Hey, Buggy Boys and Girls!

As you probably DIDN’T know, World Mosquito Day is today. Mosquito Day may not seem like a day you’d want to celebrate, but it actually makes good sense. It’s observed on August 20th every year since 1897 when the British doctor Sir Ronald Ross made the discovery that mosquitoes were transmitting malaria from person to person. To raise awareness over the matter, he insisted World Mosquito Day be observed annually.

In observance of this day, I thought we could take a look at some very interesting and little known facts about those pesky little buggers. 

Boys don’t Bite
You know how people are always complaining when the mosquitoes are out? Well, it’s just the females. No, no—not the folks complaining! I’m talking about the mosquitoes. It’s just the female mosquitoes that bother you. The male mosquitoes are harmless and will not drink blood—in fact, they don’t even have the mouthpiece that the females do to pierce the flesh of an animal host. Instead, they just drink nectar.

Don’t Spit on Me
The worst thing about a mosquito bite is the itch! Am I right? But did you know that it’s not really the bite that’s causing your itching sensation. It’s her spit! As she’s drinking, your blood at the surface of this microscopic wound begins clotting as part of our body’s healing process. If your blood clots too fast, she can’t get a good drink. So she spits on your wound which prevents clotting. It’s that slobber she left behind that our body responds to with itchiness and histamines.

Slow Poke         
Yeah, they’re vicious bloodsuckers, these girls. But did you know that they’re actually pretty slow. Yep. Despite being four times lighter than a feather (which you’d think would aid their speed), they only get around at a little over a mile per hour. That makes them one of the slowest flying insects of them all. Dragonflies, for comparison, can be found zippin’ around at 35 miles per hour!

So the next time you find yourself surrounded by a swarm of mosquitoes, remember to blame the female gender for this irritation and keep guarded with the proper repellents which can be found when you click right here. Share your new knowledge with people for World Mosquito Day and, as always, thanks for reading!

- John

Hey, Sunshine!

Summer camp and running around in sun showers go hand in hand. And when you’re spending long, active days outdoors, you’ll need to reapply your sunblock. But how will you know when it’s time to reapply? That’s where SPOTMYUV® comes in.

These Hypoallergenic Stickers go on your skin and, the same as your skin, they react to sunlight and sunscreen. When the time comes that you ought to reapply your sunscreen, it changes color: transparent when your protection is working and purple when your layer of sunscreen loses its strength.

Graduates of the University of Waterloo's Nanotechnology Engineering program and overflowing with a passion for sun protection, Andrew Martinko, Chad Sweeting and Derek Jouppi co-invented the detection stickers. With loved ones in their lives who’ve been impacted by skin cancer, these guys had a burning need to bring a product to market that would inform someone when it’s time to reapply sunscreen.

Skin cancer is the most common cancer in the world and almost 100% preventable when sunscreen is used correctly. Unfortunately, people use sunscreen less than half as much as they should! These Detection Stickers definitely help!

A rather clever product to help increase our behavior and habits when it comes to sun safety, SPOTMYUV^® became the latest brand name in the line of products from Dig It^®, a Canadian company founded in 2008. When a successful pitch for these Detection Stickers resulted in a deal with Kevin O’Leary (one of the sharks from Shark Tank), SPOTMYUV^® was born.

“As a mother of three,” says Claudia Harvey, CEO of Dig It^®. “I am committed to bringing products to the market that help people take care of themselves and their families. There has been no other product introduced in recent years that is more important for those who care about their sun safety than SPOTMYUV^®.”

Check out the Detection Stickers from SPOTMYUV^® available right here at Everything Summer Camp. Be sure that you stay safe in the summer sun this season and wear your sun protection sticker to know when your sunblock layer is losing its power. As always, thanks for reading, Camp Fans! Till next time.

- John

Hey, Camp Fans!

Summer gets busy fast—especially near the end; we all want to fit in as much fun in the sun as we can before the season ends. But make sure you don’t miss out on the opportunity to share your camp stories with our widespread camp community, not to mention win a cool participatory prize from Everything Summer Camp!

Throughout the month of August we’ve been and will continue to be taking your submissions into our ‘Share Your Camp Story’ Contest here at Everything Summer Camp. Get your memories written up or make a video and send your submissions into us—our final call is just exactly two weeks away on the last minute of August 31.

