Last Day of Camp|Lunch Bags

IMG_8193Today is the last day of Alex’s summer camp which he loves quite a bit. I love being able to drop him off somewhere for fun in the summer knowing that he enjoys the heck out of it.

Throughout summer camp, there are a variety of field trips. The camp asks that parents send a disposable lunch bag when these trips are to occur. I totally get that, and think it makes sense when managing groups of kids.

Last year, Alex happened to fall asleep super early the night before the first field trip, so I wrote all over his bag. He enjoyed the surprise, so I did it again before the next field trip. Before I knew it, I had created a bit of a tradition with these bags.

This summer there were 10 field trips. This year’s bags were, at times, more challenging than last year because I wanted to make sure that I didn’t repeat elements from last year on these bags too much.

I knew that Alex liked the bags, but I didn’t know how much he liked them until earlier this year when I was throwing a bunch of stuff from his room away when he wasn’t home trying to clean his room a bit. I had known that he had saved a bag or two  and pinned them to his bedroom wall, but when I was in his room, I discovered a stash of them.

I’ve asked Alex which bag was his favorite a time or two, but his answer is always different each time. Maybe that’s his way of telling me not to ask. I, however, like to think this means that he’s enjoying different elements of all of the bags.

Here are the bags in no particular order.

This is the bag that goes with a trip to High Velocity Sports, a trip that he took last year as well. Last year’s bag involved drawing all sorts of balls from different sports. While balls play a large role in this bag, I wanted to make sure that this bag seemed fresh and new.

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This bag went with a trip to …. that week, I needed to do two bags, as there were two field trips. This bag contains a joke from last year’s bag. Last year, I joked about avoiding green water at the water park, thinking that if a kid urinated in the pool that the water would turn green. After that trip, Alex informed me that purple was the color of pee-related infamy.

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This is the other water park-based bag. I was pretty pleased at myself for making these bags pretty different from each other.

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Between last year and this year, I listened to the Harry Potter books that I hadn’t yet consumed. As a result, the bag that went with “Harry Potter Week,” was easy and fun to come up with.

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One of my friends questioned my comparing police to heroes on this bag. However, I’ve had, so far, nothing but good experiences and don’t want to give my son a complex. He enjoyed his bag because so many elements of the bag correlated directly with things that he saw at the museum.

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The Sloan Museum/Planetarium bag was particularly fun because I had visited those museums as a child, being from Flint and all. Alex was very impressed with the likeness of the planetarium he found on the bag.

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Alex was also impressed with this bag, mainly because he noticed the Toledo Museum of Art’s logo on the bag. It’s funny to see which things stick out to him!

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Alex has long been attracted to Edvard Munsch’s “The Scream.” So upon thinking of a way to incorporate it into one of these bags, I had to go there!IMG_9177

 The funny thing about this bag is that Alex’s peers figured that the brown boy on the bag was Alex. But then they thought that I was the lady behind him. Weird. Alex thought it was weird, too. I was trying to represent a camp counselor. Funny thing is, it turns out that Alex’s canoe didn’t have an adult in it at all.

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I love these bags because they encourage me to dabble in doodling. They also make Alex feel special which is the most important part.

 

 

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