Day 9

By the way, before anyone tells me I miscounted the days, yes it is day 9, day 6 was Monday but posted Tuesday because I was tired. That is also why I missed a couple days of blogging, but I'll cover it all in this post today!

Working is starting to get more rhythmical. The first day of classes (Monday) was crazy and difficult to manage because many of us RAs didn't know what to expect. We also had problems with the dining hall, evacuation of an entire building, etc. Since then, however, work has been a lot less chaotic and a lot more organized. No more building evacuations, we've moved around breakfast times and meeting locations for classes, and made several minor changes that just made the entire process much smoother.

I guess the main point I'm going to try to get to in today's post is that working at this camp can be so exhausting and rough. The requirement of constant supervision of the kids makes things difficult. And the heat. Heat advisory today and yesterday. It makes long walks to various buildings more difficult and painful.

Speaking of walks to buildings, one of the more interesting facts about young children is that they all have terrible understandings of how time works. A walk to a building three blocks away is like asking them to slowly pull out each individual fiber of every muscle in their calves until all that's left is a raw bone and slow painful death. Basically, they hate walking places. They can't stay in a group, they never walk in similar pacing (which means I have to constantly run back and forth between the group trying to corral them like sheep to stay together and not get lost).

They also have the worst senses of humor. We have the RA Duty Desk, which is the front desk in the dorm where parents can drop off items for their kids and ask to talk to the head of the dorm. But every time you say the word "duty" in front of a kid at this camp, they all just burst out in laughter. I guess somehow, duty = butts/poop/foul excrement humor and that makes the front desk the funniest thing ever. Seriously, some of these kids start laughing just from walking past the front desk. In their heads, it's the "doody desk tee hee hee snicker snicker snort". It's a good thing we never play the game, "make the residents laugh", because I would literally just say the word "poop" 300 times until every child died from laughter and we sent 400 body bags to families. Cause of death: literal verbal excrement.

Overall, things are starting to get more regular, even the stress, although I had a minor panic attack two nights ago. Spread thin and stressed all day while still adjusting to various types of work, I sorta freaked out in my head thinking of all the ways I could mess up.

Right, speaking of messing up, I used the bathroom in the tech building today and left my class clipboard there. I walked back earlier and it was gone. Lost clipboard.

Poop.