Hey, look at my garage . . . it looks like Willy Wonka paid a visit, doesn’t it?
For the second year in a row, I am serving as the Cookie Parent for Eleanor’s Girl Scout troop. Once again, it’s been a wild ride. Brian and Eleanor trolled the neighborhood, selling boxes here and there.
I collected all the girls’ orders and sent them into the council. Then the fateful day arrived when I had 40 cases of cookies in my garage and patiently waited for families to come and pick them up.
Meanwhile, Brian and Eleanor tramped around the neighborhood again, making deliveries (Brian is my hero) while I organized the booth sales for the troop. This is where we schedule girls and adults to sell cookies at a table in front of a grocery store. I had to wake up at the crack of dawn to put in our grocery store location request before they were all gone, then organize parents and kids to staff the tables. This was tricker than it seems, since families kept changing their minds, and we had specific “safety-wise” parent/kid ratios to keep.
But it all went well, and we sold all our cookies! Eleanor even got to wear the Thin Mint cookie costume, which I thought was adorable.
That said, I am sad to say that we are going to be dropping out of the troop next year. It’s especially difficult for me, since I had agreed to be the troop leader. But when I accepted the job, I didn’t know that all the other leaders would be dropping out . . . and I didn’t know that Brian would be called to be YM president at church. Since I’ve been unable to get any other parents to step forward to co-lead the troop with me, it’s seems like a doomed enterprise. Besides, Eleanor’s extracurricular schedule is starting to wear me down. Right now, she’s doing creative dance, Seattle Children’s Chorus, swimming lessons, Girl Scouts, Activity Days, sewing lessons, and piano lessons. That’s a lot of carpooling.
Sad, but it’s time to cut back. She can still be an independent scout and we can go to mother/daughter camp together and work on badges. It’s probably the only one of her activities we can go solo with, to tell the truth. It was a wonderful thing to have the troop experience, but it’s time for a change.
Casa Camisas 