The boys went on Kazou camps

March 06, 2026

The boys went on Kazou camps

In Spring break Kabouter had requested to go skiing with Kazou again as he had so much fun last year. Works for me, that means we don't need to go on a ski vacation as a family and I can skip. Ha!

When it approached, it felt silly that he (and his brother also) went on camps since I had now time available but these camps get booked months ahead of time and feel like a lottery to succed in booking so we were happy anyhow. Only one other friend of Kabouter made it to the same camp but some of the kids from last year ended up there also so he knew more people.

Goodbye hug

Jan drove him off to the bus pick-up

Unlike last year mobile phones were allowed and in the mean time he is totally accustomed like a real teenager to always has his phone around. However I didn't want him to take his phone...it's too valuable in my mind to carry around on a camp and he did fine without on all his other camps beforehand. But we wanted to give him the opportunity to make some pictures. And our idea of buying a little disposable analog camera changed to searching our old digital camera's from the depth of our cupboards to finally realise that some old iphones might still have better quality and give him more options.
And so in the end we logged him on on a very old iphone , and as a result he could also text us and friends messages (whatsapp didn't work on this old version and also some games he wished to download didn't work but in the end I thought it was a very good compromise).

And as such we could now and then ask some updates on the skiing, the weather (and hte massive snow dump in the Alpes) and I received a very happy smile that melted my mom's heart as well as some intriguing weird luggage pictures and some sparse pictures from the slopes (since he only dared to take his phone along on the ski slopes for one day). I'm still happy that we had very limited but a bit of contact.

I think he was having fun

Okay...thanks for the picture, I assume?

I guess you are packing up again

Fiesch! I remember the buildings from the sports center from my old Kazou times

After a tiring bus ride where we could track the bus advancements, it was time to pick him up. He had had no sleep, but it was good to hug and then he could catch up on his over 500 missed whatsapp messages from friends. But he's going back skiing with Kazou next time, that's his decision. I feel this was a pretty good camp again.

And since his big brother could go on Kazou camps, Beertje wanted to go as well. But he's much younger and none of the school friends went on camps in this vacation. Most of them don't go on external camps yet (or only maybe once in summer). But Beertje insisted: he had seen one in the Ardennes in Heer-Sur-Meuse in Domaine de Massembre where I've been multiple times myself. They'd visit the caves in Han-Sur-Lesse and he wasn't scared to go on a camp and leave for a week without knowing any friend.

Wow brave boy. I wouldn't have done it at his age. But he really looked forward to it and 3 days before his departure he had made his entire suitcase on his own on his own initiative. Talk about motivation.

A day after his brother's departure it was his turn. I had to take some departure pictures to text to his friends (to declare his "offline presence") and then he left too. He didn't get a phone or camera so we had to wait in silence and wonder if he was making new friends.

Fortunately mid-week Kazou posted some pictures on their website so we saw they were having a good time. When we picked him up we first had to watch a camp dance to which they all participated enthousiastically and some addresses had to be exchanged before we could take him home.