A Visit With A Junior Troop

Last night we went to a meeting with Troop 6710 in Beebe, AR. The leader is a parent in my daughter's old troop, and has a Junior troop of her own. They are working on the Agent of Change Leadership Journey. This visit was spurred by the bridging requirements to work with an older troop and a younger troop. (I have requested a list of Daisy troops in our area, so that next year we can hopefully work with a younger troop.)

Since there would be an extra girl in the meeting, (my girl) I felt obliged to whip up a kaper chart for this visit so that all of the girls would get a kaper. I wish I had added small tags to label each bracelet, but since it was a last minute idea, I was kind of squeezed on time. We had to look at the box each time we moved to another activity and it was a hassle. And why, yes, that IS a tissue box (very handy and self contained for a kaper chart).


I could even have added a green bracelet if we'd had one more girl. General Assistant got opening and unplanned stuff, and Quality Control was to take care of closing and make sure that the room was left better than we found it.

We wanted the girls to get something out of the meeting that applied to both levels. My Little Brownie is working on Brownie Quest. We decided to do the "I'm Being Framed" activity where the girls add positive descriptive words to a self-portrait. We found an awesome template file for that here. (The file link is way at the bottom of her very inspiring blog post.) This activity ties into both journeys, and hey, it never hurts to take a few minutes to remind our girls how awesome they are.

I was so tickled to see the girls working on this project because even though they all started out with the same materials - every single picture was unique - just like every girl!

I wish I had taken the time to create a doc file with more words, but the girls also hand-wrote some of their own. A couple of the girls even drew their own portrait instead of using the templates.

Two girls came in late after I took these pics, we got everything back out and let them each do one too -and I'm kicking myself for not getting pics of their posters as well...

We took a few minutes to talk about Juliette Gordon Low and the upcoming birthday of Girl Scouting with some history trivia about the first troop in Savannah, GA.

All in all, everybody enjoyed themselves and each girl got something out of the activity that they will hopefully carry in their hearts. Each girl was able to see that their individual talents and personality traits are strengths and valuable additions to their Girl Scout teams.

This activity fulfilled one of the requirements for both Brownie Quest Discover Key and Agent of Change Power of One, which are in the first session to use words or pictures to tell others about who you are.

I took the opportunity at the end of the meeting to give each of the girls a fun patch in appreciation of sharing their meeting with us and giving us an opportunity to make new friends. My Little Brownie and I really love visiting with other troops and joining in events where other troops are present.

And of course, I went straight home after the meeting and made a scrapbook layout for the occasion. For this post, of course, I had to alter the picture to hide these lovely young ladies' faces - sorry! I posted the unaltered pictures for the parade in December, but that was a public event. Now that I am a little better at Photoshop, I can make one for Troop 6533 that included us in their parade!

Until next time, my wonderful Juliette Friends!

Ridiculous Crafts & My Apologies for the Bombardment

When I started to write this post I noticed all of the drafts that I had been scheduling and saving, but I didn't know I had to hit the publish button. So those of you who have subscribed to my blog are about to get bombarded with about 8 of my past posts - and I am so sorry. When I check my posts I preview them from the editor, but I don't go to the blog page and that is where I made my mistake I guess.

So on to the ridiculous craft.

I guess you know by now that I am entranced by all things Girl Scouty... So I was trapped on Pinterest one day and saw the wreath. OMG the WREATH! Yeah, baby, it's $60 on Etsy and she's not even offering it for sale anymore.

Well, I'm kinda crafty, so I thought to myself "I could do that!" So, lets compare, shall we:

Awesome Wreath

Cheap Knock off Wreath
shedding huge amounts of glitter
on my bedspread.

Okay, the first problem is that I couldn't find both of the mesh colors at Walmart. They had the kelly green, but not the lighter color, so I got the wired mesh which is only 5 or 6 inches wide. The wired mesh doesn't work very well (or look right), so you can bet your cookies that I'm going to Michael's next time I go to Little Rock. She also just prints off the cookies and laminates them, so since I am such a polymer clay demon now, I am going to try to mold the cookies out of that. Will update when I get it redone... Mine actually doesn't look too bad in person, but when I compare it to that delicious one on the left I just can't settle.

By the way, if you just can't live without one of these things, just Google mesh wreath and you'll find thousands of tutorials on making them. YouTube videos too. Apparently I am about two years behind on yet another trend. Oh well. It wasn't hard though, even my daughter helped - so we were both just coated in green glitter!

Happy Crafting and Cookie Sales, my friends.

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!

Our Own Personal Cookie Rally

Our Service Unit pushed our cookie season out a month this year. We had such nasty booth weather the last 2 years, I guess someone complained. Although, I didn't complain, I am grateful that they moved it out because now we wont have so much competition with the closest Service Unit selling at the same time. 

We had our own personal cookie rally this week. You may remember from my last cookie rally post that we were late enough to miss the cookie tasting. Last year I bought one of each kind of cookie for this very thing and fortunately they are selling all the same kinds this year.

 

So, here we are. All set up - so pretty... Don't focus on the messed up curtain on the left. The lineup includes Samoas, Thin Mints, Do-Si-Dos, Tagalongs, Trefoils, Rah-Rah Raisin, Toffee-tastic, and Savannah smiles.


You may have noticed that there are no Thin Mints on the napkin. They mysteriously disappeared before the picture could be taken. Weird, huh? Although she is smiling in the picture, she has no knowledge of who may have taken them. So we can considered those sampled. Let's move on, folks.

