My daughter is  loving Kim’s Kids Day Camp and that’s a good thing. At the beginning of
the summer she was vehemently anti-camp. She tried a day camp two years ago and
said, "Never again," It was a gymnastics day camp and I guess she had big
expectations: she probably expected to spend the entire day jumping on
a trampoline and doing cartwheels.

Turns out, the kids had to
do quite a bit of exercise in the morning. Warm-ups. And my daughter  wasn’t
too crazy about THAT. One time they went to a public pool on Douglas
Street in Brooklyn and OSFO claims the water was really, really
shallow: "Two feet high, Mom. Not so great for swimming." She didn’t
much like the kids either.

Okay, okay. So I let her quit
after a week and she happily hung around the house. I tried not
to think about the hundreds of dollars wasted.

Last summer,
day camp was, of course, out of the question. We spent
afternoons at the pool in the Mariott Hotel in downtown Brooklyn, where we enjoyed the sauna, the whirlpool, and a chance for my daughter to take
swimming lessons.

As this summer approached, I wasn’t sure what my daughter would be up for. When I  found a chess camp at a
place called "Let’s Play Chess," a small storefront on Fourth Avenue
between 8th and 9th Streets, I was surprised when my daughter said yes. For
three intensive hours a day, it was chess, chess, and more
chess. I signed her up for one week as an experiment and my
"anti-camper" seemed to enjoy it.

At the end of the week,
the teacher gave my daughter a trophy because "she improved the most of
everybody this week." That was a big thrill. But there were no girls at
the chess camp. My daughter  was
itching to hang out with girls and to go swimming.

That’s when
she asked if she could join her best friend at a camp called Kim’s Kids
where they do swimming, hiking, and special trips.

"But you
hate day camp," I said. "I know. But I want to try this one," she replied. "Well, if I’m going to pay the money, you have to promise
not to quit. You have to make an effort to like it,"  I said
firmly. "I will," she said.

I  had to jump over hoops
to get her into Kim’s Kids which is run by a fifth grade teacher at
PS 321 who really knows what he’s doing. But I
was able to do it. I begged, I pleaded, I filled out the forms
and handed over a check for $475 dollars.

After the first day
at Kim’s Kids, I knew it was a go. "It was great!" my daughter exclaimed, still wet from the beach with swatches of sunburn under her
eyes. "And my counselor is really pretty," she added. All the kids look
exhausted but like they had enjoyed themselves. From that day on, I knew we’d found a camp that even a avowed "anti-camper" like my daughter  could enjoy.