June 2013 – 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.

FHE: Bowling

With school being out we are starting to pick up the pace on Ethan’s cub scout stuff and we decided that for family night tonight we were going to go bowling so Ethan could earn the bowling belt loop. We left for the bowling alley as soon as Kyle got home from work, and we got there while there were nice and not busy. 🙂

We paid for our game and got everyone changed into bowling shoes, and we picked a few balls of various weights (they even gave us a 6 lb ball for the little little kids to use), and Kyle got our names into the score board and we were ready to go. Kyle went first and then it was my turn, that way we could show the kids HOW to roll the ball, and then each of the kids got a turn.

I love how happy Dinah looks here. She was so excited that she could actually roll the ball down the lane and knock the pins over. Earlier today she was concerned that going bowling wasn’t going to be any fun. At girl scout day camp they got to do a little bit of bowling, but there was only a 12 lb ball and the girls had to roll it on the concrete in the pavilion to knock over some pretty worn pins (some of which didn’t really want to stand anyway). I don’t think many of the girls were able to even lift that ball, and so Dinah was worried that she wouldn’t be able to actually play.

Chloe was so excited that after she rolled the ball she would start to jump up and down as she watched it go and waited to see how many pins she knocked over.

Lydia was most excited to watch for the ball to pop up out of the ball return. She would roll the ball (with help of course) and then she would turn right around (not caring anything about knocking the pins over) and head straight for the ball return, where she would stand, anxiously waiting for the ball to reappear. There was one time however that she tried to chase the ball down the lane and she slipped and fell, right on her back. 🙁 Needless to say, she didn’t try that again.

Kyle was the only one in the family that actually threw the ball with his left hand.

Kyle really liked this “action shot” of me rolling the ball down the lane. Notice how the ball hasn’t actually hit the ground yet? Despite the fact that I am left handed, I threw the bowling ball with my right hand. I am kind of a weird lefty. I write with my left hand, and I always carry my purse on my left shoulder and I find it easier to carry the babies with my left arm, but bowling, using scissors or chopping veggies I do with my right hand. Weird huh?

At one point Tyra, Dinah and Chloe all needed to go potty. So after Kyle’s turn and mine he took Dinah and Chloe, and Tyra went after her next turn. When they came back, Kyle brought with them this neat contraption that you set the ball on, and then the little kids can just push the ball off!

This made it much easier for the little ones, and their balls went much faster pushing it off rather than pushing it on the ground. Dinah, Chloe and Lydia all finished the game using this thing, and Tyra used it a lot too. Somehow I failed to get any pictures of Ethan or Tyra while they were bowling. Part of that was because the camera’s battery was glowing red to warn me that it was getting low. 🙁 Ethan did pretty well, and Tyra seemed to have trouble rolling the ball. Most of the time when it was her turn she kind of threw the ball more than she rolled it and it always hit the floor with a much louder thunk than it would have if she just rolled it.

We went over our hour of lane rental and had to extend our time a couple of times (they only extended us by 10 minutes each of those times) and after the second extension we still had Chloe and Lydia that didn’t get to finish the 10th round. However we figured it wasn’t necessary to ask for a third extension just to finish up their turns, especially since it was getting late and the bowling alley was starting to get busy.

As you can see by the score board, I beat Kyle, and some of the kids have kids have higher scores than I do, but I would like to point out that that is only because THEY were using the bumpers. 😉 The kids were really well behaved while we were playing and they seemed to really enjoy bowling, so we may have to do this again sometime (which is the perfect excuse to come back and work on the cub scout bowling pin).

Chloe’s fourth birthday

Chloe’s birthday was actually Wednesday. But on Wednesday, we had activity days, and then cub scouts, so we ended up celebrating a little later. We let her open her card and present yesterday. Kyle and I got her a Snow White duplo set.

We ended up having cake today. Every time I asked Chloe what kind of cake she wanted, she just said “I want a bought cake”. Once I established that she wanted us to buy a cake instead of me making one, I again tried to ask what KIND. She just answered with, “I already told you. I want a bought cake.” It didn’t matter to her what kind of cake, so long as we bought it. So I asked Kyle to pick up a cake on his way home from work. I was expecting something from the bakery at Wal Mart or the grocery store, instead he came home with this fancy, red velvet, bundt cake.

Just look at how happy she is to see that pretty “bought cake.”

New Addition to the Family

We rescued a kitty today! A neighbor posted on Facebook saying that this kitten had been abandoned in her yard, and she was trying to find a home for it. Kyle didn’t want a new cat, but we recently had an incident with voles in the girls window well, and so I insisted that we needed a new mouser. So I went to collect the kitten. Based on what my neighbor said, it sounds like this kitten was the runt, as she was much smaller than the rest of the litter. My neighbor found the kittens, and after that the momma cat started relocating the litter. Eventually all the kittens had been moved and the momma cat never came back for this one. I suspect it is a female, because that’s what calico kitties usually are. We don’t have a name for her yet, but we shall give her a home, and she will grow up to earn her keep by catching rodents.

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!