How we spent Girl Scout Week 2016

Girl Scout Week is celebrated each March, starting with Girl Scout Sunday and ending with Girl Scout Sabbath on a Saturday, and it always includes Girl Scouts' Birthday, March 12.

My Little Brownie spent the week earning the Girl Scout Week Patch.


March 6, 2016 - Day 1: Girl Scout Sunday

The requirements to choose from for day one:

____ Think of three different ways you can serve God or your country. Do one of them.

____ Attend a religious service AND wear your Girl Scout vest/ sash.

____ Say or sing grace at a meal.

  X    Do a good deed for someone.

____ Spend 20 minutes in quiet reflection.

My Little Brownie brought eggs around to a couple of the neighbors. With 9 laying hens, I had several dozen in the refrigerator. Helped them, helped me! She actually went out and collected the eggs that morning without me having to ask 3 times :)

We didn't go to church, so we wont get the Girl Scout Sunday patch, just the patch for Girl Scout Week.


March 7, 2016 - Day 2: Community Day


  X    Put some bird food outside for our feathered friends.

____ Help clean up an area in your community or at school.

____ Recycle as much as you can today.

____ Pick three toys donate to your organization of choice.

  X    Fly a flag in front of your home today

We filled up the bird seed and hummingbird feeders. I showed her how to make homemade hummingbird syrup: One cup boiled (NOT microwaved) and cooled water to 1/4 cup sugar. The hummingbirds don't show up in Arkansas until the first week of April generally, but since Spring is early this year we took a chance.


March 8, 2016 - Day 3: Spread The Cheer Day

____ Say “Hello” and smile to as many people as you can today.

____ Do something to help someone without being asked.

____ Visit with an elderly friend or family member.

____ Write a note to a family member or friend about how much you appreciate them and why.

  X     Learn to say "hello, good-bye, please and thank you" in another language.

Of course, my Little Brownie chose Mandarin, as Ni-Hao Kai Lan use to be one of her favorite shows. Thank you Google Translate! Not only did it give the Chinese (Mandarin) characters, but it showed how to spell it in English and had a sound button to hear the word spoken!

March 9, 2016 - Day 4: Health & Safety Day

  X    Do at least 20 minutes of exercise.

____ Discuss with an adult ways to handle stress

____ Check to see if your smoke detectors and fire extinguishers are working properly





____ Eat only healthy snacks today. Stay away from foods with high amounts of sugar and salt

  X    Learn some stretching exercises and do at least three of them.


I took advantage of this one to get the Dancer Badge knocked out as well.
I'm glad that warming up is the first step! These old bones wouldn't have been able to get through this badge without it!

For step 2: Try a new dance, we spent some time on YouTube learning some "new" moves for the 50's dance coming up on Saturday with our service unit. We tried out the Hand Jive, the Stroll, the Swing, the Mashed Potato, the Jitterbug (epic fail), and the Twist!

50's dance

Step 3 was interesting... We practiced curtsies, proper carriage in walking, and good standing posture. This made me remember when I was a kid and my mom showed me how to walk with a book on my head. I guess that was something they did when SHE was a kid. We had a blast with step 2 & 3 because we were also wearing our poodle skirts!

Step 4 was fun too. My Little Brownie made up a new dance using current and 50's moves together when I played disco music! (I couldn't help myself!) I wish I had that on video for posterity...

For step 5 - completed on March 12th- that was a gimme :) We went to the 50's dance and had fun! She was able to do the Hand Jive for the other scouts that were there!



I showed her how I change the batteries and check our smoke detectors and fire extinguisher on Sunday (today) when we set the clocks ahead, so I wasn't going to get technical on that one... That is also the day I change batteries on all my clocks. I didn't do it last night because she fell asleep on the way home from the dance and I wanted to let her help me do it.


March 10, 2016 - Day 5: Outdoor Day

____ Do a rubbing on a leaf, tree bark or any other thing in nature.

____ Take a scavenger hike. Find something in nature that starts with each letter of the alphabet.

  X    Plant a vegetable, flower or herb in a pot to enjoy.

