This is Dinah’s first Girl Scout day camp! The big girls (6th-12th graders), led all the younger girls to a circle in the middle of the field where they sang camp songs while they waited for all the other girls to arrive.
I was volunteering all four days, and so Tyra, Dinah and I all got to go. Day camp this year was planned completely by Girl Scouts in sixth through twelfth grade, and so the adult volunteers just had to show up and help at each of the booths. But before they could go to the booths, the girls had to be put in the groups that they would be with for the rest of camp. Dinah got to be in the Pink Ponies group.
Tyra got to be in one of the blue groups. I don’t remember what they called themselves.
On day one, I got to be at the boondoggling booth. I haven’t done this since I was in middle school, and at that time I didn’t know there was a name for it! So it was fun to get to re-learn something I already knew before. A lot of the girls had trouble understanding how to do it, so by the time the end of the day rolled around and we had the Daisy groups last, we decided that we would just have the Daisies braid instead.
When I got home, I finished a boondoggle that I started during the day, and I had to figure out how to tie it off. So I googled it, and found a whole website of different boondoggle stitches! It was amazing! Ethan recently went to Webelos Woods, and one of the projects he started there was a boondoggle to work toward his Craftsman badge, but he hadn’t finished it. He was amazed at all the other boondoggle stitches that there are to do too, and exclaimed that he really wants to do the Cobra stitch. I told him that there is no way I’m going to let him start another one when he won’t finish the one he’s got!
Day two, I got to be at the yarn doll station. This was not very well prepared. I remembered seeing an email before day camp started with instructions for the yarn doll, but they were very small, and I had no idea that that is where I was going to be, so I didn’t think much of it. The email didn’t actually say anything; it just had an attachment. So getting to day camp and finding out that everyone’s attachments in their emails were different based on where they were going to be helping, was kind of frustrating. So at the yarn doll station, there was yarn, and ribbon, and a couple pair of scissors. No instructions, and no other supplies. When we finally found someone that had instructions we found that we were missing other things. Like pieces of cardboard. Step one for these dolls, was to wrap the yarn around a piece of cardboard 26 times, and we had just a few minutes to come up with a whole bunch of pieces of cardboard! It was crazy but we made it work. It was also super windy, so our cardboard, yarn and rolls of ribbon kept trying to blow away.
When we got home from day camp, Ethan proudly announced that he had finished his boondoggle, and asked if we could please go get some supplies so he could try some of the other stitches. Totally amazing to me, he had ZERO interest in finishing that project until he saw that he could do something else with it, and that I wouldn’t let him until he had finished the first one. Then suddenly he is done and begging me to go to a craft store.
Day three of day camp, I got to help at the cow door hanger station. This craft was so involved with passing out plates, and papers and scissors and glue and markers, and bells, that I had NO time to take pictures of anything. The first couple of days, I tried to get pictures of all of my girls in my troop while they were at my booth, but yesterday that just was not happening!
Today, day four of day camp, the girls got to perform skits that they had been putting together the other days of camp.
I was too far away to hear anything of what the skits were about, but my awesome zoom on my camera could get pictures from that distance. After the skits were over, the girls got to rotate to the different stations and today they were just carnival type games. I got to manage the boot toss game. There were eight boots and the girls got to try to toss ping pong balls into them. Again, no pictures because I was too busy chasing ping pong balls before they got to the street. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and my girls can’t wait to find out what day camp will bring for next year. 🙂
And check out the patch! The big girls, that planned everything, also designed the shirt and the patch!
