Just another day at work!

I would be lying if I said my summer job wasn’t fun.  It is camp – and what isn’t fun about camp?  Riding ponies, swimming, movies, amusement parks….we have a great time everyday with our campers.  Today was another fun one!  We went to the pool, like we do three times a week, every week but this time, there was an obstacle course set up for the campers.  It looked much easier than it was!

The course started in the water so you had to pull yourself up on to the apparatus and stay on it, jump over an obstacle without landing in the water, climb the slippery wall and cross the tall one without falling off.  The campers LOVED it.  One of them must have gone it at least eight times!  The lifeguards held races for the kids as they raced over it.  Of course, the counselors were dying to try it as well.  I have done at least five mud runs, but was almost as nervous for this one because so many of my former students were there watching!  Not only would I have to be in a bathing suit in front of all of them, (anyone who reads this blog regularly knows my struggles with self-image and knows how hard this is for me,) but I also had to try not to embarrass myself in front of all of them!!

Our camp director, who also teaches at my school, wanted to do it as well, so I figured if she was going to do it, so would I.  The two of us jumped in and the lifeguards told us when to start.  It sounds silly because obviously the course was in the water, but I never expected it to be so slippery!  There were handles but my feet didn’t want to hang on!  I made up that little hill and we ran across the short ramp together, jumped into the pit and had to climb back up out of the water.  Lugging my body over that wasn’t easy!  Our director agreed!  That was the hardest part! I made it across the next two parts fairly easily.  I don’t even think the whole thing took us a total of two minutes yet we felt like we accomplished something! Not just that we did it, because it really wasn’t that hard…but that we did it in front of all those kids.  Who knows, maybe it gave us a bump up on the “cool teacher” ladder 🙂

Tagged: Camp, camp is fun, cool teacher, Maplewood Pool, not so hard, obstacle course in the pool, self-image, summer camp, summer job