They’re Off!

The girls have been installed in their respec­tive camp units. Genevieve was a lit­tle clingy as I left, but Katie was pret­ty much fin­ished with us as soon as she knew where her tent was. Of course, she’s been to both this par­tic­u­lar camp before with her troop and to anoth­er for a week of camp last year, so it makes sense that she feels more excit­ed than cautious.

Because the post office is so dan­ged unre­li­able, the camp now sug­gests that par­ents leave mail with them to be deliv­ered to the girls on spe­cif­ic days. sam­bear and I each wrote a note for each girl for each day. I used dif­fer­ent sta­tionery for each day (all of it old­er than the girls, so it’s good that I final­ly used it!), and just wrote brief notes. Sam did a tarot read­ing for each girl for each day and wrote about that. It’s a good thing I long ago accept­ed the fact that he will always be the cool­er parent.

As I had antic­i­pat­ed, the camp per­son­nel weren’t used to deal­ing with inhalers for any­thing but asth­ma. They have forms to be filled out to allow campers to keep asth­ma inhalers with them, but the forms are all about asth­ma. Peri­od. Fine, I had antic­i­pat­ed the pos­si­bil­i­ty that this would be the case. I had a let­ter in hand from the neu­rol­o­gist stress­ing that Katie must keep the inhaler with her or it does no good. So we spent 40 min­utes meet­ing the camp MD (who does­n’t stay there all week), the camp nurse (who does), and the camp direc­tor, and going through the sto­ry with each and every one of them. She has an inhaler in her fan­ny pack to keep with her. She has two more inhalers in the lit­tle box from the phar­ma­cy with the RX label on it, left with the camp nurse. (The inhalers are one-use things, so if she has to use one she’ll need to get anoth­er one.) Appar­ent­ly, the MD had nev­er once even heard of inhal­able Imitrex and went on and on about how it’s usu­al­ly giv­en as a shot.

Geni would­n’t respond to any of the direct ques­tions or attempts at con­ver­sa­tion from the coun­selor assigned to her tent, Red. I did­n’t real­ize until I got home that she may not have under­stood Red, who has a British accent. I don’t know that Geni has ever been exposed to much of that before, but Rowan men­tioned that he was hav­ing trou­ble with it, though he and Katie have watched and enjoyed Mon­ty Python’s Holy Grail. Hope­ful­ly, Geni’s ears will adjust over the week!