the pieces of my life

This Sunday our Daisies bridge to Brownies. Let me start off by telling you, I love being a Girl Scout leader. I love the girls in our troop. I love my co-leader. I think the whole experience has been fun and it’s been amazing to see the girls blossom over the last two years, and I look forward to being able to do more with them as they get older. This past year we’ve done art classes, Christmas caroling, volunteered at Cradles to Crayon, seen a play, went letter boxing, and so much more. We’re going on a morning canoe trip in a couple of weeks, and I can’t wait.

That said, there are days when I’m tired, when the girls are whiny, and when things just don’t gel. Today wasn’t exactly one of those. But a bunch of us got it into our head that we should have an all-school Girl Scout event. That’s 1st grade Daises (bridging to Brownies), 2nd grade Brownies, 3rd grade Brownies (bridging to Junior Girl Scouts), 4th grade Juniors, and 5th grade Juniors (bridging to Cadettes). All in one celebration. All with one bridging event.

Today, for our normal Daisy meeting, we met outside the school with all the other troops to practice the ceremony and figure out how the bridging/ceremony/singing will go. It. Was. Bedlam.

Tonight at dinner, I said, “Sunday should be interesting. Today was a total clusterf**k.”

The girl and the boy asked, “What’s a clusterf**k?”

I said, “What does it sound like?”

The boy said, “I dunno,” but the clever little girl said, “It sounds like a circle of f**ks. Like f**ks in a circle. Oh! I get it! It means chaos! A clusterf**k is chaos. Yeah, today was a clusterf**k! Clusterf**k, clusterf**k, clusterf**k!”

Excuse me while I wipe away the tears. She just makes me so proud!

When the boy became a Cub Scout, the girl started saying, “I want to be a Girl Scout! Can I be a Girl Scout?” It was a refrain I heard often enough that when she started kindergarten, I sought out a Daisy troop (Daisies, which didn’t exist when I was a child, is the first level of Girl Scouts, before Brownies. It’s for kindergartners and 1st graders). Of course, there wasn’t one for her.

So I started one. Of course.

Today was our second meeting. The girls are working on their “Use resources wisely” petal, so for the past month, I have researched crafts. I have experimented doing crafts at home with the girl to make sure they were doable. I have checked out kid recycling books from the library. I have begged friends and neighbors to save me their toilet paper rolls. I’ve shopped for paints and jingle bells. I annoyed Adam with the mounds of recycling that I wouldn’t let him get rid of “just in case I needed it for one of the projects.” I carted three huge bags of supplies over to the school. I got yummy–yet allergy-free–snacks for the girls. I send the boy off to hang with a friend. I, with the help of another mother, shepherded the children through egg-carton jingle bell ornaments, toilet-paper roll bracelets, bottle lid magnets, foil ornaments, toilet-paper roll ornaments. I read about where our garbage goes. I listened to them share ideas about how they can reuse–and about their stuffed animals. I clean up the mounds of paper mess.

We get home. I unload the bags from the car. I sort things and put them away. I eye the wine. I ask my daughter, “So, how was the Daisy meeting?”

She looks up at me, cocks her head, and shrugs one shoulder. “It was medium,” she tells me.

“Medium?”

“Yeah, medium. Not good, not bad. Medium.”

And that’s when open the wine and count the minutes till Adam gets home.