Photoessay #152 - Mom'n me 2007

Back from another mom'n me and, as usual, it was fine. Of course, I'm not REALLY doing mom'n me because, for the second year in a row, I've just gone for the day. A very different experience than staying overnight, in an indoor or outdoor unit, dragging your body into some strange place with a sleeping bag and using a biffie. Just going for the day definitely the easy way out. But still I made an appearance and contributed.

The picture was taken last year at Camp Lyle McLeod but easily could have been today. It stormed strongly at the end of the week and last night, when Dennis and the girls had gone, it was cold, rainy and windy. Whew, glad I hadn't made that trip. Some sprinkles and light rain in the morning but the sun broke through in the afternoon. Well maybe a little. Nice canoeing, Lake Bendickton looked like glass, calm and gleaming. Ilana and I floated around the lake during one of her sessions.

I made gorp in the morning, hadn't really occurred to me that that project really had to get going until I got there. But, if you want to hand out the bags at lunch, well there's your answer. Everybody who comes to camp contributes a bag of gorp ingredients. The job of the gorp-maker (me, this year) is to mix up the big ol' pot of gorp and put it into baggies to hand out for the afternoon snack. I think there were 135 participants, Grover told me to make 170 bags, I ended up making 212 bags. With help of course. Took me a while to get the right size pot and that's a lot of bags to empty. I corralled a mom with a 5 year old daughter and another 9 year old to help. Took about 1 1/2 hours to do it. But the bags were ready by 11:30. That's a lot of cereal, crackers, raisins, chocolate chips, candy, pretzels and heaven know what else.

In the afternoon, I hung around with Ilana who was running the canoeing, sort of helping getting people in and out of canoes. The last session, several people got stuck out on the lake (plenty of first-time paddlers) which Ilana had to go out and rescue and tow them back to the dock. The lake is calm and small, you can see the whole thing. Everybody has flotation devices and stable canoes and you really can't get into too much trouble.

I left home around 7:45am, got home around 9pm. Really not too tough as long as you don't have to sleep out in the cold. Turns out Dennis slept in the little library off the main lodge last night.

Another mom'n me (ok, modified) in the books.