15 Daisies

Where have I been? I’ll tell you where I’ve been . . . I’ve been starting a Daisy Troop at my daughter’s school. If you’re not familiar with Daisy Scouts, it’s Girl Scouts for Kindergarten and 1st Grade girls . . . one step below Brownies. My neighbor, Becky, and I have girls in 1st grade, so we thought we’d volunteer to co-lead the troop when the Girl Scouts came asking.

What the HELL did we get ourselves into?! Oh. My. Gawd! Talk about hearding cats!

We’ve had a lot of fun getting the girls together and planning our calendar for the year. Thank Goodness Becky is as organized as I am . . . meant I only had to do half the work - probably even less! And she uses Excel . . . ahhhhhh, a woman after my own heart It’s working out great because she does all the communicating with the parents, etc., and I get to come up with most of the activities that we do. I’m loving having someone to share these responsibilities with!

Our first order of business was to go to the Girl Scout shop and check out all the “stuff” they apparently need.

I should never be left alone in that shop. I would by EVERYTHING because it’s all so friggin’ cute!

But, all that cute stuff costs money . . . so we bought the daisies, and other patches, and pins, and troop numbers (btw - who puts two of the same number in a troop number? We had to buy 30 number 2s! No, they did not have that many in stock.), and leader books, and journey books . . . and left with our bags full of Daisy Goodness.

One thing we decided NOT to buy were the Daisy uniform smocks - they were $13!!! Fleece was on sale at JoAnn, so I volunteered to MAKE the smocks for the girls. Actually, I volunteered to have it be our first craft at our 2nd meeting I figured 8-10 smocks - no big deal.

We ended up having 15 girls sign up - FIFTEEN! That’s FIFTEEN K and 1st graders for 90 minutes every Monday after school. YIKES!

It also meant 15 smocks to make! It was easy, though . . . I cut all the smocks here at home, then the girls helped me use steam-a-seam at our 2nd meeting to make the pockets on the front. We cut out head holes, and cut strips out of the remnants and used them as the ties on the sides. The girls had a BLAST making their smocks - heck, they got to use a hot iron without their mother around :-) And it was so cute to see them all in their matching self-made smocks. I didn’t get a good picture of one of them, but they turned out pretty well and only cost $2 each instead of $13!

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was intimidated when I found out we had 15 girls in our troop - we’ve had to turn kids away! 15 is a large number of K and 1st grade girls. I was kind of hoping we could split into 2 troops - one first grade and one kindergarten, but then we decided we wanted to keep them together. It’ll be good for all of them as they learn to help the littler kids who can’t tie shoes or write their names and for the littler kids to look up to the bigger girls and learn about respect and compassion and being helpful to everyone.

I must say that after our first 2 meetings, I’m feeling really good about this. We’ve had a 3rd mom volunteer to be a co-leader with us (yay), which is a huge help. All the girls are so fun and we have such a fun group of personalities (and 3 sets of twins!).

We are going to have a blast earning our daisy petals this year I am sooooo fortunate to have the part-time job that I do so I can be involved with things like this with my little Princess . . . I would hate to miss out on such a fun opportunity!