Summer School

We were afraid Alex would miss day camp this summer. On the first day of the last term of summer school that he attended to three years ago, he cried and cried when I dropped him off. “Camp? Camp?” he often said over the winter when we passed the building, where he caught the bus to camp. Of course, during the same period he could never pass a school building without darting up the steps and peering through the windows. It was, as always, difficult to know exactly what he wanted based on what he said.

photo courtesy of Bill Ward's Brickpile (flickr.com)

The day before summer school, I took him by the school he’d be attending (he knew the building, and had been there many times for school district parties, even though he attended a different elementary school). He darted again, right to the locked doors (it was Sunday); he pulled on them and pulled on them, and when they didn’t budge he darted to another set of doors and tried those.

“School? School?”

“Not today, Alex. They’re closed. Tomorrow, YOU GO TO SCHOOL!!”

That seemed to delight him. A few hours later, when due to my lack of foresight we wandered past the camp building, he only ran to the door to the look in for a moment and said nothing.

We wouldn’t have hesitated about day camp if Alex had seemed to love the entire experience last year. But, aside from a loving counselor who still sometimes babysits for us, trips to water parks, and bouncing on a bungee contraption called “The Flying Squirrel”, Alex didn’t seem to like to even participate in many of camp’s activities. And camp was $5,000. Know how many water parks we can hit this summer for $5,000?

“School?”

“Tomorrow, Alex.”

Next morning, Alex popped up at 6. “He’s excited,” Jill said, and later that morning she reported that he’d been “delighted” to start school. This morning, I took him down to the bus and he wiggled with excitement as the bus pulled up. We wiggled with having guessed right.