Camp Mom

I do this thing with my kids during the summer. I call it “Camp Mom.” It’s in lieu of spending oodles of money on summer activities. Instead, I set a theme for a week and we do activities around that theme.

So far we’ve done Vacation Bible School Week, Pirate Week, Mom is puking so do whatever you want as long as it’s quiet week, and “You kids have no TV all week” week.  Camp mom involves a lot of sleeping late and watching movies and playing Wii. Sometimes it’s a challenge to get Graham out of his pajamas.

I look at it as a lesson in “Be” as opposed to “Do.” I also look at it as a lesson in self-direction, and I look at it as an opportunity to force my children to clean up after themselves.

It’s Harry Potter Week around here this week. We’ve been watching Harry Potter I – VII in preparation for Friday’s movie premier of the final installment in the Harry Potter epic and, yes, I do have tickets.

My kids have been wearing their Harry Potter costumes and blasting each other (and the dog) with drinking-straw wands and spells in Latin. They ask, “What’s the spell for …” and usually I remember it from the books, but when they get creative, I remember enough Latin from high school and college to provide a suitable command. On the day of the premier, I’m going to surprise them with wall art decals from the Hogwarts Houses — Graham has a Gryffindor shield, Georgia a Ravenclaw one, Chris has Hufflepuff and I have Slytherin.

So far so good.

This afternoon, Graham asked, “Can we play with the Castillos?” The Castillos are toys like Legos, only they’re Spanish, not Danish, so they are much less well engineered but infinitely more artistic: when you make a castle with the Castillos, it looks like a castle. They’re also 35 years old and no longer manufactured. They were mine when I was a kid, and when I got cancer and my mother was desperate for anything that might help me survive, I mentioned to her that I’d really like the Castillos, that they would put me into a healthy cancer fighting mindset. I really did use cancer as a means to weasel the Castillos out of my own mother– there’s a prior post on this blog about me being in Slytherin, and the Castillos are evidence of it.

The Castillos are the best toy in my house, and they’re mine, and my kids know that.

I told Graham he could use the dining room table to build castles. Both kids have been at it all day, building on their own version of Hogwarts. It’s pretty awesome.

Today, I had something to do that I really had to finish, but tomorrow, in between errands and loads of laundry, I’m planning on spending it building castles on the table.