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Is this actually happening? 22 months after leaving their beloved summer home, my kids are finally heading back there.

This Saturday. It sorta doesn’t feel real after this last year +. We’ve gone through (and not done yet!) a (hopefully) once in a lifetime global pandemic, over a year of different version of learning and school, social distancing, masking, missing out on seeing & celebrating with loved ones, minimal activities, and an entire summer of no camp. Child experts always talk about the resilience of kids, and while that’s never felt more true, these kids have truly been total rockstars. They’ve had no choice in any of this and have had to go along with the constantly ever changing “rules”.

But they are going back. These camps have worked incredibly hard to make this happen and the moment is finally here. It doesn’t even feel real. Like, I know they’re leaving but I cannot imagine not having them at an arms distance – where they’ve pretty much been since March 2020. And while it sounds totally amazing to get a much deserved and needed break – it feels totally bizarre we are not going to be together.

We’ve gone from baking banana bread, chalking our walk, and completing way too many puzzles to dropping them at camp – in a school drop off line fashion – for 7 weeks with no visiting day. I went from baking way too many banana bread loaves to feeling like it’s kinda bananas.

Don’t get me wrong – I couldn’t be more excited for them. When I think about it for them – there’s nothing better. They get to be kids. Without a care in the world. As their summers should be. At sleepaway camp, they can play, and run, and hug and just be. A big smile forms on my face just thinking about that. What more could I want for them?

They also gain some independence back. They get to make some of their own decisions – some smart, some maybe not so smart – but all part of the growing up process. They get to make new friendships and strengthen ones they’ve already established. What more could I want for them?

But what about me? I’m used to having them home. I’m used to hearing every minute detail of their day. I’m used to way more hugs than I’ve ever gotten. I promise I won’t miss the constant X-box screaming and non stop Tik Tokking, but I will miss their “noise”. It’s going to be really quiet. After a long time of no quiet.

But as you’ve probably already thought this (if you’re still reading it!) – this isn’t about me. It’s really not. It’s about them and the gift they are getting this summer at overnight camp. There’s just so many feels. But on Saturday – rest be sure – I’ll put on a brave face and share in their excitement and watch them literally RUN out of my car into the waiting cheers and arms of their friends & counselors. I do plan on sitting in between them the entire car ride up and keeping dark sunnies on – but part of me is a teeny bit excited to come home and walk into my too quiet house and have a cold glass of wine – while I wait for the refreshing to start….

By: Katherine Stiroh

After spending many summers at an all girls overnight camp in Pennsylvania, a veteran sleepaway camper turned counselor writes a letter to her younger self sharing genuine lessons and advice with all first time and future campers.

My first summer at camp was when I was going into 4th grade, and I was so excited to start camp after three years of drops-offs and visiting days for my older sister. I heard countless stories of her funny moments in the bunk with her friends and the cool things she got to try every day like biking, making s’mores, and arts and crafts. I couldn’t wait to start my own camp journey. Although I wouldn’t change a thing about my camp experience, if I could go back and tell my nine year old self a little about what’s to come – this is what I would say. 

Dear nine year old me,    

Right now, you’re sitting in the backseat of your parent’s minivan which is packed to the brim with your trunks full of color war tutus, stationary, and enough socks to last you a lifetime (but they won’t even last the summer). Your stomach is turning with the most emotions you have ever felt at once: excited to meet your new bunkmates and counselors, nervous to be leaving your parents and house for the first time, and anticipation to see the place that will become your home for the next seven weeks. These emotions are completely normal, and although you may feel overwhelmed, you will soon feel right at home. 

After initially meeting your counselors, unpacking your trunks, and having your first camp meal it’s time to get to know your bunkmates. These are the girls who will soon be your best friends in the entire world. You will share everything and talk about growing old together and visiting camp summer after summer. Nothing can compare to the bond you have with the girls you spend your summers with and they will be there for you through absolutely everything.   

With your new camp friends by your side, you will then begin a schedule full of activities and sports. TRY. EVERYTHING. Sign up for trips, join the intercamp sports leagues, and dance and sing your heart out at every chance you get. In the next two months, you will do things you never imagined yourself doing. You’ll try water skiing for the first time, you’ll be in the play, and you’ll dance and sing in front of the entire camp more times than you can count. Every unknown step and every chance you take will lead you to discover something new about yourself and the people around you.    

Right now, it all might seem so new and scary and I know it’s hard to imagine yourself away from your parents for so long, but this is about to be the beginning of the most important and meaningful chapter of your life. Enjoy every minute and hold on to your friends as tight as possible. These summers will fly by and before you know it you’ll be wishing for just five more minutes in your summer home.  

