Head (and Hands!) Up for Camp - April 21, 2022 | Kids Out and About Seattle <

Head (and Hands!) Up for Camp

April 21, 2022

Debra Ross

When I was growing up in New Jersey in the '80s, we had two options for camp, at least as far as I was aware: Girl Scout Camp and Boy Scout Camp. (Okay, make that one option for camp.) Even though there were some specialty subjects that you could choose, when you went to camp you were going to camp. For, you know, the "camp experience." I went for a week during the summer after 7th grade, and here is the sum total of what I learned:

  • "Bug juice" isn't made of bugs, but it might as well be.
  • You can become popular by devising dirty lyrics to camp songs.*
  • When hundreds of gnats swarm around your eyes, hold your hands over your head so they congregate there instead.

The last item is the only one that served me beyond middle school. Nowadays, thank goodness, camp is an entirely different enterprise, both for Girl Scouts and everyone else. Whether you need to send your kids to camp as day care, or because you want them to make up for socialization time and experience lost to the pandemic, or because you find a program where they can learn something they'd never learn in school, or because you want them to bond with nature beyond just gnats, we have tons of options. So today, kids have reasons to look forward to the summer even more than they used to.

Your own backyard (by which I mean your local area, not literally your own backyard, that's a whole different kind of camping experience that we'll talk about in June) has LOADS of opportunities for summer camp 2022. For the past several months, we've done our best to encourage local camps to post their 2022 summer programs to our camp calendar so they're all in this one handy place to make it easy for you. It's free for camps to post, so you have a lot of options. Our online 2022 Summer Camp guide lets you search by subject; you can head right to the months of MayJuneJuly, or August to see camps posted by week. You'll be amazed at the array of options, but we do our best to organize it all in a way that won't make you dazzled.

Deb

*Yeah, I still remember those lyrics. Let's hope your kids make a better use of their camp experience than I did!