When you work as a Jewish day camp counselor all summer, it consumes your life and you realize that that’s all you talk about. If you aren’t speaking to your camp friends, they have no clue what you’re talking about. These are just a few of the many things that become a part of your life each summer.
1. The Countdowns
Since camp has taken over your whole life, you pretty much spend the whole year counting how many days until starts. You also spend the whole year wondering which age group you will get and who your co counselors will be.
2. Gaga
This is the only sport at camp that everyone actually loves
playing. Everyone takes it way too seriously and everyone knows that you just
finished a game by all the dust all over your clothes and body that won’t wash
off until you get in the swimming pool.
3. Actually Having to Swim Everyday
Although the pool is probably the grossest place at camp
because of all the pee, sweat and germs, it's also the most refreshing part of
camp. After being outside in the heating sun playing gaga almost all day,
getting in that swimming pool is the greatest feeling ever.
4. Oneg
Every Friday, after swim you don’t actually have to do stuff with your children, now you just get to look forward to singing the blessings before the challah and grape juice, and eating all the challah you can without anyone judging you, because let's face it, at the end of the day, all of us are starving.
5. Maccabiah
Not having to wear your staff shirt, getting to show your
team spirit, spending all 3 days just screaming that your team is better than
the other team. What could be better than that?
6. Dreading Rainy Days
Once you wake up and see the rain falling from the sky as
hard as possible, you know that your whole day is going to suck. Having to go
to the high school is the worst thing ever. Spending 7 hours having to tell
your kids to stay seated and stop screaming is so tiring that by the time you
get on the bus at the end of the day you just want to die.
7. Tan Lines
If you don’t have tan lines from your shorts and t-shirts,
you definitely did camp wrong.
8. Tightening Seatbelts
Your campers think that they can outsmart you and will
untighten their seat belts every 5 minutes on the bus ride and think you
won’t notice. But all it really does is make you and them annoyed when you keep
walking over to their seats to tighten the seat belt.
9. Clean Versions of Songs Becoming your Best Friends
When listening to music on the bus, the kids usually want to
listen to the newest songs on the radio, but if you can’t find the clean
version on iTunes, that’s one less song you can listen to.
10. The Campers are Literally your Children
When you spend 7 hours a day, 5 days a week with these
children, they pretty much are your kids and you start to feel like a parent.
Whether it’s making them feel better when they fall and scrape their knee with
a band aid or watching them win at gaga, you really do feel like these children
are your babies.
Although camp is super stressful and you come home every day
practically dead, there’s nothing else that you can imagine spending your summer
doing. The bonds that you make with your co counselors are some that can never
be taken away, and watching these children grow is so rewarding. So until next
year, all you have to do is look forward to camp.