Don’t forget: Everyone who submits gets a $20 gift certificate to Everything Summer Camp as well as a chance to be one of our ten, random, and lucky winners! Once we have everyone’s submissions, we’ll randomly select our winners and publish each of the winners one day at a time leading up to our grand prize winner of a $300 Everything Summer Camp Gift Certificate.

We’ll also have three winners of the second-place, $100 Gift Certificate and six winners of our third-place, $50 Gift Certificate.

Storytelling is an extremely useful means for campers to cement all the fun memories and valuable skill sets that they learned at camp. It’s great to review the new experiences you’ve had to help yourself process and reflect on what you learned. Need help with some ideas of what to talk about? Check out the initial Contest announcement I wrote last month. 

Please include in your submissions your first name and your last name initial, the camp you visited, and how many summers you’ve spent at camp. Parents are more than welcome to send us their submissions based on camp from their perspective or their own camp experiences as well.

We love hearing your summer camp stories and can’t wait to receive a fresh new collection of stories from this year! Share your stories by clicking right here. And, as always, thanks for reading, Camp Fans!

- John

Hey, Camp Folks!

Thanks for joining us once again for today’s post in which we’ll discover another Adage Origin where I deep dive all those popular phrases and sayings that everyone knows, but seldom understand why they mean what they mean. They’re so built in to our language that we may not even realize we’re using them. Today’s phrase is ‘The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence’.

People often times shorten this phrase to ‘The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side’ or even just ‘The Grass is Always Greener’, but it all means the same thing. It’s pointing out the notion we’ve all had that the next person over has it better than we do—that, maybe under a different set of circumstances, our life could be a little nicer (or a lot nicer). The phrase is most commonly used to remind people that this is never really the case and just a notion in their head.

The origins of some other phrases can be rather unsure as to the time it was coined and who coined it. This one, however, was written in 1545 by a man named Erasmus of Rotterdam in England. But he didn’t write ‘The grass is always greener…’. No. He wrote that “The corne in an other mans ground semeth euer more fertyll and plentifull then doth oure own.”

Translated to our current speech, it would say, “The corn in another man’s ground seems ever more fertile and plentiful than our own does.” But what’s this guy talking about corn for? The phrase is about grass, isn’t it? Well, it’s likely that the corn was replaced with grass to make the saying more universal. Not everyone grows corn. Almost everyone has at least a little bit of grass.

Interestingly enough, corn (which is typically considered a vegetable) is actually a grain with the botanical classification of a grass. So corn is a grass anyhow. Both are also green, like the color associated with envy which could have also been an influential element when the final version of this phrase was crafted.

And, as I already mentioned, this phrase is most often used as a reminder for people to be grateful for the things they have. Be grateful for everything in your life including your grass (and corn if you have it) and, as always, thanks for reading!

- John

Hey, Dessert Devourers!

The campfire craving that has everybody asking for “some more”, these gooey dessert sandwiches consist of chocolate, marshmallow, and graham cracker. Today is National S’more Day. There’s really only one dessert to have when you’re sitting around a campfire. S’mores, though they weren’t always known as such, are the traditional campfire treat that have been around for roughly a century.

America’s traditional treat, S’mores are sandwiches of roasted marshmallow and a piece of chocolate between two Graham Crackers. Short for “Some more,” this delicious dessert got its name because of what it makes you say after you eat it: “Mmm! Can I have s’more?”

A man named Alec Barnum is said to be the one who invented the s’more, though the dessert’s true history is somewhat of a mystery as its recipe appears in a book that was written by the Girl Scouts in 1927 called Trampling and Trailing with the Girl Scouts.

You can make your own variations to s’mores recipes. Some people add peanut butter, others add fruit; as long as you have the initial three flavors, you have a s’more. In fact, all the desserts I listed at the beginning of this post can be made s’more flavored—s’more cake, s’more pie, s’more pudding, s’more brownies, s’more ice cream, s’more cookies, s’more dip, s’more bars, s’more donuts, s’more rolls…that’s—that’s a lot of s’mores.

Of course, big s’more fans here at Everything Summer Camp, join our S’more Bucks rewards program for our online store. It’s a fantastic way to get free money for little effort that’s redeemable for the camping gear available on our site.

Learn more about our S’more Bucks and get signed up with this previous Blog post. Appreciate your S’more Bucks as well as the actual treat and, as always, thanks for reading. Now go roast some ‘mallows and smoosh your S’mores together. Cheers!

- John