Camp Kiesel

I'm not gonna lie. I have not being excited about Darren starting scouts. Not at all. The scout program is great, don't get me wrong, but for Darren it means A LOT of "stretching". Everything that Darren dislikes or is afraid of they do in scouts. For some kids these activities come easy and natural, not for Darren, but are hoping it will be able to find something he likes to do. He will work mainly on those social skills that are so difficult for him and hopefully he'll learn new things in the process.

Flipping through the cub scout handbook made me cringe and shake my head. We really don't have a ton of expectations but at least we want him to try it and be positive about it. Their motto is "Do your best" and that's a very important idea we would like Darren to learn and apply in his life and I'll be the happiest person on earth if that's the only thing he gets out of this. For us tough, the most important thing is that he experiments and tries new things and feels proud of himself when he's done.

I do get anxious about other kids picking on Darren because of his lack of skills on some things but  we hope he also learns that, in the words of Temple Grandin, he's different but not less.

So anyway, Darren's first activity was their day camp at Camp Kiesel and I gotta say Darren was all excited about it even though he had no clue what to expect. Daniel took the day off and went along. They met early in the morning around 7am and came back home around 1 or 2 pm. That's a L-O-N-G morning for a kid who loves to be indoors playing video games or on the computer.

They had a lot of fun activities planned for the kids like a nature walk, archery, boating, BB guns, leather crafts and an obstacle course. Overall and considering the situation Darren did great and much better than we thought. He was fine letting other kids ride in the car with him and Daniel, absolutely loved archery and the rope bridge. Towards the end he was tired and had a hard time with the bb guns (let's say he won't trying those any time soon) and even though he likes boating he did not appreciate getting splashed by other kids haha.

His den is taking the rest of Summer off (and I'm very happy about that :P) They will resume activities on September. There was only a pack meeting a couple of weeks ago and involved swimming and hot dogs. Needless to say Darren loved it! (and this time he didn't mind kids splashing and throwing balls in the water!!)