Care Package Nightmares

What is it about kids and care packages?  When Carter starts to think about getting ready to go to camp the first words out of her mouth are, “You are going to send me a care package aren’t you?”  I think Care packages started during the war to help feed people who were truly starving.  I don’t know when they became the staple of kids going to camp.  I think Carter considers it is a badge of how much your parents love you.

One year when she was at camp she told me about a girl in her cabin who did not get a care package and how the child grew more and more despondent at each mail call without a package.  Think that the entire camp experience can be ruined by one thoughtless, selfish parent who after shelling out thousands of dollars for camp and hundreds more for a trunk, new sheets and towels, and a crazy creek chair wasted the whole thing by not sending one stinking package.

Camp basically provides a kid with everything they really need to live a fun and carefree existence.  But a package from home is icing on the cake.  So I succumb to the pressure and send off a package.  What I have discovered is there are good things to send and bad things and in the end it is all about getting some totally unhealthy food, which luckily at Carter’s camp girls are required to share with the whole cabin.

In Carter’s case some goldfish and sour gummies are the least bad for her acceptable foods.  I also know that a Tiger Beat magazine, especially one chocked full of One Direction photos is a great non-food item.  I throw in a new box of stationary just to take up room and a note and I’m done.

From previous years I have learned that the packages that come from “Care Package Providers” are easy to send, but never have food and Carter comes home with all the crap they sent her and throws it away.  Also books and clothes are the equivalent to sending coals to New Castle.  I get a letter home that says something like, “You sent me a book!”

If only there were some incredibly healthy and desirable things I could mail I would.  I think that the camp would frown upon my sending a commercial frozen yogurt machine and the yogurt in dry ice, unless I was sending it as a donation to the dining hall.  I think I might have to send an electrician along to rewire the cabin to handle the power load and that is a no-no for sure.

So hopefully my barebones package is the care Carter is looking for; just enough reassurance that her parents love her, but nothing too embarrassingly over the top.  If only she could appreciate what having to go to the post office in order to mail it really was like, then she would kiss my feet.