Rebecca – Page 7 – Andelin Adventures

Girl Scouts Trip to the Cabin #1

This is our second year taking the troop to Amy’s family’s cabin in Strawberry. We invite the moms to come with, as it makes for a nice mother & daughter overnighter. Last year we had nine girls, and this year we have thirteen. There was no way we were going to get all thirteen girls, with all their mothers, into the tiny cabin, so we planned two trips to the cabin. This trip was for all the juniors. To have enough seats, we borrowed our old van from Granny, so that I would have plenty of seats to get my girls and their moms to the cabin. Kyle ended up taking all of Friday off so he could be home with the rest of our kids, and borrowing the minivan made it to where he was able to keep the megavan home in case he needed it.

As all of the girls that went up this trip were the ones that went up last year, we had requests from several girls to go up to the water tower as soon as we got there. So we had the girls grab their water and their binders and we hiked up to the water tower, and the girls worked on the scribe badge.

When we came back to the cabin, the girls got to get dinner started in the crock pot to work on their simple meals badge, and they actually did most of the cooking for the whole trip, leaving us moms to sit back and watch. 🙂 Then we worked on the detective badge. We had the girls take their finger prints and write some things that are unique about them. They also got to make necklaces of their names in morse code. I know it sounds crazy, but they used one blue bead for a dot and two blue beads for a dash, and they had clear beads for spacers. They also got to play a game of clue.

This morning after breakfast, we tried to take a longer hike on a trail that Amy remembers using when she was a kid. Tyra looks so small next to the other girls!

Apparently the trail has been purposely blocked off, and so we weren’t able to finish our hike. So we came back to the cabin and finished up some requirements for the badges that we were earning and then we cleaned up and made our way home.

Girl Scout Day Camp

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!

Bridging

As I was preparing for my Girl Scout troop’s bridging ceremony, I went to the shop to rent the bridge that they have there. I was told that another troop was using it and that it wasn’t due to be returned until Monday the 10th. That just wasn’t going to work. I told Kyle of my problem and he decided that for Cub Scouts this week he would have the boys build a bridge. Cub scouts are supposed to bridge from Cubs to Boy scouts too, and building one ourselves it would be available for both Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts. So Monday night Kyle took the van to Home Depot to get the lumber. Tuesday night he came home from work and cut the wood, and Wednesday the Webelos came over to help build it.

They got the main part of the bridge all built, but didn’t have time to finish the rails. Thursday I had a service unit meeting so nothing new happened on the bridge. Yesterday, Kyle came home from work and sanded the bridge down. This, morning he made another run to Home Depot to get some more supplies and he finished the rails.

It came to be time to go to Amy’s house for the end of year party, and Kyle took us all over there and then solicited the help of one of the other dads to help take the seats out of our van and then come back over to our house to get the bridge. I got to stay at Amy’s house and watch the kids play in the yard.

Ethan somehow got a hold of most of the squirters:

Then my Brownies got to bridge to Juniors:

I also got to welcome all of my new Daisies for next year. I am so sad that there isn’t a picture of them, but I gave them a certificate to welcome them to the troop, and they each got a daisy barrette that I made, where each petal was a different color (the colors of the petal awards that Daisy Girl Scouts earn), and I got to give them their first couple of patches. 🙂

Eagle Mountain Pony Express Days Rodeo

My girl scouts got to do the flag ceremony to open the Eagle Mountain Pony Express Days rodeo tonight!

We asked the girls to be there AT 5:00, so, as luck would have it, WE were the ones that were late. However, it wasn’t entirely our fault. Debby came over and I was just finishing getting the kids ready and so I told them to get in the van. The button for the van didn’t unlock the doors…not a good sign. I got the keys and manually unlocked the doors, and while Debby loaded the little kids in the car, I got in and tried to turn it on. The van wouldn’t start. I panicked. It wasn’t even making a sound like it was trying to turn over. It was just dead. So after trying to jump it with Kyle’s car, and trying to jump it with the neighbors car, out of desperation, we split the family in half and half went in Debby’s car and half in Kyle’s car.

The girls did a practice run, and we got to go sit in the stands to watch the pre-show while we waited for the rodeo to start.

We took the girls back down behind the stands to get ready for our turn. I felt like we just stood in the way most of the time because nobody told us where we were supposed to be standing. Amy took Afton back to the box where the microphone is because she was supposed to call out the flags. However, that never happened. The speaker in the box had his own narrative to read and we just had to go with what he was saying. I wish there was some better communication between the rodeo people and our troop so that we would have had a better idea of what to expect. All things considered, the girls did a good job. They didn’t understand the announcers cue for them to walk out of the arena so they stood there a bit longer than they should have but that’s ok, they are cute second, third and fourth graders, so nobody minded.

Next time maybe we will get the girls to all face the audience, instead of looking all over the place.