By: Julie Kaiden

Camp is under a month away (yes, you read that right!) and it’s time again to start thinking about the infamous “Last Meal”, or for some families, “the week of a thousand meals”. 

Campers can be overwhelmed with the first day jitters, but are also anxious to reunite with camp friends and get back into the much deserved summer routines.  Parents are getting emotional about separating with their kids, whether it’s for 2, 4 or 7 weeks – especially after all the time they have had together over the last year +.  It certainly brings up all the feels as we watch our children experience a push into adulthood, far from home but embarking on the summer of their lives.  They really do grow up fast!

Even though campers live 10-for-2 and love their camps, they also are obsessed with their favorite food from home. Indulge with your child one last time before they take off for the summer with their family meal and enjoy some more family time.  Here are 3 easy steps to nailing your last family meal together:

1. The first step to pulling off the perfect “Last Meal” is crucial – picking the cuisine!  What type of food will your camper miss the most while at camp?  Is it Japanese? Italian? Mexican?  A delish steak dinner?  A home cooked meal?  Although food at camps has improved greatly over the years from the mush to a bevy of options including salad, pasta, and the occasional lobster (Helllllllo Maine!) and steak, your camper still wants to say goodbye to home in style.
2. The next step is to pick the perfect setting.  Besides the food, this meal is an opportunity for valuable family time before the kids leave. You want to make sure you have time to chat about the excitement that lies ahead – yet also feels like a festive, celebratory night.  Does your child have a favorite restaurant in your town or city?  Is there somewhere your child is aching to try?  This year in particular, campers will be laying low before camp to reduce the risk of COVID-19 – so bringing in sounds like the best option if you are wanting the restaurant route.  This gives you the controlled, comforting environment of being home – while still enjoying favorite foods from whichever restaurant your camper will be most excited about!  This step can get a little tricky when you’re sending multiple kids off to camp. Be prepared for multiple lunches and / or dinners for some good QT and to satisfy the needs of each sibling. It would be wayyyyy too easy to just pick one place!

Editors note: Every year, we take our kids to their most favorite local restaurant for dinner – and it’s where we go for lunch when they return – but this year, keeping in mind staying careful before camp – we are opting to have our last supper at home. My kids don’t know this yet (so I hope they aren’t reading this. Just kidding. They aren’t!) but we are going to create a “restaurant” menu with all their favorite dishes in mini courses. Chez Kaiden, if you will!

3. The final step (drum roll pleaseeeeeeee!) is to relax. Let the night be about your child. What they are looking forward to. What they may be anxious about. And of course, what their first meal will be once they are back from camp. Keep the night light and positive and rest up – find your darkest sunnies for the next day – and let them fly. They got this!

By: Jessica Greif, Summer 365 Counselor located in Brooklyn, New York

Sleepaway camp has been a part of my life since 1986. I went from being the youngest camper in my bunk at age almost-8 to feeling like the oldest cabin counselor ever in the universe at age 25. And now, 35 years after beginning my camp journey, I have a new job title: that of camper mom. It’s a role in which I was initially cast leading up to Summer 2020, but with production put on hold for a year, I’ve spent the last 12 months rehearsing. Now that it’s May, we’ve begun gathering bits and pieces of gear in our guest room, in hopes that we can pack without last-minute stress. As I think about my own summer preparations over the years, and about shifting into this new phase of my relationship to camp, I can’t help think of my mother, who was–and is still–a master of labeling, Ziploc-bagging, and making sure her kids had what they needed. Looking ahead to our son’s first summer away, I am aware that there is one aspect of camper-momming for which I have unknowingly been in training since childhood – a set of guidelines that my mom laid out through her unflagging consistency as plainly as if she were writing a how-to manual, but in words that were inquisitive rather than instructive and playful rather than pushy. And so I give you, as best I can piece them together, the top 5 lessons I learned from my mother about writing to a kiddo at sleepaway camp:

The top 5 lessons I learned from my mother about writing to a kiddo at sleepaway camp:

1. Quantity Above All

My mom started writing to me each summer when I was still at home, and when I arrived at camp, there was invariably a letter–and sometimes several–waiting for me, narrating what we were up to during those last few days before I left. She wrote to me daily while I was away and I’m not sure I’ve ever told her how much it meant to me to be that girl who receives mail every darn day. I rarely struggled with homesickness during the majority of my camp career, and while that was due to many factors, such as keeping busy and being very happy at a just-right-for-me camp, I also think it had to do with never feeling as though the people I loved the most were very far away, because they appeared in our cabin mailbox daily.

