DIY Neighborhood Summer Camp

What do you get when you combine four families with nine kids, summer fun, minimal resources, and a bunch of grown-ups with varied interests and some spare time?

We are a group of families interested in what we could do for our kids this summer that went beyond what we'd experienced at local day camps. We'd all had some good experiences and some lousy, and we'd spent a whole frustratingly big bunch of money trying to outsource some good summer fun. This year we decided to do things a little differently. 

Camp Darwin started with a conversation between two moms. A third was added at the bus stop. Somehow I got involved, too (I guess they all just knew I'd want in on the action!). The grown-ups met in February and piloted a conversation about expectations and involvement. We came with all kinds of questions -- what if we want to back out? Who puts sunscreen on the kids? How much money should we spend? What time should we start in the morning? It was great to handle some of these logistics early on, and of course, we're still trying to figure things out as we go. 

We committed to a monthly dinner throughout the spring. The kids all knew each other, but had never played all together. This was an eye-opening experience -- nine kids is a lot of kids for an indoor party! 

The first dinner was at my house. Here we made our first large group decision -- what to name our camp! 

We put up a blank sheet on the fridge and invited everyone -- kids AND grown-ups -- to contribute ideas whenever they had a flash. We had a great list of choices and knew it would be hard to pick one. Everyone took two flags and flagged their two favorites. In the end, we had a clear winner -- Camp Darwin. This name came from from one parent's comment that this camp would be a true "survival of the fittest," but I think it gathered real momentum when two of our campers realized that "Darwin" sounded just like a combination of their two names. Now we had a name! And from here out, our monthly dinners were known as, "Darwin Dinners."

This was also the first time the campers all sat together at one table for a meal! 

At our next Darwin Dinner the kids had a lot of fun with the chickens:

And the kids worked out some of the details of what will eventually become our camper-made logo.

The third Darwin Dinner involved lots of time on the big swing, a campfire, learning a great lesson on self-centering from our third grade campers, and a sharing of our hopes and dreams. At this point, everyone (adults included) was a little hazy on what the day-to-day of camp would look like, and our hopes and dreams are varied and awesome: 

Wall ball

Awesome stuff
Eat strawberries
We are just awesome
Baseball field at Gales Ferry School
Go to Costa Rica
Go to the park
Go to space
Music and theater
Alpaca farm
Finish school textbook
Unstructured and structured time together

By our fourth Darwin Dinner, these kids were showing strong signs of how awesome this camp could be. They played outside for a long time, and when it got a little buggy, they came indoors and spontaneously started a game of Apples to Apples. All of them. Together. With no adult involvement. I mean, can you even believe this? Nobody asked if they could watch TV, nobody snuck in any Minecraft, not one kid.

The most prevalent comment that night was, "How long until real camp starts?"