Week 2 at Camp K: Teenagers with Cognitive Disabilities

My goodness, this week at camp was a tough one! While last week I had to worry about my campers falling asleep during activities, this week I had to spend every moment watching and running around making sure my campers didn't run off and get into trouble! This week I had direct responsibility over 2 campers: K and M, who called himself the fire dragon guy. K was a very difficult camper; I was responsible for all her ADL's (like showering, changing her diaper, brushing her teeth, getting her dressed, etc), she was usually nonresponsive by choice, almost never listened to directions, and would "plop" on the ground for 20 minutes at a time refusing to get up. M, on the other hand, was a wonderful camper, loved by everyone, and could do most of his ADL's on his own; he just had a tendency to run off, which made it hard to keep track of him while I had to stay behind with slow-moving K, especially for long periods of time when she plopped! This week was exhausting, working 7:30am until 9pm with campers who had tons of energy and little desire to follow directions. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't still incredibly rewarding! My camper, M, made me laugh and told me nice things all week. Here are some of his favorite sayings: "You are spiffy and smart!" "You're my best friend buddy in the whole wide world" "You're a smart girl" "You are soooo sweet." haha. And with him, everything is a fire dragon! The horses were fire dragon horses, the canoes were dragon boats, the fish he caught were dragon fish, the rope bridge on the course was a dragon bridge. My favorite was when he took the cover off of the pool table and wrapped it around himself, convinced it was a fire dragon parachute. Silly me for thinking it was just a regular pool table cover. K (a different K then my camper, but he was also in my group) sang his same song over and over, which we all learned and got stuck in our head every day. It went like this "I walk the line, because your mine, I walk the line, ha ha ha, hee hee hee, school is double uuu, and you shake it all about, that's what it's all about, yea!" S was absolutely hilarious without trying and made me laugh so hard all week long! He would always ask "How old's your daddy?" or 'S:"M sneeze?" Me: "Yep!" S:"Why?" Me;"Because his noise tickled" S;"Noise tickled?" Me:"Yea!" S:" (laughs, then gets a serious face) M sneeze?"' and the whole thing started over again. It was so funny! D would always ask me to tickle him, and then crack up laughing when I did. D swore like a sailor when he first came to camp, but we worked with him constantly and he was saying such nicer things by the end of the week! C was such a sweetheart who would always give the best hugs and have the biggest smile on her face. And the other C, one of the biggest trouble makers at camp, I found absolutely hilarious, but that's only because I wasn't responsible for him. It always made me laugh to look up and see C half way across the field with 3 people frantically chasing after him again. It happened about every 20 minutes.
Other than the funny moments, there were also the moments that made all the hard work worth it. One of my favorites was on the ropes course this week- I was up on the platform doing transfers, so I got to be up there and watch my campers climb on up. I watched them struggle but persevere and then light up with a smile whenever they finished an element of the course. Also, at the beginning of the week, we sit down with our campers and come up with three goals for the week, and watching them make progress on their goals during the week just makes me so happy! This week feels like a blur, since there was no moment to rest and I was always running around chasing a camper or getting something for a camper or taking a camper to the bathroom or to the nurse. But I absolutely fell in love with our batch of campers this week and had a lot of fun with them! There's a lot of them that I'm going to miss. And to all you mom's who have raised more than one teenager at once, I give you huge props, because I could barely last a week =P
I can't wait for week 3 of summer camp to start!