Camping! part 2

I'm back to continue the story, and before I leave the whole boy vs. girl in scouting thing entirely, I wanted to elaborate on the reasons why the girl scouts are more exclusive. The goal of girl scouts is to build young women of courage, confidence and character. Those are the three C's (NOT cookies, crafts and camping) that are most important, and the way to achieve that end is by allowing the girls to discover themselves, use their strengths, and cooperate with each other to reach their goals. So they learn by doing, their activities are supposed to be girl-lead (so they get to experience leadership), and they help each other. Study after study has shown that in mixed boy/girl learning environments, girls hold back, don't lead, don't volunteer, don't participate, and don't get valuable hands-on experience. So when the girl scouts camp, it is all about the girls learning and doing - hands on, and it gets sacrificed if boys are invited along, because you can't get boys to hang back and let someone else do it! In the same way, I could not get that father to quit "helping them" with the campfire, that is, taking the project over, and so the Brownie girls completely missed out on fire care learning. Smart Daisy leader that we had, the Daisies ended up with their own fire and marshmallow roasting, and maybe some learning happened at that end.
Interestingly, this was a source of some friction between the leaders of the Brownies and the leaders of the Daisies. Although only a few years separate the groups, they are surprisingly different in ability and tolerance, and what I heard, when they came back from panning for clam shells (no teeth found), was that the Brownies left them behind and the Daisies couldn't keep up, so therefore, the Daisies wanted to do their own hike and not combine that activity. Later, it was the Daisies who wanted to have their own (Smaller!) campfire and didn't want to continue at our Brownie bonfire. There were some hurt feelings on the part of the Brownie leader because as a Daisy leader the previous year, she felt excluded because her girls were young, and took pains to open the brownie arms of fellowship to include the daisies. However, I could see that the Daisy leader was correct in doing some things separately, mostly because it was easier to manage. There was no intention to hurt anyone's feelings.
The next activity was the hike, and my daughter foolishly went hiking without socks on her feet. Fortunately, she wanted me to go along, and I enjoyed it, even though I had to piggy-back her part of the way due to a growing blister on her heel. I hate having to be a mom/nag, but honestly, must all my prior hard-earned experience go to waste because she is too stubborn to listen to me and follow directions? Why is that?
We got directions for the hike from a friendly g.s. senior who lead us past a camp with other friendly cadettes and seniors and hiked about a mile before turning around and hiking back. After stopping by a bath house for a quick potty break, my daughter and I met up with another senior who piggy-backed Brianna the rest of the way to the tent so that I could patch her up. The Girl Scout spirit was alive and well in the welcoming faces and voices we met on the hike. It gave me hope that despite our misfit gaggle of girls who are on the verge of cliques and snottiness all the time, that they would emerge as friendly helpful women that would 'make the world a better place.'
We had some down-time scheduled after a snack of string cheese, pretzels and grapes, and I got busy with my bracelet making supplies. It didn't take long for me to have a whole circle of girls trying to weave a bracelet out of embroidery floss using the foam-circle method my daughter and I perfected. Several of the girls started the project but gave up quickly, but a few stuck with the project enough to get an inch-long chain of candy-striped weaving before it was time to cook dinner.
When I got back to the 'kitchen' it was just in time to see that a disaster happened: the majority of the macaroni for the mac'n'cheese had turned into a paste by the high heat of the cookstove, and was inedible. The less-than-half that had been cooked in MY pot had turned out fine, fortunately, so we just had to be conservative in doling it out. So the rule is, if cooking for 50 people, use teflon cookware! The beans came out fine (in my pot, I must add), and then it was time to cook the hot dogs and hamburgers. The hot dogs went on the little weber grill (yes, Jo, your old one!) tended well by one of the moms. The original goal was to have the girls cook them over the fire upon a stick, but as the fire was too big and dangerous, that learn-by-doing-plan got changed. I fired up the coleman propane grill and took out the hamburger meat.
Now, I do realize we went shopping at SavALot, and one cannot expect too much, but that 'meat' was a dull gray in color, squishy "as a crabby-patty" according to one mom, and full of fat and probably soybeans, but labeled 'all beef' (yeah, right). Cooking it was an adventure, because on low heat, they merely melted and lost 30% of their mass to falling between the grates, and on high heat, they flamed up so bad they were nearly black even with constant flipping on my part, and of course, there was no middle setting between those two extremes on the grill. I didn't eat one, and my daughter only ate half of hers, but most of the thirty or so that I cooked were gone by the end of the night. I and my tent-mate ate plenty of beans, so you can imagine what it sounded like that night.
After dinner, it was time for s'mores, and I started the water for hot-chocolate. It takes a long time and a lot of propane to heat two gallons of water! So long that, after I cleaned up the dishes (not many because we had paper plates), the girls wanted to retire to their tents rather than wait any longer. The fire had died down to a nice glow, and I roasted the last two marshmallows for myself, and realized for the first time how cold it was getting to be. I had time to get my jacket when Beth asked if there was just one more tent anywhere. We hadn't even gotten mine out of the trunk, so I offered it. The big tent had collapsed for the second time, and rather than shuffle the girls, we decided to drag its corpse out of the way and erect mine over its ground cloth in the full dark. Truck headlights were lent and the tent was up within minutes, while those girls who were sleeping in it went to have hot chocolate. I had put my daughter to bed in her tent when the troublemakers' tent started shaking and shrieking. I took them to get some hot chocolate and tried to get them to settle down. They took malicious delight in imaging shadows coming to get them and spooking each other with, "Someone's coming!" and the like. There was an incident earlier of two brownies drinking from the spout of the water cooler rather than finding their own cup, and I, for the first time, pondered how you punish someone else's child for wrong-doing. It wasn't just that they did it, its that they knew they were doing wrong when they did it, didn't stop when I told them to, and back-talked me to boot. I am going to have to ask the council trainers how to deal with this behavior, because it just shocked me that they could be this awful.
Once in their tents it still took a while before they settled down, and no sooner did they all shut up, then one popped out to go to the bathroom. My tent-mate and the other leader did the honors all night long escorting girls to the bath house. I was awake quite a bit, listening to the hoot of the owls, the rapid soft snore of my tent-mate, the coughing of my daughter, the rasping of my sleeping bag as I changed positions often. When I finally slept soundly, it was off my pad and tucked into the corner of the tent, but its where I ended up feeling most comfortable and warm. It got down to 42 and my shoulders were feeling the chill. At 4:20 I was glad to know the night was almost over. At 5:00 I thought, "only one hour to go." and at 6:00 after the night-owls woke up, I got up and dressed, too.
I started the stove for breakfast, and we had the remains of the hot chocolate to give the girls upon waking. The grits cooked well in my teflon pot, but the oatmeal had that burned taste I associate with camp...probably because no matter how much I stirred, some still burned to the bottom of those cheap pots and flavored the rest to its detriment. I hadn't brought enough brown sugar (barely remembered it at all!), and so we added some marshmallows to the oatmeal to sweeten it. It tasted weird! I can't say that it was much improved, but it really wasn't worse, either. Many girls opted for ham-n-cheese on hamburger buns, but the cheese grits were wonderful, I thought. While we cooked other moms broke down all the tents, and right after the closing ceremony and breakfast, many Daisy scouts and moms went home. A few moms stayed until everything was cleaned up and hauled back to the cars. Then we took pictures in our dirty, gritty, unwashed, poorly-slept state and headed back.
The girls had a great time; the parents were exhausted. I wasn't the only one to have a nap Sunday afternoon! It was worth all the work and worry, and I can't wait to do it all over again.