Dear Hagen,
In a rare fit of optimism last month, I decided to sign you up for a week-long Rookie Sports Day Camp at the YMCA. Rookie Sports is for kids 4-6 and wraps up every day by lunchtime. Each day, your group would be learning about and playing a different sport: Hockey on Monday! Football on Tuesday! Tumbling on Wednesday! T-Ball on Thursday! Soccer on Friday!
The night before camp started, I stayed up fretting that the whole thing would be a disaster. When I'd asked you in the past why you didn't want to go outside and play soccer with the kids at your preschool, you'd answered, "I usually like playing with zero other people." You don't like sports or humanity, so I worried that sports camp was going to be a mistake. I explained to your dad in the middle of my tossing and turning: "Look, if I'd signed him up for Computer Coding or Advanced Pterodactyl Studies or How To Build The World's Great Structures Out of Tinkertoys, I would have no concerns. But instead, I've signed him up for a week of everything he hates." If your dad freaked out every time I freaked out, this family would accomplish nothing. Still, I was irritated by his lack of anxiety.
Laney and I took you to camp on Monday (picture above) and you were in remarkably good spirits about the whole thing. We left you in the capable hands of a gaggle of teenage counselors and ran back to the car. At noon, when we picked you up, I asked, "So....how was sports camp?" You said, "It...was...AWESOME!!!" You even gave a little fist pump. Three seventeen year-old girls were running Rookie Sports, and they each thought you were "The cutest thing in the world," and every time I dropped you off, they gathered to give you a hug, and when I picked you up, you were always sitting in the lap of one of 'em. So that's part of the mystery solved.
You also made friends with an older (6) girl who always picked you to be on her team, and when I showed up at noon to get you Wednesday, you looked at me and shrugged and said, "She wants me to stay." "Yeah?" I asked, "Well, I need you to come with me, so we're gonna go." I'll be damned if I'm going to wait in the car so my preschooler can chat it up with a girl.
Today was the last day and I'd heard there was going to be an awards ceremony. I didn't figure it applied to Rookie Sports people, but when I walked in the gym this afternoon, your favorite counselor met me with "Hagen won an award today!!" I'm embarrassed to say I may have hollered, "For WHAT?!?" She told me, "Hagen won the 'Honest Camper' award, because he always tells you the truth...AND THEN SOME."
"We all played soccer today," she also told me, "except for Hagen, who spent the class running up and down the gym howling, because why Hagen?" "Because I'm a coyote," you explained. "He's just got more personality in his body than I've ever seen!" she gushed.
You won a soccer ball for being the Honest Camper. It's flat, so you're wearing it as a dome hat.
Everything went exactly like I thought it would.
Yay, sports.
Love,
Mom
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