The past few days have been super fun and packed full of Canadensis goodness!!  This weekend, a large crew of Canadensis folks headed up to Holyoke, Mass to celebrate the wedding of Alyssa and Mike.  They met at Canadensis more than 5 years ago, and have continued to return year after year.  They were both Head Counselors in 2011, and their time at camp was mentioned quite a bit throughout the ceremony and reception.  They are truly a perfect and loving couple, and I wish them all the best!

The day after the wedding, we moved our Camp Canadensis office to the WHYY Studios – which is the National Public Radio station in Philadelphia.  We were trained and oriented as volunteers for their fall membership pledge drive.  We sat and answered phones for more than 5 hours, and just like everything we do…we made it a lot of fun!  It was great to hear from people connected with Canadensis, most notably, our own Jason “JCal” Calabretta – his father Peter – and Brandon Starkman’s grandma!  In total, we took pledges that summed $3,693…and we enjoyed it so much that we might be back for a televised fundraiser in the future…stay tuned!

This upcoming weekend will also be packed with Canadensis goodness because we are hosting our Canteen on the Fly, ice cream get-togethers in a town near you!  However, we love when camp friends host their own reunions and tell us about them!  I got an amazing email and photo from a great camp mom recently that simply said “These three girls live each other so much and are the best of friends. Thought you might enjoy seeing a picture of them.”  I thought you might enjoy seeing the picture too, so check it out below!

I have a long drive to work everyday, and when I discovered National Public Radio last year, it made the drive feel a lot shorter!  Some of us from Camp Canadensis will be volunteering today at our local NPR Station, WHYY.  It serves the Philadelphia area and South Jersey, so if you live nearby you can tune into 90.9FM.  If you’ve ever enjoyed NPR, and you are over the age of 18, please considering calling 1-888-345-9499 and pledging your support while we are answering phones on Monday, October 17th between 3-8PM.  You will have the chance to talk to with one of the Canadensis volunteers…”Aunt” Terri Saltzman, Don Cannon, Eric Forti, Robin Forti, Cara Corradetti, Matt Unger, Phoebe Gurr, Neil Sukonik, Dave Malter (my amazing boyfriend who took the day off to help us) or myself.

More great images from summer 2011…

I love arts and crafts – I can often be found in the Canadensis Art Shack during the summer!  I take any opportunity to get creative, and I had a good reason for my latest project.  Two of my very good friends (who are also in the camp biz) recently adopted an adorable new Bernese Mountain Dog named Luke.  I’m going over for dinner tonight, and I wanted to give them a useful gift, so to make a gift like this, do the following:

1.  Purchase or repurpose a nice glass jar.

2.  Fill with useful items – for a dog that means toys & treats!

3.  Top it with a fun ribbon.  This one has paw prints, and it’s an adhesive ribbon so it can be reused for crafts later.

4.  Add a label – this label is actually a chalk board (such a cool item!)

5.  Scribble a note – I know mine is a bit messy, but it’s the best I could do with chalk!

I got such lovely feedback about my last blog post of “framed” images from Summer 2011 at Canadensis, so I decided to make a recurring blog post called “Frame Worthy Friday”.  Here are four more amazing photos from last summer, and check back every Friday for more!

You know when you take an amazing photo, and you decide that it’s “Frame Worthy”?  A moment you want to preserve forever and look at often is deserving of a frame that will only add to the enjoyment of the photo.  There are so many photos like this from the summer (a credit to our amazing photographer LMac), so I wanted to share a few images that I “framed” with you.  Are any of these your favorite summer photos?

One of my favorite winter events is the Canteen on the Fly that we will be doing for the third time this year!  Since canteen is one of the favorite hang out spots at Camp Canadensis, we take the concept on the road, and set up gatherings at ice cream stores in communities where we draw a lot of families from.  We love seeing our current campers, new campers, and even people who are just interested in hearing more about Canadensis at these events.  ALL of us from the winter office are there, so it’s a great chance to get to know us better.

Check out the super cute graphic for the event (if you click on it, it will enlarge)!  I’ll hope to see you there in October!

Here is another photo of the Camp Canadensis Crew on our recent trip to Maine.  Even while riding the bus, we stick together…at the front!

This week I was fortunate enough to take a trip with some of the ‘Canadensis Crew’ pictured above.  From left to right – Director Brian Krug, Assistant Director Pam Levi (me!), Girls Head Counselor Robin Forti, Director Eric Forti and Owner Neil Sukonik.  We attended the American Camp Association  “Residential Camp Conference” which takes us each year to visit the facilities of many of the great camps in the Northeast.  This year, we took the trip all the way up to Maine, and we got to share ideas and learn from other camp directors while taking in the sights of some beautiful campgrounds.

All of us at Canadensis love to collaborate with other camp directors – we think it strengthens us as a movement, and helps make the Canadensis experience better for our campers and families.

When we got into Maine, we had a little bit of downtime in Freeport near our hotel, so we explored town and found an incredible bakery “When Pigs Fly” – seriously, go check it and and order some of the most incredible bread ever! –  www.sendbread.com – We also saw the original LLBean which is now a huge store open around the clock.  Here is a photo of Robin and I in front of a huge hiking boot!

Hello Canadensis Friends!  This will probably be my last time blogging from up at Camp Canadensis during the 2011 season because I’ll be moving back home to Philly tomorrow.  The plan had been to move back after our Indian Summer/Family Camp Labor Day Weekend, but we lost power after Hurricane Irene and it just came back on last night!  Unfortunately we had to cancel the weekend just in case we were still powerless.

During the 4 days with no power, it was actually really fun at camp!  Some of the post-camp staff taught me how to play an awesome game called “Phase 10” which is kind of like UNO, but takes a lot longer to play (have I mentioned before that I love games!?)  I also got to play some Monopoly with some of the full time staff, and to tell the truth…it got pretty interesting!  Eric and Matt (who run the operations of camp) were incredible during the power outage, they hooked up a generator to the kitchen, so we still had great food, water, and a place to charge our cell phones!

Luckily we had beautiful weather during the day – so during down time it fun to ride bikes or go for walks, but at night it was totally dark.  That was when we got creative – one night we had a Domino’s Pizza party for all the staff in Health Center (also hooked up to the generator) and I ended my nights reading by candlelight – it was great, and I finally finished the two books I had wanted to read all summer.

The best part of the power outage was that we had time to get crafty!!  A big project that I started (and will likely finish in pre-camp next year) is refinishing some chairs and “camp-ifying” them!  I found these awesome chairs up in our warehouse, and they are super sturdy with great bones, but they needed some love:

After unscrewing the seat cushion, I spent time cleaning off the years of dust, and stripping whatever paint I could remove.  Then I got the spray paint out and covered the chairs (and my hands!) with a fresh coat of blue.  Now, the truly fun part was recovering the cushion!  These chairs will be in our Fabric Art program once they are finished, so I originally thought to take fun and different patterns of fabric from the fabric closet, but then Cara had the great idea to use Canadensis T-shirts!!!  I cut the t-shirts up so that they were flat squares, and I used a staple gun to attach it to the cushion before screwing it back on to the wood.  Here is what the finished project looks like:

Even Annie approves of the new chairs!!  I hope this inspires you to get crafty!  If you have any “Canadensis” themed crafts that you’d like to share, please send them my way!