Gotta do what you gotta do!

@Amy- when we only have the older kids, we definitely do the audio guides. It helps a lot. The little guy is still just slippery. We wound up putting him on benches with a phone to play games while my husband and I looked at everything.

Early age overnight camps are not just a French thing, but a general European thing. I’m originally from Central Europe and went to my first overnight camp at age 7, for three weeks. By the time I was 12 I was being sent for three week language immersion camps abroad (so none of the adults spoke my native tongue) and at age 14 my parents just put me on a plane to stay with a family of friend’s relative in Canada for the summer (none of use met these people) and I traveled intercontinental by myself.
I won’t say it was all great, and I always despised and refused to go to actual “camping” camps, but my parents wanted to grow my independence and it worked so well that I moved from Europe to US on my own at age 18. If you ask my parents today they’d say I grew up to be a bit too independent, but I was never the youngest one in any of the camps I attended.

@Lisa- the French have some interesting history in that regard. Apparently, a few hundred years ago the entire infant population of Paris used to be shipped out to wet nurses in the country for years. I guess a few weeks of summer camp is nothing compared to that! (Factoid from the book Act Natural).

I think I started going around age 9 for a few days, and was handling a week by age 12 – 3 weeks at age 13. I loved it!

@SHU- yeah, fortunately he lost interest quickly, so the ice cream was still edible!

@Nicole – It probably will be the best week of the summer! It’s just always challenging to do something new. So glad you’re quoting me…:)

Fried green tomatoes for the win?

I quote some Laura Vanderkam every day (sometimes just in my head) and constantly try to remember the lessons from Juliette’s School 🙂 Huge fan,