2. No Need to Have Anything Specific to Say!

Most of my mom’s letters were about what she had done that day, whether it was laundry, errands, a haircut, a movie she and my dad had seen, or dinner with friends, and I ate it up as a reader. It simultaneously made me feel as if I were there with her, and also, if I’m honest, that I was lucky to be at camp, where it was way more fun than at home! Even when she traveled to Cape Cod to visit my grandparents and went on the bike rides I loved and ate at favorite restaurants, I never felt as though I were missing anything, because she brought me along with her.

3. Break Out Allll the Nicknames

I have a stash of letters from the summer of 1992, my last year as a camper before becoming a CIT, and in the ones I’ve been rereading from my mom, she greets me variously as: Jezel (twice), Jezel-Bezz, Jess-a-belle, Jess Greif, and just plain Jess. Some of these were familiar, while others I’d never heard before or since. The great thing about using silly nicknames in a letter is that you’re not embarrassing your kid in front of anyone, but it is guaranteed to make them smile, even if they would never admit it to you. A corollary to this is:

4. Have Fun with the Visuals

My mom is big into cards, and so almost everything she wrote me was on a greeting card, rather than on plain paper or stationery. I turned 14 the summer I received these letters and I can assure you, nothing she sent me was ever subject to the annoyance and eye-rolling I doled out so generously when we were together in person. This is a selection of the cards she sent that summer, and while that level of cutesy would no doubt have not been welcome in our live interactions, they positively hit the spot when I received them at camp. There is something about being away from home that, while making a young person worlds more independent, also strips kids down to their essential kid-ness and does away with the need to assert oneself as separate, because the circumstances have already taken care of it. So the top hat-clad duckies, the snuggling kittycats, and the rodents clutching heart-shaped balloons? Bring ‘em on. All of that and then some.

5. Settle on a Signature

I can’t say why this made a difference to me, but there was something comforting about how my mom would sign her letters. The most frequently used sign-off I can recall was Lots of love from Dad and me – Mom. The “Mom” went on the line below the rest of it and usually had a little swirl underneath. Something about the regularity of that goodbye and its variants was soothing to me and I came to count on its rhythm. I’ve compiled the sign-offs from the pile of cards I’ve been looking at, and they all have some version of the patented my-mom farewell. I haven’t decided how I’ll end my letters to my daughter this summer, but I’m thinking I might put the “Mom” part inside a heart – stay tuned.

And with that, I leave you to your letter-writing adventures that will—no matter what form they take–be perfect for your kid(s), because they will reflect your unique bond. There is no wrong way to go about letter-writing. We may be out of practice in this somewhat lost art–or even in writing by hand at all–after spending so many years in front of screens and keyboards, sending instant missives and expecting instant replies. Just as our kids are stepping away from what is easy and comfortable at home and immersing themselves in the slow, tangible delight of time spent at camp, I encourage us to do the same in our communications with them. Write early and write often, and your kids will know they’re on your mind and in your heart.

By: Dana Liberman, Summer 365 Counselor located in New Jersey

So, first of all, I am not really old enough to have a child ready to start looking at sleepaway camps, let alone get on a bus and go to one.  And second, I just got off a bus a few years ago from my camp, right?  Was 1994 not a few years ago?!  

I vividly remember having camp directors come over to my house in the snow, setting up their slide projectors in my living room and projecting their ‘camps’ onto my uneven wood-panel wall.  Don’t judge, it was the mid-80s 😉.  I remember road-tripping with my parents later that year to visit and tour the camps. I remember the songs being sung around each camp, the colors the girls wore and what the bunks looked like.  How is it that I am now the one in charge, contacting camp directors, reaching out to set up tours and booking hotels to stay in?  Where did the years go and how do I even begin to explain to my daughters how lucky they are they have their entire camp lifetime in front of them and how they need to treasure each and every moment they have at camp for it goes by way too quickly? They will blink and someday find themselves at a desk doing the same for their kids.

When I think about how fortunate I was that my parents gave me the opportunity to go to camp, the gift of sending me to a place to grow into my own, to try things I would never otherwise be exposed to, to learn from others I may never have met and to truly find who I was meant to be in this world, I recognize the importance of the decision.  

And so, as I embark on this journey with my oldest daughter, unsure of what her camp experience will be, I am trying to keep a level head about it all.  I loved camp…I am camp.  There is no place in the world I feel more myself than at camp.  But this isn’t about me, it is about her. And I want her to have her own experience.  I want her to find a place that is all her own.  Of course, she knows how I feel about camp, she will tell you it is my happy place, but I am doing my best not to influence her decision about where to go or what to expect.  I want her to experience the websites, the videos and the conversations with camp directors with an open, unbiased and clear mind.  I want her to walk on to campuses this summer and not know what to expect.  I want her opinions to be her own. I want her to be wow-d and surprised. I want her to be curious and ask questions…not the ones my husband and I will ask, the ones a 7-year old wants to know about.  She’s already excited to ‘stay up all night’ (and my apologies in advance to her future counselor because she very well might some nights!) and she doesn’t quite understand how you really just get to have fun and do activities all day and night for 7 weeks straight.  I love the innocence and can’t wait for the adventure that lies ahead for her.

