The triumphant return

Yesterday, Mark came home from camp. He'd been gone 12 days, longer than I've ever been away from him, and I was very excited about his return.

When I went to pick him up, Mark wasn't there yet, but his luggage was.

I picked out his duffel bag among all the other bags. We'd stuffed his sleeping bag into a white trash bag, so that one took a while longer to find (I wasn't the only mom to utilize kitchen garbage bags as luggage).

As I loaded the bags into my car, Mark's shoe tumbled out. I stuffed it back in the bag, where I noticed not only its mate, but his back-up shoes as well. I sighed, fearing that my child was riding the bus barefoot.

Luckily, he had on flip-flops as he stepped off the bus. He also had a giant scab on his chin--apparently, he misjudged the depth of the pool, and scraped it. (I giggled as I remembered discussing the same injury with a friend over happy hour this week. Although she may have been a wee bit...impaired...when she scraped her own chin.)

After collecting his blood sugar logs and group picture, I searched nervously, looking for Mark. He takes notoriously bad photos, and I expected to see him with eyes closed like last year, or eyes closed and mouth open, like the year before. He was making a really weird face, but he smiled and said, "Hey, at least my eyes are open!"

"Whose shirt is that?" I asked, pointing at his photo.

He shrugged. "I dunno--it was in my laundry, so I just wore it."

Mark couldn't wait to tell me all about camp. I peppered him with questions, and he was uncharacteristically chatty. He raved about the food (ribs, steak, burgers, breakfast cereal), the store where he bought diet sodas every day ("I'm gonna miss those sodas!" he lamented), the pool where he scraped his chin, and the bear they all saw traipse by his cabin. He told me about the 8-mile-hike they went on, and when I asked how long that took, he answered, "About 20 minutes."

He told me about all the sports he played, and the snacks (beef jerky!) he ate every night before bed. He described the overnighter where they camped outside on a tarp, but did not eat snack (bears like beef jerky). He talked about the arts and crafts, and groused about the drink choices at dinner every night (milk or water). Then he smiled and told me he'd figured out where they kept the Crystal Light, and how he'd filled up his cup with that instead.

He was filthy, so I asked when he'd last taken a shower. He said he took one the night before, then he bragged that he'd only taken two showers the entire time.

"You only took TWO?" I gasped. "Including the one last night?"

"Yep," he answered. "And only because the counselor made me." I can only imagine how smelly that cabin was, with a bunch of sweaty 10-year-old boys running around!

He told me the staff had done his laundry during the weekend, including his sleeping bag. I was relieved to hear that, considering he'd only showered once during the two weeks, and once the night before he came home. I put the sleeping bag outside to air out, but it may go directly into the trash if it doesn't freshen up a bit.

Mark talked a bit about the kids in his cabin, including Andreas, who came from South America. Mark, of the overflowing closets and crammed to capacity under-bed, insisted that his cabin mates were slobs. And then he uttered words I never imagined him saying in a million years...

"I was the clean freak in our cabin," he said, quite seriously. He shuddered at the thought of his cabin, and I shuddered even more. If my kid was the cleanest one there, then I don't ever want to go to camp.

He was exhausted, but hungry, so we stopped for lunch on the way home. We walked right past an ice cream store, and he remarked that, "I don't know why, but for some reason, I want ice cream."

"I bet," I answered. Then I hugged him and said again how glad I was he was home.

"Me too," he said. "Maybe we should celebrate with some ice cream." And then he nudged me toward the ice cream store!

So I was glad to see some things don't change. He had a blast at camp, and I had a blast at Mommy Camp while he was gone. I exhausted myself and the friends who went out me every night while he was gone (big props to Kathleen and Edra for humoring me during Mommy Camp!). And I'm sure he exhausted the camp counselors during his stay. But we were both home, happy, and glad to see each other.

Until next summer...