Filed under: kids, sports | Tags: brownies, camp champions, girl scouts, gps, kayaks
Because Camp Losers just doesn’t have the same cachet…
Our Brownie troop had a blast at Camp Champions last weekend. Or rather the weekend before last weekend (yes, I know I’ve neglected my blog). We drove out there right after school on Friday, and let me tell you, there’s nothing more entertaining than eavesdropping on 9 year old chatter from the driver’s seat. I’m beginning to understand how Neil felt this weekend when my friends Sara and Angela came into town. Only we’re probably not as interesting as the 3rd graders…
Despite having several printed maps and a GPS, we managed to take a wrong turn when we were about 500 yards from the entrance. The map said “turn right and take an immediate left” and the GPS said “yep – I agree 100%,” so right we went. Only, there was no place to turn left (well, perhaps if I had been in a Hummer, but definitely not in the minivan). So I just kept going straight. Naturally, the GPS lady sighed and groaned about having to “recalculate the route” because I had missed the imaginary street to the left that only Garmin and Google maps know about. After a bit of u-turning and guessing and gesturing and cell-phone conferencing, we made our way back to the original road, and went straight instead of turning right and left, and lo and behold – there it was!
Anyway, when we finally got there, we dropped all of our crap necessities off in our cabin, and then went to this little amphitheater to eat our sack dinners. The girls were delighted to have a stage, and it was almost like being at swanky dinner show. Only the “show” consisted of a poorly choreographed and costumed production of snippets from High School Musical interspersed with the school play How Does Your Garden Grow. With a little Hannah Montana thrown in for good measure. But we did have a beautiful view of the sun setting over Lake LBJ from our table concrete steps.
See all those kayaks? Our girls were too young to kayak, so we just looked at them.
They were even prettier up close. Maybe next year…
After dinner, we cleaned up and headed down to the other amphitheater (champions are total showoffs) for a quick sing-along. There were a few shenanigans involving a stolen pirate flag from another troop and various plots to trick the leaders by pretending to be asleep, and a few Shel Silverstein poems, and then we finally managed to get 9 girls and 3 adults into bed. And mostly sleeping. With occasional snoring, sneezing, and yes, more chattering.
To be continued…
Because without you, I wouldn’t be able to torment my kids with obligatory bluebonnet photos every year.
I usually resort to outright bribery to get decent pictures, and even then, it’s pretty iffy.
We skip school take a “mental health day” once a year, and I always time it for a pretty day in April, when the bluebonnets are at their peak. We do other fun stuff, but pictures are always part of the deal. If they don’t cooperate, they go back to school. I take my bribes very seriously.
This year’s mental health day happened to coincide with Travis coming down with strep (again), and an eye doctor appointment for Abby. Travis has been on the new antibiotics for 24 hours, so he’s feeling just fine, but he couldn’t go to school since he was running a fever yesterday. And since I was planning on picking Abby up early anyway, I decided to just keep them both home and have a little fun.
We went to Schlotzysky’s for lunch, where the kids debated who was more “talented” over their pizzas and lemonades.
Travis: I’m really good at baseball. You can’t even throw.
Abby: Well, at least I can tie my shoes.
Travis: And I have more AR (accelerated reader) points.
Abby: Soooo! I’m more “adulty.” (This is where I just about spit out my diet coke.)
After lunch, we went off in search of a bluebonnet patch, and then to see Horton Hears a Who. And before we headed to Abby’s eye appointment, we stopped to enjoy a cupcake or 3.
Abby immediately licked all of the icing off the top. That way, she contaminated the entire cupcake, successfully deterring any and all sharing. Not very “adulty,” if you ask me.
While Travis, appalled at Abby’s greediness, took a bite and offered me a taste. And then reveled in his favored child status for approximately 2 more minutes, until he farted loud enough to scare the grackles away.
Ok, I know it sounds a bit…babyish. But Ga-ga is a serious game! Like dodgeball in a pit. And sometimes with 2 balls.
One of our rotations at Camp Champions was supposed to be a low-ropes course (the girls were too young for the high ropes). Only, there was no low-ropes course. Hmmm. When we finally flagged down a camp counselor, he led us over to the Ga-ga pits. He explained how it was kind of like dodgeball, but you have to use your fist to whop the ball. You’re out if the ball hits you anywhere below your knee, or if you hit the ball and it flies out of the pit. If the ball hits you above the knee, you’re still in the game.
“Terrific,” we all think. “Glorified dodge ball.” Only it wasn’t. It was way cooler! I don’t really know what made it so much more fun. Maybe it’s because the pit evens out the playing field – you don’t need to throw (far) to get people out. And it’s not as intimidating, since the ball isn’t moving nearly as fast (especially when you’re playing with a group of Girl Scouts).
But let me tell you – those girls got into it! We challenged a couple of other troops, and our girls usually came out on top. They were some hard-core ga-ga players! A few of them were diving for balls and pulling some Matrix-like moves to avoid getting hit. We even had one Ga-ga injury, when one of our girls got a splinter small stick stuck in her finger – it went all the way down to the bone, and let’s just say there was a lot of blood (I’m getting queasy just thinking about it – ack!!!).
Abby was one of the last girls standing during one game:
At her age, I spent an inordinate amount of time coming up with excuses to get me out of dodge-ball during P.E. I have to say I was mighty proud to see her sticking in there until the very end. *Sniffle*
Filed under: artsy fartsy
Since my brownie troop has added a few more girls, we needed to make new troop shirts before our campout this weekend. The camp had an olympic theme, and we were supposed to pick a troop mascot and color. After a good bit of debate, the girls decided to go with the “Turquoise Monkeys.”
