Hello, dear friends!! Humming Bird here with Cat Nap, and a few updates about our super fun Orientation Day!!

This is the best day for campers to get acclimated to camp life, sign up for classes, and bond with their cabin groups!! Allow us to take you through the day, step by step!

We wake up for a beautiful Bagel Sunday breakfast (of bagels and sundaes!! Just kidding about the sundaes… but super serious about the yummy bagels!!)

We had our first Morning Meeting!! Tom and Meg opened up the Meeting by playing their dulcimers together, like they do every Bagel Sunday!! Also, because of the schvitz (that’s our way of saying the dreaded R word… rain, ew!!) our Meeting was held in the Rec Hall, instead of at the gazebo, where we normally meet.

In staggered groups we do the following, not necessarily in the same order!!:

We head to the Red Barn as a cabin to hear the class sign-up “schpiel” and then sign up for our classes that we will be taking for the next two weeks, starting tomorrow!!

Then we eat a yummy, well-deserved lunch!! Since the weather is less than ideal for our usual outdoor seating, we ate as cabins inside, at our breakfast/dinner tables!

After lunch we have swimming evaluations, held in our beautiful lake! Campers and counselors will enjoy a lovely dip in the water! Campers also get their photos taken in the Hilton Dance Studio today, and those photos will be sent to the campers’ folks back home– so check your mailboxes, families!! In addition, all campers and counselors have their heads checked for icky Ookoos (head lice)!!

Mixed into these activities, cabins have lots of “fuzzy time,” or unscheduled times during which counselors can facilitate games to inspire cabin bonding and getting to know each other! Campers also have time to unpack, and practice our Pinegrove acts!!

What’s Pinegrove, you ask?? Pinegrove is a beautiful tradition we have here at camp, to open and close the sessions! We walk in silence up Tipi Hill to our little haven in the woods, and we sit as a camp around a fire. Cabin groups can sign up to perform songs, poems, stories, and more! We all get to enjoy the beautiful nature that we are lucky to have surrounding us, and we venture into this exciting session as a whole camp group.

Pinegrove is an incredibly special place on camp, and one reason it remains special is that we don’t bring flashlights or cameras up there. We keep it entirely a technology-free zone, so we won’t be posting pictures of the night. However, you can enjoy these pictures below of some of our Orientation Day madness, and we will have pictures of the first day of classes ready to share in the following days, so please do stay tuned!

I’m off to take Cat Nap to her swimming evaluation… What they say is true, cats really don’t like water!!

Chirp, Hum, Meow!

Humming Bird and Cat Nap

PS: The Official Humming Bird and Cat Nap Candy Drop Probability O’Meter’s beeps remain low and slow as of now… we will update you tomorrow!