• Pink lemonade (fondly called bug juice in my circles)

• Jacks (onsies, bounce, twosies, bounce, threesies, bounce)

• Swimming until my skin gets all wrinkly

• Sack lunches featuring cream cheese and grape jelly sandwiches (don’t knock it till you try it)

• Singing songs on bumpy buses

• Coming home with a killer tan

Reminiscences of my own childhood camp days. Some of the best memories I have.

I hope this for my children. That they will have special, camp fun memories to carry them into adulthood. Memories that they one day will pass on to their own children.

Instead, they get. Math.

Yep. That’s where we are this week and next. Math camp at Texas Mathworks in San Marcos. My son came home today bubbling over with excitement about learning how to graph algebraic equations. In fact, spent the rest of the day playing with his calculator and graph paper.

His memories of Camp? I suspect something along the lines of…

• Playing fastest calculator finger

• Competing to see who can recite the most digits of pi

• Building Möbius strips for arts and crafts

• Getting a tan not by sun, but by sine and cosine

Is it just me, or is he missing a big dose of fresh air, solid exercise and good, clean, silly fun?

This is the question that has been taunting me all week. I freely own up to the fact that math is not my idea of summer fun. But, it is his. In fact, it’s his dream camp.

I keep reminding myself that these summer skills are laying the foundation for a four-year scholarship at MIT, and that one day, he will delight in sharing his own camp memories with his kids.

I just wonder if his children’s eyebrows will furrow together in that “gee, aren’t you lame” look when he regales his childhood algebraic adventures. The same way his do now when I tell him about bug juice.

UPDATE: THREE YEARS LATER: My son attended Texas Mathworks for three years running and it was his favorite camp ever. This year, he graduates to a much higher level math camp that will give him high school credit. If you’ve got a kid who loves math…or one who just needs to brush up on his math skills…I give this camp an 11 out of a possible score of 10! You just have to be willing to make the drive.