The hardest part of sending a child to sleepaway camp is not the goodbye at the bus. It is the year before, when a family has to pick one camp out of hundreds scattered from the Poconos to Maine, armed with little more than glossy brochures, a camp fair handshake and whatever the neighbors swear by. A new website built on Long Island is trying to replace that guesswork. Ten for Two, at tenfortwocamps.com, gathers 143 overnight camps into one free, searchable directory, lets families line camps up side by side, and sends an information request to as many as six camps with one click.

The name says who it is for

Camp families have a saying: kids live ten months for two. The school year is the waiting room, and the weeks on a lake somewhere upstate are the point. Ten for Two takes its name from that saying, and it is aimed at the families who already know it is true, and at the ones about to find out.

Built by someone who has seen camps from the inside

The founder, Geri Shumer, is a Long Island camp mom who picked her own children's camp the way most families still do: asking around, touring, and hoping she was reading the signs right. What sets her apart is what came next. Shumer spent eight years planning group travel for sleepaway camps and schools, work that put her inside the camp world and showed her how camps actually operate. An editor and writer by trade, she built the resource she wishes she had the first time around, and the site says plainly that it was built on Long Island.

What the site actually does

The directory covers the territory Long Island campers know by heart: the Catskills and the Adirondacks, the Berkshires, the Poconos, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut, plus camps on Long Island itself and a handful farther afield. Filters sort them the way parents actually think. Coed, all boys, all girls, or brother-sister. Full summer or shorter sessions. Traditional camps or specialty programs in sports, the arts, outdoors and adventure, health and wellness, Torah study, and camps built for children with special needs. There is a filter for accreditation from the American Camp Association, one for dietary needs, and one for religious affiliation that runs across the Jewish movements as well as Christian and nondenominational camps, a level of specificity that general directories rarely manage.

Each camp gets a profile, the comparison tool sets camps next to each other feature by feature, and the reviews come from camp families. An account is free, favorites can be saved, and one request form reaches up to six camps at once, which spares a parent six separate rounds of the same questions.

Advice with sand in its shoes

What separates Ten for Two from a directory with a search box is the advice underneath it. There is a printable checklist for camp tours, including what Shumer calls the director test and the mayonnaise test, along with the staff questions most families never think to ask. There is a guide to the call every parent dreads, the one from the camp health center, and which questions to ask before deciding whether to involve the pediatrician. There is a clear-eyed section on money: what full-summer, half-summer and starter sessions tend to cost, where the hidden costs sit, and how families actually afford it, including nonprofit camps. And there is a readiness guide whose central test is hard to argue with: the strongest sign a child is ready for overnight camp is that the child is the one asking to go.

The homecoming advice reads like someone who has stood in that parking lot. Bring a garbage bag for the contents of the duffel and leave the bag in the garage. Book the lice check before the bus arrives. Then skip the interrogation on night one, because comfort food and a long sleep come first.

Why the timing matters

Camp decisions are made in the off season. Families aiming at next summer tour camps in the fall, and the most sought-after camps and sessions fill long before the weather breaks. A tool that turns forty open browser tabs into one organized list arrives at exactly the right end of the calendar.

For a Long Island parent, what changes is the starting point. The old search began with the two camps your block already attends and widened only as far as word of mouth could reach. This one begins with the whole map, drawn by somebody local who has already made the drive, taken the tour and waited by the mailbox for the letter home.