“No Soup for You” at Camp Grandpa > A Military Heritage

The Camp Grandpa CrewSummer time for the military community often includes visits to family from a long distance. When our military brats were young, we tried to include some time with their grandparents/aunts/uncles/cousins as part of our summer.

If we were close enough and schedules worked we even left them for a week(s) at grandparents or camps involving the family. One year during a PCS we left the guys at grandpa’s and Leanne at my sister’s when we went house hunting. It was the only time in a 30 year career that we could look ahead, find a house before arriving in the local area and it was wonderful!

A memory of one of those summer moments came out during my dad’s funeral/memorial service this year when Dan related a story about his grandfather sending the two brothers out to work a project in the rain and telling them to “Go Be Ducks”.
Hot Dogs and S’Mores!
Skip ahead about 25-30 years and the roles have changed, we are now the grandparents. A broad spectrum of ages (one is graduating from Army basic training today) but the military heritage of visiting continues with “Camp Grandpa.” Somehow grandma decided that all of her hard work should be identified as Camp Grandpa but I digress.

We have loved our times together for many years now with only one real interruption during surgery for Grandpa. So when they arrived this year we were excited to say the least. Military planning was included of course with a schedule of events to keep grandpa straight.

The camp was full of humor, no time for tears, fun activities, early morning hikes to the river, four wheel quad rides, a minor league baseball game, horseback riding and yes we kept them busy! They behaved so well and it left us with so many great memories. This was the first year that Camp included a grand daughter (we did have a niece attend a couple of years) and she thrived with her older boy cousins. We set the rules and one of them was that parent rules do not apply! Up early, late to bed, ice cream smoothies for a snack at 2, etc. were the rules but grandpa and grandma were to be listened to of course.

Baseball game, personal guard during Star Wars Night!We laughed hard when during a game of “Go Fish” (used to calm them down after a full day of full speed ahead times was interrupted by a “No Soup for You” response from an 8 year old who had never seen the Seinfeld TV show but had heard the response from someone and it just fit the moment and left us all rolling on the floor!