Camping with the Girls

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A couple of weeks ago I had to go camping to learn how to go camping so I could take my Girl Scout Troop (14-5th graders) on an overnight camping trip. Here are some pictures from the trip which was attended by 13 of my scouts and four other parents. We earned three badges while we were there. This is Hannah and her best friend Phoebe together with Izzy and Francie working on the drawing badge. During the course of the day they had to draw the same scene three times, to get the different shadings of sun as the light moved, and then also from the perspective of a bug.

But while the drawing badge was fun, the real craft of the weekend was making bracelets with a rainbow loom. If you don't have a tween girl it's likely you don't know what these are, but they are rubber band bracelets that are woven together in lots of different ways (think macrame with rubber bands!) The troop made a million of them whenever we weren't doing anything else. Here's Lizzie working on one of hers:

We broke the "Leave No Trace" rule that was part of our camping badge when several of the girls found and kept these monkey brains "fruits." They are actually called Osage Oranges and, among other things repel mosquitoes. You can't eat them, though. And they do really look like Monkey Brains. Half of my troop took a couple mile hike (I stayed behind with the other half) and Hannah took this picture of Phoebe and her monkey brain:

Some troops like to sing (and mine certainly does, too) but what they REALLY like is to dance. I brought my iPad (no other electronics were allowed except for phones if the girls felt they'd need to call home and say goodnight or something -- none of them did!) and we danced for a couple of hours in the evening. Here's Hannah, Charlie, Steph, Grace and Paytan doing Cotton-Eyed Joe:

We also earned the Simple Meals badge (we had done a couple of steps before the campout). I broke the girls into three patrols and each patrol fixed a meal. This is the dinner group making tacos. What makes this picture memorable is that the adult and two children on the right of the photo are vegetarians, and they had to chop up the meat (actually Hannah and Phoebe did that while they watched) and Amy had no idea how to make sure it was "done." The tacos were delish though and the refried beans that we made for the veggies in the group were a huge hit with all the girls.

Lizzie's cooking the marshmallow for her s'more. She's wearing the bandanna that she made as part of the Junior Camping badge they all earned. And, just so you can all be extra impressed, I built that fire, which raged on (it's not yet raging in this photo) for most of the evening:

More dancing! Here's Hannah, Phoebe and Analisa doing the Macarena:

Time to rock out to Make It Shine (theme song from Victorious):

 

Here are two of the adults who  helped me out, Amy and Cindy, during their full-contact game of Blink. It's a fast paced matching game that Amy is very bad at and Cindy is very good at. Amy kept cheating and Cindy kept winning. It was hysterical although I doubt the troop knew why we were laughing so loudly. I will say that for all her worries about roughing it (she made Cindy pick up a bag of Doritos when she left camp to go walk her dog) Amy was the one who got up at 6 am on Sunday morning and went out and cleaned and raked the fire circle so I wouldn't have to. All the parents who came really helped out and made things run very smoothly -- even though they were screaming more loudly about the mice in the cabin than the girls were.... ;)

 

Here's the whole group just before we left for home on Sunday morning. I was tired (the mice kept a lot of people up for much of the night as they scratched around in the attic so I stayed up to keep everyone calm...) but otherwise unharmed from the trip which my troop deemed AWESOME!! In May we're doing a Camporee with the whole Service Unit (all the girls in our school district) and we'll be at it again -- hopefully with NO MICE along for the trip!