Winning the Summer Camp Slog 😩 → 😎
Make planning for this summer easier to tackle and conquer with friends.
Ah summer. How can one season bring about such widely divergent feelings?
For those of us with daycare or full-time nannies, it’s just another season, maybe time to book that weeklong vacay to the cottage or some other summer adventure.
For those of us with school-aged kids or childcare that follows the wildly outdated school schedule, it strikes panic, frustration and weariness at the thought of having to stitch together ~10 weeks of childcare.
The most prevalent option? Summer camps. They are typically private options (read: expensive and highly variable in quality and logistics) run by all sorts of kids activity centers.
And if the thought of figuring out how to cover the summer, week by week, isn’t bad enough, it’s up to every parent to research what the best options are in their area, including what the costs and schedules are and when registration is.
Enter one of our top parent spreadsheet submissions: The Summer Camp Planner. It looks like pretty much all of us have created a version of this puppy.
Summer Solver Tool 😎
So for those that are doing this for the first time or are just gearing up to start for this summer, we’ve gathered the best of all of the approaches to create this Summer Solver Tool.
One of the themes we heard for why summer camp planning is so painful is because it’s made up of many involved steps, each taking a good amount of time, all feeling daunting. So we’ve broken it down into 5 separate steps, each of which can be done by either partner.
(To use it for yourself, copy each of the 5 tabs over to your own Google Sheet (annoying, I know. We’re busy building a better option) and customize as you need.)
Our top Pro Tips: 1) Give yourself lots of time so you can just do one step a week 2) Divide and conquer with parents of your kids’ friends 3) Put extra weight on options with better logistics (eg full day, includes meals, closer location, or yes, less $$) over the content (eg. STEM or super cool soccer camp). Feel free to worry less about the specialized skills they’ll pick up.
With that, let’s walk through this week’s tool, step by step 💪🏽.
1) ✏️Sketch out your summer - Every family can use this step to proactively plan out their summer, whether you have camps in the mix or not. Start with when you might be taking vacation or if a family member is visiting (and could help with childcare 😉). Pop those in and create a Plan A, B and C.
2) 🏕Gather camp options and details - The next step is to find all the options available in your area that would be right for your age kids. Ideally, there would be a magical central place that listed everything (Sawyer is a great resource if it’s in your area) but the next best thing is to make it a social effort - find 3 or 4 other class parents to load up all the options all of your kids might be interested in.
3) 🧩Figure it all out - Now the hardest part. Starting with your Plan A and all of the collected camp options, start to pencil in the ones that work best, accounting for interests, logistics and costs. If you’re planning with other parents, work from the same spreadsheet with each of you having your own family tab so you can try to register your kids with friends (also a lifesaver when it comes to managing logistics like pick-ups/dropoffs). Do the same with your Plan B and C.
4) 🔒Register and lock it down - Now get ‘er done. Divy up registrations with your partner or another family member. Get registration dates into calendars with a link to the spreadsheet. Work down the list, enlisting Plan B or C when needed. Notes costs and post-registration details in the spreadsheet.
5) 📝Summarize and save it - Phew. You did it. Copy over the final plan and tuck it away until ~May when you can pull it out again to figure out joyful logistics.
Putting together this week’s tool highlighted just how much we all are reinventing the same wheel every week when we can be tapping into the work and wisdom of those that have already done it.
Have a Summer Camp planning tip or trick we didn’t cover? I’d love to hear about it and improve our tools - email us at hello@modernvillage.com.
Lucky enough not to be planning for summer camps this year? Feel free to forward to parents in need 🤓.
And finally, we’re still in the early days of gathering these “best practices” of busy parents and sharing them out. I’d love the honest feedback - how is it helpful? How is it not? Email me at avni@modernvillage.com with the 😍, the 😕 and the 😫.
Until next week.
Let’s parent forward.
-avni
Coming up:
💰Family finances. What are the biggies that we should all be thinking about and what are the tools and services making it easier?
🥰Relationships - it can be hard to figure out how to find the time and energy to invest back into our relationship with our partner. How do others do it?
🙋🏻♀️Build your Back-up Bench - for those of us that don’t live near family or close friends, it’s a lifesaver having a Back-up Bench of people we can count on in a pinch. We’ll walk through how to build one that works for the long haul.
Do you have tips, tricks or tools that you think could help everyone? Share them here: https://themodernvillage.typeform.com/to/CpIfhT