The first month of the year arrives as this glorious blank slate. Until we fill it with grids. And so begins spreadsheet season.

I made mine on January 3. When I texted this triumph to a friend, she responded, “LOL, mine’s already two weeks old.” Spreadsheets pop up on email and in the kindergarten parent WhatsApp group. We swap good ones the way others share stock tips or sheet pan dinner recipes.

I’m not talking about tax prep—god knows that spreadsheet can wait a few months. No, I’m talking about summer camp. Somehow January has become the time to Tetris out what our kids will be doing six months from now. At my house, June, July, and August are fully planned (at least on the spreadsheet) before the recycling truck has collected our Christmas tree from the curb.

It’s not because I want to live this way: shelling out $500 for soccer camp while the playfield is still dusted with snow, reducing the promise of our most carefree season to data entry and deadlines. But for 11 weeks—that’s one-fifth of the year—families with school-age kids find our routines totally upended. This regularly scheduled void offers relatively few workarounds.

Summer camp is an enormous privilege, no doubt. One day of camp costs $178 on average, according to the American Camp Association. But for my household, where both adults have full-time jobs, what’s our alternative? I’d love to just send my kids outside to play, but eventually they’ll heed the siren song of Camp YouTube. In Seattle, where nearly two-thirds of adult residents were born out of state, most of us don’t have a willing grandparent in the vicinity who might tag in for summer childcare. And with a cost of living that’s 50 percent higher than the national average, you can bet a lot of us parents need to work.

Our tech-savvy, optimization-prone citizenry conquers this chaos with our good friend, the Excel file format. It helps us stay on top of what camps exist, when they’re offered, and a week-by-week rundown of our tentative signup plan. Bonus points for spreadsheets that include the date registrations open, which might be anywhere from November to April. The good places fill up fast. If zoo camp opens its sign-ups at noon and you log on at 12:02, your kid can plan on zero face time with river otters come July.

My son’s favorite camp is Moss Bay, where kids spend the week sailing, kayaking, and paddling on Lake Union. I quickly learned that registering him requires the precision timing of a rocket launch. It wasn’t always like this, says owner Kevin Bynum. Once upon a time in Moss Bay’s 25-year history of summer camp, parents would call in May to ask what might be available. “Now people are calling January 2 saying, ‘when are sign-ups?’” He remembers that change happened about a decade ago. You know, right around the time Seattle started showing up on all those “Fastest-growing cities in the US” lists.

Bynum would rather put this all off until, say, March. But he listens to parents, who want to lock down certain camps before they move on to the less-competitive options. “Instead of March it became February.” Last year, sign-ups crept into late January when Moss Bay switched from a traditional free-for-all registration to a lottery system. Before, “it was 3,000 people on the same site in the same two minutes.” Sessions sold out before parents could finish typing in their names or email addresses.

I envy friends whose kids can attend a summer program at their school, mucking around with soccer balls and monkey bars. Sure, I could just sign up for whatever’s cheapest, closest, or simply available. I often do. But if I’m going to part with several thousand dollars over the summer, I’d rather pay for activities my kids will actually enjoy. Selfishly it’s also harder to get small people out the door in the morning when they aren’t psyched about the destination.

My own childhood summers involved books, TV, and playing deeply dorky games of house in the trees at the edge of my yard.  That doesn’t fly in an urban environment, but some camp emails I receive have the depressing whiff of parents who’ve been stage-managing their kid’s MIT application since before they learned to ride a bike (FWIW, my kids did enjoy bike camp). Ceramics camp? Fun. A week learning spy skills? Could be useful. Chat GPT camp? For $850? Well, I suppose “I outsourced my mom’s job to a robot” could be a memorable college essay.

I don’t need my son and daughter to spend the week learning to write code or play squash or run a hedge fund. My biggest philosophy around summer camp: They should be within a 15-minute drive from my house. Even the all-day sessions are way shorter than your average business day. Factor in a cross-town trip and you’re lucky if you can write a to-do list and answer a few emails before it’s time for pickup.

Thus, the spreadsheets. I’ve been making them since my son was in kindergarten—once the shock of this new reality wore off. But when my daughter aged out of year-round preschool, summer became a word problem from some diabolical math book: Two kids have camps that start at 9am. One is in Greenlake; the other is in Columbia City. Dad can do drop-off, but Mom has a meeting at 8:30. Solve for WTF.

Seattle’s tech community is filled with the sort of overachievers who might seek out a nonstop slate of primo summer camps. But also people like Helen Wang, who looked at this process and saw a problem prime for disruption. A mother of two with a PhD in computer science, Wang runs a Bellevue-based company called 6crickets, essentially a searchable database of local summer camps. Instead of slapdashing your own Excel sheet, you can plug in factors like siblings’ ages, distance, cost, and subject matter. The results include only camps that partner with 6crickets, but the site can build you a suggested schedule of available camps, and even share it with another parent so you can sync up your kids. Because going to a new place every week is way easier with a buddy (not to mention a carpool). “It’s the shopping mall of summer camps,” Wang says. She told me the technology required to organize all this was surprisingly complicated—an acknowledgment that made me (and my janky spreadsheet) feel seen.

Once summer arrives, I know it will speed by in a blur as I crunch my workdays into the narrow time slots claimed through so many calendar alerts and credit card outlays. And that’s no way to experience the best months of the year in the Pacific Northwest. My kids deserve better. I do too. So I started a new tab on my spreadsheet: overnight camps.