 I created a voting card for us to fill out, and I got her to try the "yucky-looking" Savannah Smiles. Turns out they were pretty good - so she ate two. And I have a little advice. They tell you when you buy three cases of your favorite that Girl Scout cookies freeze well - and I agree. Tagalongs, however, do not thaw well. Because the temperature in my house was 72 degrees, when I opened them, they were melty and a little hard to separate.

She is pointing to her two favorites. She liked the invisible Thin Mints and Toffeetastic, but she ran off with what was left of the Trefoils...

I tried to get her to number them on the sheet from favorite to least favorite, but that would have been too much like school work, so she just marked her two favorites. I like all of them and refuse to choose a favorite. I've never been crazy about the Thin Mints, but I really like them in brownies. (Just crush up about 1/2 a sleeve and toss them into your next batch of brownies, and you'll see what I mean.)

Here are the cookie vote sheets in Microsoft Word (if you need to edit it), and PDF versions.

Cookie Vote Doc

Cookie Vote PDF

Since we had props set up, we practiced talking to customers with a little role-play. We've been practicing money the past few weeks because she started studying it in school. She seems to be struggling with it, so I also downloaded a free money board game from Educents. She's been approaching people to initiate cookie sales this year, which I am so glad, and she has been so polite! I'm pretty impressed with her. I still can't believe how fast she's growing up!

So, now she's done all the steps to earn her Meet My Customers Badge!  She's been thanking her customers, but we like to also dress up a bag and make a cute tag for delivery, which I think really makes a nice impression on people.


And here is the card that I use to keep up with the requirements.

If you want, you can print these any size you like, but we like to keep them in baseball card slots in our binder and move them into our project life scrapbook album as we complete them. It's handy for journaling with our pictures.

Wishing you all a great cookie season!

Pics from Cookie Rally 2016

We are fortunate that even though my daughter is an Individually Registered Girl (Juliette), our Service Unit has events every month. She gets to network and stay in the loop. Most of the time at least one or two of the girls from her old troop are in attendance, so she has someone to pair up with for games. 

This year our Service Unit did a spa theme and sleepover party. The girls got to have a toilet paper fashion show. It was hysterical. Some of them could barely walk because their fancy toilet paper skirts were too tight around their legs!

Toilet paper fashion show

                                                        

The older girls came up with a relay race where three teams raced to fill cups with cotton balls. They had to carry the cotton balls plastic spoons they held in their mouths. They weren't supposed to touch the spoon. 

Cotton Ball Relay

They had a dance off to Let's Dance YouTube videos that one of the leaders played on a screen on the wall. Then the girls kept us up until almost midnight giggling.

Caught...

Each girl got a goodie bag with assorted make-up donated by Maybeline.

We were almost 20 minutes late because I had to stop and buy a new air mattress at the last minute. I got my payback when it was the most uncomfortable thing I've ever lain on. We missed the cookie tasting (they only let the girls try a broken piece of one kind of cookie, so it was more like a snack), but we decided that we will do that at home for our badge work in the next couple of weeks. I bought a box of each kind of cookie last year because I looked ahead and saw that one of the activities for their cookie business badge was to taste all the cookies and vote on your favorite.

I know this post is pretty short, but I promise as cookie season draws closer, the posts will probably get longer.

Until next time, my busy Juliette friends

Postcard Exchange Rant...

This exchange is no longer available.

Recently I accepted a request to help a troop in Virginia exchange postcards with a troop from every state. I spent over a week looking for postcards from Arkansas because apparently people don't send postcards anymore. I finally found some in an obscure truckstop 30 miles away and bought every one they had for future exchanges. Then I sent it and never heard anything... and never heard anything... Did they get it? Where is ours? Hmmm.

The post had disappeared from the Facebook group I first responded to. Good thing I took a screenshot so I wouldn't lose the address. So I typed in the lady's name and messaged her. Yeah, she got it, thanks. The girls are so excited, great. Here's a picture of them checking the mailbox, bye.

So, where is OUR postcard? Newsflash, ladies. You can't wear the patch for the postcard exchange! I won't let you! You didn't exchange postcards - you used me and now you owe me a buck for the postcard plus postage because you didn't reciprocate. Thanks alot.

So word to the wise, spell out the terms clearly when you negotiate these "trades". I'm actually not messed up over the money, but I do feel disappointed. I have tried 2 years in a row to sign up for the Postcard Exchange and they no longer do it. They haven't even updated their website in forever.

Rant over.

We are actually open to postcard exchanges if anyone is interested, but it must be a trade. I mean, I have like 10 postcards just waiting to be sent to some deserving troop or individual girl that wants to make new friends.

Until next time...

Christmas Break

Ah, Christmas! Here you are again.

Just because we are taking a small holiday break from Girl Scout Journeys doesn't mean we can't earn patches!

Like this one...

We spent the evening making gingerbread houses with her older sister and my grandsons. We kind of cheated buying a kit, but I'm so glad that we did.

And this one...

Then, the next night we all made the cookies, you know, because Santa must have them...

Our family tradition is to open one present on Christmas Eve. They each got a new set of pajamas and we do family movie night. This year we watched Arthur Christmas and munched on popcorn. Then the kids checked Santa on Norad. Finally, set out the cookies, carrots and milk for Santa, of course!

Checking on Santa's progress

Then THIS happened!

Merry Christmas Everyone!