____ Identify three different plants in your neighborhood.

____ Play games outside for at least 30 minutes.

We spent most of the morning getting my seeds started. I feel like I'm kind of late on that this year (for Arkansas), but if it's as wet this spring as it was last year, I guess it will work out OK. We planted cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, lettuce, cabbage... you get it. We also planted some herbs from seed. I was worried that she planted the seeds too deep, but I guess I shouldn't have -as of this morning some of them have already started to sprout! I hope she helps me get them into the garden when it's time. This activity also went with the current unit that she is studying in Science about life cycles.

March 11, 2016 - Day 6: Family & Friend Day

  X    Draw a picture of your family.

Our family living in
Minecraft world

____ Do something extra special for your family or a friend and leave them a note.

____ Make a friendship gift for someone special.

____ Be extra nice to your siblings. Do a good deed for them.

  X     Plan a route and take your family on an evening walk.

I have no explanation for the picture, but she used to be fixated on Monster High, so I'm just going to go with it... We also planned and took the evening walk around the neighborhood so that I wouldn't have to deal with the inner struggle of whether this picture counts towards the requirement.


March 12, 2016 - Day 7: Girl Scout 104th Birthday

____ Recite the Girl Scout Law to your family.

  X    Read or reread the Juliette Low story. (Here is a version for Daisies)

____ Plan something special for Leader Appreciation Day on April 22.

  X    Learn about when Girl Scouting first started.

____ Learn a new Girl Scout song and teach it to a friend.

Here is a great resource with Juliette Gordon Low games and crafts.

This week has been way crazier than I expected, and I am just exhausted. All of our "why didn't you tell us you were selling Girl Scout cookies" friends came out of the woodwork! We didn't even sit down and make the swaps for her pen pals like we had planned, but we did put together some for the 50's dance. These are mini 45 records cut out of a black plastic folder with a 1" hole punch, then green glitter paper punched with a 1/2" punch stuck to the center on each side. We took a regular hole punch to the center (I had to do that part), and scooped it up onto a safety pin. Even though we are the only ones to bring swaps to service unit events, they always go over well. There were a couple of daisies that said they didn't even know what swaps were. (I shake my head...) But the thing is, when you bring these to events, your daughter ends up speaking to every single girl there because they all want one!

Mission accomplished.

Troop leaders ask me in awe about my daughter's activities for scouting, and I'm sure it sounds like this is easier. Really, the only difference is that I don't have to deal with moms - wait, OK, this is easier...

My Little Brownie met her initial cookie sales goal. Mostly because we have to order our cookies by the case like the troops do. As an "Independent Girl Member" my daughter can't do booths unless we participate with a troop. Our service unit doesn't want us to tie up an official booth location for one girl, so we were told that we can set up "a stand" anywhere else. Whatever. It's still kind of a booth - right? I'm not going to over-think it... So worst case scenario is that I get stuck with 11 boxes of each kind - I am sooooo doing a "stand" this year!

So that pretty much caps off my week! I hope everyone enjoyed their Girl Scout Week festivities and are looking forward to cookie booths - if you haven't already done that.

Love,

One Tired Juliette Mom

Swap Banner & Computer Expert

This time of year is always so crazy. Cookie season is a couple of months of activities (and sales), Thinking Day, Girl Scout Week, the list goes on - and all of this starts before we are fully recovered from the holidays! The crafts never end :)

I have posted about the swaps that my daughter does with the Girl Scout Swaps group. The last one was World Thinking Day and we received ours back last Monday, but I haven't had a chance to do anything with them until this weekend.

This is what we got back! 100 swaps! We even got the one from the Juliette in California that my daughter writes to. What can I say, you already know that I am an enabler! But really, I'm so glad she joined - I love her being there too!

We did 2 countries/participants because there were 74 countries claimed and we wanted more than 50 of them. We ended up with 57 out of 74. And it was really fun, too.

And I finally ran up that swap banner I've been wanting. Maybe I should've made it bigger...

Before                                           After

My Little Brownie is planning on making a Girl Scout Birthday swap for her pen pals and I've been planning my next few weeks with her Girl Scout Journey. Over the last week she completed her Computer Expert badge, and we are brainstorming ideas for the project to earn her Take Action badge and complete the Journey. We've got it narrowed down to two...

Here is my latest scrapbook layout, though I still prefer the Project Life style, I'm giving this to My Little Brownie for her scrapbook. She loves Photoshop and she hovered over my shoulder while I made this. She helped me pick out the pictures and I let her move the elements around. They say a picture is worth a thousand words!

