she speaks from experience. The first time Olivia went to a sleepaway camp she was just eight years old. It was the Paradise Valley Summer School of Visual Arts, located at Outdoor School. She wanted to go because her teacher had recommended her for the program, she got a scholarship for it, and she really liked art.
Although she had gone camping lots of times before with her family, and had been to plenty of day camps since she was at least five years old, Olivia admits that she was nervous about sleepaway camp. She was especially worried the night before she left but “once you’re on the bus you’re just so excited,” she notes.
At camp it didn’t take long to meet some new friends, and she quickly got into the routine, which included lots of art work, such as painting, printing and something called Raku, which is a type of pottery made using a kiln.
“It was really fun,” says Olivia.
She explains that she always had enough fun during the day that she didn’t have time to feel homesick, but sometimes at night she did.
The camp was five days long and Olivia admits she occasionally felt a bit homesick the first time she was there.
Her strategy for dealing with feeling homesick was to think about all the fun things she had done that day and all the fun things she would be doing the next day. Her parents had also written notes for her that they packed in her bag so she read them before she went to bed. She recommends other parents do the same for kids who are going to sleepaway camp for the first time.
Olivia has since been to the same camp two more times and doesn’t get nervous or feel homesick anymore because she knows what to expect. And what about having to share a cabin with a bunch of other campers?
Olivia says it’s “pretty good,” but notes the first year there were a couple of campers regularly talking late into the night making it hard to sleep so the next year she brought ear plugs. Problem solved.
“It’s kind of like a sleepover but with people you don’t know, but you’re going to get to know,” she says.
Olivia says she and her fellow campers didn’t play any pranks on each other the first year she was there, but last summer a couple of them pretended to be bears in front of another cabin one night, making noise and shuffling around. Unfortunately, the kids in the cabin didn’t notice, but it was still fun. Olivia plans to go to the same camp again this summer and can’t wait to get there.
Her message to other kids going to sleepaway camp for the first time or thinking about it is: “I think they should just go for it and see how they like it because it’s only like one week and it’s a good experience”
And don’t worry about making friends, she says. “There’s a lot of people in the camp so I’m sure that out of all those people you’ll probably get along with at least one.”
This story originally appeared in a special section of the North Shore News focusing on summer camps.