So here we go.  Bring on the brochures!  Let the videos roll!  Our bags are packed (well not just yet but in my head I’m already mentally packing)!  I have waited my whole mom-life to do this and after the year our children have had I can’t imagine a more perfect time to tour and start this journey.  Hope you will follow along with me on this ride…plan to keep you all posted.

Wish us luck!

XO

Dana

A special collab that is to (tie) dye for!

Is your blood type tie dye too? Tie dye is such a summer / camp staple and clearly a trend that is not going anywhere anytime soon.

On this National Tie Dye Day we want to take a minute to honor this quarantine obsession. Tie dye is everywhere and there’s a reason why. So where did it come from and why is it relevant now more than ever? Little might you know, our fave pattern has historical roots and its emergence and popularity in 2019 and 2020 is not coincidental. According to a blog from Heroine by Jessa Chargois, “a synonymous symbol of the counterculture movement, tie-dye has an undeniable place within American history and the American future. While tie-dye has been a form of self-expression for centuries, the cultural significance surrounding the rainbow swirls and bright colors was solidified within the 1960s and 1970s, serving as an emblem of the rejection of strict social norms imposed on society within the 1950s. Rejecting violence, capitalism, materialism, and uniformity, the hippie culture preached love and compassion and sought individualism through the use of tie-dye techniques on their garments.”

Furthermore, Chargois says that “until recently, tie-dye was a friendly backyard activity for the youth, rather than a symbol of rejection for the establishment. However, in Spring 2019, high fashion luxury runway shows began to show elevated forms of the psychedelic print in sophisticated silhouettes.” And at many shows many in the fashion world showcased the the connection between politics and high fashion and brought tie dye swirls into the conversation maintaining the “integrity of the psychedelic print” to represent love and peace.

Tie dye’s everlasting presence beyond the summer months is sparking such joy by bringing summer vibes all year long. So whether you create it or wear it for nostalgia, to make a political statement, or because you love its burst of colorful swirls and want to continue to ROCK IT AND ROCK ON 24/7 for all fours season… no judgments here!!

Celebrate National Tie Dye Day with a very special collab!  

We are beyond excited to partner with Live & Let Dye to launch a limited edition custom collection for summer ’21.  Nothing says camp fashion more than tie dye, so we put together two bundles for ordering: our Happy Camper print (rainbow tie dye!) or customized Spirit print (camp colors!).  Each bundle includes a hoodie, tank & bandana and we cannot wait to see your happy campers rocking it all during rest hour, on the fields, campfires, or during Color War!  

From morning line up to evening campfire, this collaboration is TO (TIE) DYE FOR!

To celebrate the season of giving, we are introducing two exciting GIVE SUM give back initiatives to raise money and awareness for our partner SCOPE (Summer Camp Opportunities Promote Education) and participate in their ‘Do Something December’ CAMP-aign. Let’s do this, together!!

There are THREE (easy) ways to give back with Summer 365!

Get the bunk back together this winter season and sign up for a S’more 365  virtual elective focused on giving back this holiday season, camp style! Learn about service, fundraising, the mission of SCOPE, and come ready to brainstorm a creative and fun service project you and your friends will put into action! Children and teens of all ages are welcome. Set up a private elective or join an open class, all proceeds from the elective will go to SCOPE. Electives will be instructed by awesome camping professionals and/or campers!! Email to get more info and set up an elective.

Also – the buddy system!  It works just as well in business. For every friend referred to Summer 365’s service we will make a $100 donation to SCOPE, simply make a note you want to #GIVESUM!

Finally, what is GIVE SUM? We know so many cannot afford a summer camp experience, which is exactly why GIVE SUM was born —a special scholarship fund that affords kids from underserved communities, life changing opportunities through the experience of summer camp. For every child or teen we work with that enrolls in a camp or program we made a donation to this fund as well as other fundraising and volunteer initiatives that Summer 365 engages in throughout the year.  Learn more here and to donate directly.

We are proud to partner with SCOPE.  Children who receive SCOPE camperships gain access to attend overnight summer camp throughout the United States, free of cost to their family.  As you know, camp is one of the greatest gifts you can give this holiday season.