My daughter the homegirl

M is attending a Baltimore City YMCA camp this summer. It's a standard day camp, with lots of your typical arts & crafts, outdoor play, and time spent flapping around wildly in the facility's pool. After some initial reservations about being away from Mommy, she's been enjoying it quite a bit. But the truly interesting thing about it, at least to me, is that of her age group -- a gaggle of about 25 preschool-age campers dubbed The Buccaneers (and how cute is THAT?) -- she's maybe one of two white kids.

The camp is overwhelmingly African American in every age group (as is Baltimore City), and from where I sit it's kind of an amazing experience for her to have -- to BE the racial minority, to know first-hand what that's like, albeit in a very controlled circumstance/environment. I haven't talked with her too much about that part of her experience, and am just allowing her to roll with it for the most part, which she seems to be doing on her own just fine without my meddling. Her best friend is a mixed-race kid, and I don't get the sense that she really pays too much attention to matters of race at this point overall.

And the kids at camp appear to be treating her fine and accepting her. If anything, I get the sense that they're enjoying her novelty. When I go to pick her up in the afternoon, the cluster of 4 or 5 little black girls that M rolls with inspect me as though I'd just entered the atmosphere, having traveled a great distance to Earth from Planet Cracker in the Whitey Galaxy. "HI!" they holler to me as I approach, a discernible lilt in their voices that suggests a mixture of surprise and genuine curiosity.

Anyway, the other day Jamie and I were sitting on the couch getting our Wimbledon on, when M started softly chanting a schoolyard rhyme I'd never heard before -- one involving living with boyfriends and shooting dice, it just so happens. Turns out she's been gettin' schooled by her friends at camp in some pretty awesome childhood verses. In the following video, M and her best buddy demonstrate two:

She clearly hasn't got the actual clapping parts down yet, but I'm guessing that'll come with time and practice. All in good time, my friends, all in good time.