We didn’t have a ton of time to make our shirts and everything had to be done in one meeting, so I prepped them ahead of time. I’m not sure what to call this technique – flour resist? Anyway, it’s a really cool way to get a design on a t-shirt without resorting to iron-ons, or getting covered head to toe in tie-dye.
This works best with the el cheapo 50/50 shirts from the craft store – the dye isn’t as vibrant on 100% cotton. First, you need a fairly large workspace covered with newspaper. Spread out the shirt, and put some aluminum foil or cardboard inside, so the paint won’t bleed through to the back.
Then pour some water in a bowl, and whisk in flour until you have a paste the consistency of . . . paste. Thick enough where it won’t spread, and thin enough that you can squeeze it out of a piping tip. If it’s too thick, it will turn into dough, and that really won’t work.
Decide what you’re going to draw on the shirts, and if you need a template or not. When we made Mickey shirts for our trip to Disney, we just freehanded swirly Mickey heads (large spiral for his head, and 2 smaller spirals for his ears). Since I needed to make 12 troop shirts, I made a monkey pattern in Photoshop, printed it out, and stuck it inside the shirt so I could trace it.
Now for the fun part! Put the flour mix into a squeeze bottle (an old mustard or ketchup bottle works great, or use an icing tip and bag like I did). Then start squeezing the goopy stuff over your design, or just draw something freehand. You can add stickers to the shirt too (for our Disney shirts, we added a few of those little foil stars). Whatever is covered up will stay white.
Once the flour is on, it needs to dry before you paint. Overnight is best, but if you’re impatient like I am, you can whip out the hairdryer and get your kid to dry the shirts. You can tell if the flour is dry when the t-shirt starts to pucker around the design.
I took the shirts up to the meeting at this point, so the girls could paint their own. We used SEI Tumble Dye, which is basically tie-dye in a spray bottle. You can’t really make intricate designs with this stuff, and it’s best to stick with 2 colors, so you don’t wind up with this putrid brown mess. The girls were in 3 groups for the campout, and each group decided on a design. One group did half and half (like the shirt below), another did a pink monkey surrounded by blue, and the last group did a blue monkey surrounded by pink. You want a good bit of coverage around the design, but it doensn’t have to be completely covered with paint.
At this point, the girls used the hair dryer to dry the shirts and took them home. Once the flour is completely dry, you can just pick it off with your fingernails (it kind of crumbles and breaks off in clumps). Then throw the shirt in the dryer for 20 minutes to heat set, and wash and dry like usual. When you’re finished, you get something like this:
We made matching bandanas (sans monkeys) and got a ton of compliments at the campout. Monkeys rule!
I was going to add the upside-down exclamation point, but then the title looked like iHola! – which suggests some sort of exciting new Mexican / Mac venture…
Neil took Abigail to the Girl Scout Father-Daughter dance this weekend, and a good time was had by all. There was dancing, festive food, and plenty of giggling and squealing (and I don’t think all of it was directed at Neil’s infamous dance moves). Oh, and there were also sombreros.
I feel like this picture is missing something – a parrot perched on Neil’s shoulder perhaps. Or maybe a margarita glass.
Mmmmm….doesn’t that sound delish?? Yum-o! (Extra bonus points if you can figure out who I’m channeling.)
We don’t typically do much for April Fool’s day, so I figured that dessert for dinner would be totally unexpected. And if it looked like boring old dinner instead of a fun dessert – even better! I dug around for ideas on the internet, and found this recipe from Family Fun.
Basically, you pre-bake the pie crust and fill it with vanilla pudding. The “veggies” are Starburst candies, and the “potatoes” are chunks of bananas. It looks eerily like the real thing, especially since it’s cooked in it’s own litte pie tin.
The whole thing only took about 20 minutes to put together – and I was multitasking during part of that, making an actual meal for Neil and me, since I didn’t think he’d be too thrilled with pudding for dinner. The hardest part was shooing the kids out of the kitchen every 2 minutes. I finally told them to ride their bikes, shoved them out the door, and locked it behind them. That worked for about 3 minutes, until someone had to use the bathroom.
When I brought the pot pies to the table, they looked like this:
Abby immediately sighed and rolled her eyes and started huffing around the kitchen about how she HATES pot pie and chicken and pie crust. Oh, and veggies too. Grrrr…. Then she took a bite.
She dramatically stated that at LEAST she liked the crust. I told her I really thought she’d like the inside too. She poked around for a minute or so, then tested it, while asking what the chunks were. I told her “carrots, peas, and potatoes” right about the time she tasted the vanilla pudding – and she promptly spit the whole mouthful out!! Neil and I started cracking up, and she finally realized it was an April Fool’s dinner, and finished off the entire pie.
Travis isn’t nearly as picky, so he dug right in and figured it out immediately. They were both pretty thrilled that they got to eat dessert for dinner, and I didn’t have to hear a bunch of complaining about dinner. We might be having pudding pot pies more often! Think they’d notice if I sneaked some real veggies in there?
Neil and I had this totally serious, non-foolish dish from Cooking Light.
Chicken Orzo Salad with Goat Cheese
I used rotisserie chicken, since that was even easier (and tastier) than dealing with those pre-cooked chicken breasts. And I didn’t happen to have any “prechopped” red onions (does anyone???), so I had to chop some myself. Other than that, I pretty much followed the recipe.
It was good, but could have used a few cloves of garlic. And possibly a little more salt. That would elevate it to great / repeater status. Ok, the “repeater” part is unlikely, since there are approximately 3 recipes I repeat on a somewhat regular basis (like more than twice a year). But anyway, it could be a repeater, with a little help. It would also be tasty with feta instead of goat cheese, for all you goat cheese haters out there.
Oh, and by the way? You might want to check your zipper.