 


I'm working on my Girl Scout Week marathon. The first day of Girl Scout Week is March 6th. For us it's the last day of initial orders for cookie sales where things slow down a bit while we wait for cookie drop. You can join us as we wade through it to earn a fun patch or two!

And here is the binder card for Computer Expert:

I'm Looking forward to seeing you during Girl Scout Week!

World Thinking Day

This year, as Juliettes, we didn't host a booth at the World Thinking Day event with our Service Unit. We still wanted to participate, though. We signed up with the Girl Scout Swaps group on Facebook again. My daughter chose Jordan and I chose Germany. Normally we only sign up for one swap, but we did 2 this time thinking we would get a better variety back. (There were over 75 signups) We will log them in a keepsake passport just like we would if it was an event we attended.

Jordan swap

I downloaded these super cute country cards to insert into our keepsake passport from the making friends website. These people are awesome for making these and offering them to us for free. We bought the coiless safety pins and hopefully trapped the beads with the postcard and flag tag that is also on their site. (Maybe the beads will be slower to fall off when the pin is opened) For the Germany swap I tried something I've never done before... polimer clay! It was fun to make little pretzels, but I had to fool with the baking temp and rebake and rebake and rebake. Thankfully according to most sources you can't overbake it, and if you cover it while its baking the color shouldn't change and it wont burn. It's supposed to feel rubbery when it is done. I added the flag and postcard and called it done! 

Germany swap

I am actually trying to make time to sew up a banner for the swaps that we get as well. Anybody who has checked out anything Girl Scout related on Pinterest has probably seen the swap banners and I bought some Daisy blue and Brownie brown canvas along with some iron on letters to make a couple of them. I will probably do this year's (brown) first, because she really only got the ones for thinking day last year, and they are still on the lanyard that they handed out...

We still attended the World Thinking Day event with our Service Unit. 

Funny story: I got a text 8 days before the event asking me if I wanted to do a booth. (by ourselves, in 8 days, ha, ha, ha, ha...) Yeah, Sweden. 

The troops that host a booth have to make 150 swaps and 300 food samples from the country they are assigned to. We had a ball doing Australia with her Daisy troop last year, but it was an insane amount of work! 

I'm such a people-pleaser, I almost said yes, but then my common-sense kicked in as I tried to mentally calculate how we could possibly come up with the funds to pull that off - even considering the amount of time it would take one adult and an eight year old to brainstorm and create 150 swaps. Oh, yeah, and a presentation board. I was kind of bummed out too, because that would have been fun if we'd had more notice. Maybe next year... 

Checking out the Displays. She hit the Fiji booth
at least a dozen times because she loved the fruit
drink they made. She had a purse full of dimes!

This girl is covered with swaps!

Our old troop did Madagascar this year.
The cute red-head is her BFF stamping passports.

And a picture with our Service Unit Director to finish out the day. She's the sweetest lady!

Hope you're all having fun with all the events your Service Units are having this time of year!

Swap Tree

Miss Thing wanted to do something special with her Christmas/Winter  themed swaps. I scooped up this mini tree at Dollar General for $3.50 and cut her loose!

Swap Tree

I think she did alright :)

She was really excited when we received them about 10 days ago, and she's already talking about the next swap which will be World Thinking Day (sign ups starting in January.) Next up is Earth Day (sign ups in March), then 50 States swap (sign ups in May). The link for the group is Girl Scout Swaps mail-in exchange and it is a closed group, so you have to join to see all the past swaps. The moderator, Angel, is awesome and helpful, so I hope to see you there.

On to the next craft! 

Swaps, swaps, swaps

There are several explanations for SWAPS or Special Whatchamacallits Affectionately Pinned Somewhere. The basic idea is that they make it easier to make friends. I mean, you have to approach someone to swap with them, and you will probably have to introduce yourself as well! I have to admit that my little brownie is so wrapped up in having a swap that she forgets to be shy.

Lately we've been working on swaps. Whew, swaps are fun... tags and pins are not fun. We are making snowmen for the Winter/Christmas themed swap in a Facebook group that we joined. After spending hours on Pinterest (you know you do it too), we really had a hard time narrowing down our choices. We really wanted to do the melted snowman, but I think with 55 of them (the requirement for the swap), I don't think we would have any fingerprints left, so we settled on the beaded snowman. He's so cute.

