Summer Camp

Last Sunday we dropped Cooper off for camp at Camp Mollenhour DNR Conservation Camp in Silver Lake, IN. We had been talking about it for months, he had been so excited.

Normally the kids both go to church camp at Quaker Haven, which is where their Grandparents go to church and is on the same lake where they live. The kids know that camp like the back of their hand. It is very familar, they can even canoe across the lake to say hi to grandma in the middle of camp.

But this year Cooper heard about Conservation Camp and it really seemed like a camp for him. At Camp Mollenhour boys ages 9-15 can go for a week to learn about boating, hunting, fishing, wildlife and other cool stuff that Cooper loves.

On Sunday right before we left Cooper got cold feet. He had been super excited but when it was time to load up and head for camp, he did not want to go. He was nervous. He did not know a single person at this camp, had never been there before and all of the sudden Sunday through Friday seemed like a really long time to my 9 year old guy.

We told him he had to at least try it. That if he got too homesick he could come home. When we dropped him off, I was the one who got nervous. It seemed that Cooper was one of only a few 9 year olds at camp. Most of the boys were 12 and up it seemed. In fact when I made his bunk up and got him settled in the cabin I looked around and all the boys in his cabin were 13 and 14 year olds, maybe a couple 11 and 12 year olds. Alot of the kids seemed to know each other and had been to camp before.

I was not preparred for being so sad to leave him! I was worried about him all week. I could not stop thinkng of him. Did I packed the right things? Is he meeting friends? Every morning I would wake up and think, "Cooper is in the water." At Camp Mollenhour the director turns on a siren of a sheriffs car at 6am every morning and the boys have to hustle out to the lake to jump in and wake themselves up! It was in the fifty's every morning this week and I wondered if he was freezing. I even put Cooper on the prayer chain at church.

We picked Cooper up from camp yesterday at 6:00pm. He had a great time. He shot clay pigeons with riffles, identified fish, he scored 92 % on his Hunting Saftey DNR test, he earned DNR patches in both hunting and boating saftey, he fished with bass pros, rode in fan boats, swam and scuba-ed, shot a bow and caught a baby milk snake named Spot. And he learned this pledge... I give my pledge as an American to save and faithfully to defend from waste the natural resources of my country - it's soil and minerals, forests, waters and wild life.
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