Kids are hard.

Between being brand new with kids and having to work with the very wild Russian immigrants my first summer as camp counselor was wild. But nothing compared to some people. I noticed that there was one counselor, Tom, whose entire schedule seemed to consist of tree climbing. I thought this was just general laziness but during our first staff meeting he was called out on it by the assistant director, Flora who never got ruffled about anything.

"Hey man." He said sounding stoned, he always sounded stoned. "Trees are life and they're getting they're sharing life energy by climbing on trees."

Flora who was always patient replied "Well I get that but maybe you can limit the tree climbing to a few minutes when you have free time."

Tom closed his eyes "Hey man. I have to go where the energy tells me. I can't be a slave to schedules and rules." Flora's eyes went wide but she didn't say anything. I don't think it was a surprise to anyone when the Tom didn't show up the next Monday and there was a brand new counselor in charge of his group.

As exasperated as I was my group of Wild Russians, I didn't lose my composure. I can't say that of everyone. I was in the kitchen, taking a short break from my group to bake some cookies we'd mixed. There was a multi purpose room next to the kitchen and there was a little serving counter that let you look into the. I saw the group led by a guy named Dan whose co-counselor was Shelly. Like me she'd never worked with kids before, but she always seemed angry and intense. Their group was sitting in a small circle and being a little rowdy. Dan was off to the side helping tie a girl's shoes. Shelly was serving snack time. She'd given out crackers and cheese and was having the kids pass cups and she started to pour milk from carton. One of the kids kept taking the cups and throwing them around the circle.

. One of the crackers hit another kid in the forehead and she started to cry. I could see Shelly was visibly upset. I was about to help her but the timer went off on my cookies and I grabbed them out of the oven. I could hear Shelling telling this kid to stop and the kid just laughing. I put the cookies down and rounded the corner to help out. As I was doing this I heard a combination of gasps and laughter from the group. When I got into the room I saw the noisy kid covered with dripping white milk and Shelly holding an upside down carton; nobody was surprised when she didn't come back the next day.