Then we got to sit back and watch the rest of the rodeo. This is the first rodeo that we have ever taken our kids to, so we weren’t sure just what to expect. But there were guys trying to stay on bucking horses, kids trying to stay on sheep, guys trying to lasso calves and tie them up. There was barrel racing, interestingly, there weren’t any men competing in this; it was mostly women, a couple of teenagers and a couple of younger kids.

The kids seemed to enjoy watching the rodeo, although the girls made several trips to the bathroom (I don’t understand their fascination with porta potties).

Jeremy would make a very cute little cowboy. 🙂

There was also a rodeo ‘clown’. He did some random funny things like sing songs to people in the audience, he hid in a big barrel in the arena while the other guys were riding their horses or chasing the cows. The act that we took pictures of though was when he took two cowboys and laid them on the ground right next to a ramp.

Then he got on his little motorcycle and proceeded to ride up the ramp.

Those poor guys on the ground must have been freaking out. That ramp wasn’t anything more than a folding table, and totally could have broke or fallen over…

To me the scariest part of the rodeo was watching the guys try to stay on the bucking bulls. They didn’t stay on long, and once on the ground those guys had to get up and get out of the way fast. There was one guy that got thrown off and the bull, jumped on him about five times (at least it looked like the bull jumped on him). Thankfully the guy was able to get up and run away and jump onto the fence to get away from the bull.

We stayed to the end. The fireworks at the end of the rodeo really spooked the horses. The horses in the corral behind the arena ran back and forth in the corral as if they were trying to run away from the loud scary bright light, but there was nowhere for them to run.

When we left the rodeo there were officers directing traffic and they directed Kyle towards the city center and they directed Debby and myself toward the highway, so we had to take the long way home. We got home, and unloaded the kids, and I just love seeing them all tuckered out like this:

World Thinking Day

When I was a girl scout I remember participating in an activity that we called “International day”. We got together with a whole bunch of other troops and each troop represented a different country. We had a display to show things from our country and we got to dress up to represent our country and as a troop we made a treat to share, and we had passports that we got to take with us from table to table and as we got to taste the treats from all the other countries they stamped our passports. Upon becoming a leader I tried to look it up to see when it was supposed to be and found information on “World Thinking Day” which seems to be the same thing and it’s on February 22nd every year. Last year, we celebrated World Thinking day as a troop. Each of our girls got to pick a country, and they learned a little bit about that country, and came to our meeting dressed up to represent their country and they brought a snack from their country. When our service unit asked for activity suggestions, I suggested a World Thinking day activity and I described the way it was when I was a girl. (I also described the girl scout olympics, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with this post. 😉 ) This year, our service unit is put on a World Thinking Day event and it was similar to the way it was when I was a girl. Each troop represented a country, and they had treats and swaps, and a display, not many people dressed up though. The older girl scouts made passports for all the girls attending. I kind of think the passports that I had when I was a girl were better though. Mine have my picture on them and info about what troop I was in, and what country we were representing and things like that. These passports were just some folded papers inside a laminated cover that said “Passport” on the front. But there were enough pages inside to make it difficult for the staples to actually hold them all inside (Tyra’s fell apart, halfway around the room). Our troop represented Micronesia this year, because Amy’s sister lived there for awhile and had some things that we could put on display and she came to one of our meetings to tell the girls about the islands and the people that live there (Tyra and I missed that meeting though due to our impromptu trip to North Carolina).

If the service unit puts this on again next year I would like to get the girls more involved in deciding which country to represent. Amy split the girls up and set up shifts at our booth for the girls to cover. That way everyone had a turn to be at the table to answer questions about Micronesia, but that way they didn’t have to be at the booth the whole time and could check out the other booths before or after their shifts. Tyra’s shift was the second to last, so we started out by going around the room. We were just finishing our rounds when we heard them say that we would be ending in 10 minutes. I flipped out, thinking that I totally spaced the time and missed taking Tyra to our troop’s booth for her shift. But, upon looking at the time, I noticed that we still had time before her shift was about to start, and that there was supposed to still be another HOUR of the activity. Amy asked the ladies in charge about this and was told that some of the kids were starting to act up and the events director decided it was time to just end the activity since those girls had already been to every booth and were getting bored. Amy was quite angry with this decision. She had sent her daughter out with her husband to deliver as many cookies as they could, and then her husband was supposed to bring her to the World Thinking day activity for the last hour. But they were ending it an hour early and Amy’s husband hadn’t arrived with her daughter yet. I wasn’t really angry, but I was rather upset at their decision to end an hour early. I sent Amy around to the tables to quickly go get some swaps and things for her daughter, and while she was doing that, her husband and kids arrived, so I filled him in on what was going on. He wasn’t too pleased either.

They finished off the activity with a really big friendship circle and sang “Make New Friends”:

All in all, I think the event went well. And I think the three hours would have been a fine length of time if more troops had been willing to participate. My hope is, that they will want to do this again next year, and that more troops will be interested in participating. 🙂