Crafts Every Kid Brought Home From Camp This Summer

Nothing says “end of summer” like taking a step back to bask in the glorious collection of useless crap your kids’ camp counselors had them make with their own two sweaty hands. Here are just some of the many things you will be trying to discreetly remove from your home once your children are back in school, disposing of each arts-and-crafts catastrophe in the garbage one at a time at regular intervals below wads of crumpled-up toy catalogs:

– A kite that will never ever experience flight

– A painted box too small to be useful for anything but a dust mite collection

– Rock pets

– A mask that looks like it was borrowed from Michael Myers

– A white hat colored with markers that stains everything it touches, forever

– Coasters for drinks your kids will never put coasters under because kids don’t do that

© Kim Bongiorno

– A tie-dye shirt that will never be worn because you don’t want to wash it, because won’t it ruin everything in the wash?

– Binoculars that don’t actually do any binocular-ing

– A dreamcatcher that will get hanged over the bed and later mistaken for a spiderweb in the dark, thus ironically causing nightmares

– A foam finger that will only be used to pretend to pick other people’s noses from afar

– A bobblehead that chips each time you look at it, causing your child irreparable emotional damage

© Kim Bongiorno

– Something winter-themed, made of foam and covered in glitter

– A birdhouse, I think? Or maybe it’s a decorative tissue box cover? It’s hard to tell.

– A thousand woven plastic bracelets, at least one of which you are not allowed to take off until you die, along with fistfuls of plastic string with which to make more bracelets that the counselors didn’t see your kids “borrow”

© Kim Bongiorno

– Sand art you will never trust to not end up as carpet art

© Kim Bongiorno

It’s not that we don’t love and adore these artistic expressions by our darling progenies. It’s just that they leave a trail of ink smudges and glitter that smells of soil and old sunblock, which can take over the house if we don’t control it. Besides, before we know it, they’ll be bringing home crates of worksheets and art projects from school that will need a place to be stored too. Like in the circular file by the curb. Just kidding, kids! (I’m not actually kidding.)