If you, like we, have successfully convinced your tweeny-bopper that two weeks at sleep-away camp is something for them (as opposed to money well-spent on yourself) you may well find yourself with more free time than usual.  We would like to humbly suggest that you spend some of that time and mess, freely and joyously, with their little heads.

Our daughter, for example, is at a Girl Scout camp that prohibits electronics and, especially, phones.  So in our first letter (daily letter writing being highly encouraged) we decided to send her a “Camp Phone”.  We grabbed a picture of her phone, some screen caps of her favorite apps, sized them all in CorelDraw (but anything would do) and printed the whole mess out on card-stock.

Some highlights:

• She has a camera app!  Her instructions are: “Frame the shot, press the button and remember what you saw.”
• She has a YouTube App!  All she has to do is point the phone at something interesting (like a cat or a baby) and watch.  This being version one, however, there’s no rewind.  Or fast forward or pause (unless your subject is really cooperative).
• We included the “Off” button.  So that she can save power.
• We’re so wealthy that we included two phones!  See how good we are to her?
• There’s plenty of games – if you flip through the cards fast enough it looks like you’re winning!

The whole project took about two hours and that includes the pre-requisite fighting with the printer about paper settings.  Pretty cheap to simultaneously let your kid know that you’re thinking about them and completely annoy them.