We worked on this a couple of days because I had to go back to the store to buy more black beads. Then we had to attach the tags, which really didn't take too long.

So, since we already had the beads out... Miss Thing wanted to make Christmas ornaments!

Toy Soldier, Snowman, Penguin, Christmas Tree

The patterns for all of these except the Christmas tree is on MakingFriends.com. There is also a beading pattern for the Girl Scout, but we will save that project for another time.


So until next time - Happy Crafting!

Finally Getting the Ball Rolling

It seems like the last almost 2 weeks since we made the decision to Juliette (I made this a verb) has been tied up in admin stuff. I've been waiting on books, materials, and badges to come in the mail and looking up activities and crafts to plan out at least the first couple of months of our brownie year.

Today has been an exciting day for us because our Juliette ID strip came in the mail. Happy Dance! This was the biggest pain to find and an even bigger challenge to get ahold of. The Girl Scout Council of Suffolk County had these little gems. You can call them at 631-543-6622 and ask for the shop. They only charged me $1 apiece and that included shipping.


After and exhausting search, I found a picture of the placement of the Juliette ID strip, but it is not mentioned anywhere in any official printed guide that I have read. I think I have scoured at least 40 council guides.

As you can see this is a vest setup from before the Journeys program, but they really haven't altered the placement of that section. I think I'm going to run with it... The nice recruitment lady that I spoke to said that I am attached to Service Unit 617, so I still need to find out if that is the number I use under the crest - which we haven't chosen yet.

**Update from nice lady at our Council: The correct uniform is to leave the numbers off.

So with the arrival of the leaders guide and Journey materials, we finally had our first meeting tonight. Yay!


First Meeting:

We chose Brownie Quest to start out our year. I like it because it introduces the characters and in the story "the Brownies uncover how Low, the founder of the Girl Scout Movement, discovered, connected, and took action as an early-20th-century leader." Sweet! Her birthday is this month, so that is perfect.

I wasn't going to post my incomplete display board, but I thought, what the heck. It will evolve over time. It would have looked better if I had a full roll of decorative duct tape instead of the last 5 inches left over from my last project. We started out with The Promise and The Law, which neither of us remembered from last year. (That was the first thing to go up on the board.) That awesome Brownie Quest map came with the leader's guide. The badges to check off as we go are up there in pink, and a calendar that already has 2 council events that we are registered for this month.

The first activity we did was have my little Brownie fill out the "All About Me" that I found at the Fashionable Moms blog.

Next we bounced a ball to each other and called out our good qualities. My oldest daughter did this with us. She was in Girl Scouts about 10 years ago in high school, so she couldn't resist. This activity was harder than it sounds because nobody really focuses on their own good qualities - so we all just drew a blank when it was our turn - but we managed to muddle through it with lots of laughter. It's a good thing it wasn't supposed to play out like "hot potato"! We went around 4 times and called it good.

We didn't have a group to do the Girl Scout Law search, so I had printed up a word find for her to search for keywords in the Law. I found it here.

Next we moved on to the Brownie Quest Family Star activity where we figured out which law best applied to our family. We settled on Honest and Fair, then talked about why we felt it applied to us for a few minutes. On each point of the star we wrote in a different family member and listed a special quality or skill that they possessed.

So the Leader's guide tells me that we found/earned the Discover Key tonight - cool. Filling out the Star sheet was supposed to be a take home, but we just did it in the session.

The last thing that we did for tonight's session was to read the first chapter of the Brownie Quest Activity book which introduced the characters and the quest that they are on. The story makes a nice ending to the session. I have to say that my daughter wasn't the only one that got something out of the whole thing. She had some nice things to say to me and my oldest daughter, and I got to tell her what I thought her good qualities are - it was a good night.

**Bonus Round** We had a chance to make our first swap of the year! There was a lady on the Juliette Girl Scout leaders Facebook page that has a daughter doing the 50 States Swap badge. My daughter has been so excited that she couldn't decide what to do. I kinda had to talk her down a bit, but we settled on this.

I have to trim the tag - 'cause that's how I roll, lol. She gets to fill out the envelope in the morning because she is doing friendly letters in her Writing Skills class - win/win!

By the way, she asked me to pass it along, so if anyone is interested in the 50 States Swap, I can hook you up, but I've got Arkansas covered.

Until next time, my Juliette sisters...