27 down, 4 to go

I am officially on the countdown for the month of October to be over! I'm praying things slow down a bit since all of the fundraisers will be done and we have the first couple of Daisy Scout meetings under our belt. We have now had our parent meeting and this afternoon/evening we had our first actual "Daisy Scout meeting". If you want to know how it went, let me just tell you I had to have a malted beverage after everyone was gone and the house was quiet. Actually, it wasn't THAT bad, but the beverage did help calm my nerves a bit! I hope being a Girl Scout leader doesn't cause me to become a drunk! LOL!

This morning after I dropped the kids off at school I stopped by the office at Gage's school to make sure we could have the cafeteria for our meeting at 4pm. The secretary to the secretary told me that there wasn't anything scheduled, so she wrote me down. I had sent out an email on Friday telling everyone that the meeting was going to be there, so I was quite thankful that it was actually free! After I had been home about an hour, I received a call from the school. At first I thought, "Oh crap! Emma is sick!" However, it wasn't that at all. The lady from the school office told me that they don't let the Scouts use the school for meetings prior to 6pm because of the BLAST program that is going on. UGH! After talking with Kara, we decided it would be easiest to have it here at our house, and then we had to call the parents to let them know of the location change. Nothing works better to get me fired up about picking up and cleaning than knowing I am going to have a house full of people! Scott cleaned the bathrooms for me when he was home for lunch and I spent the rest of the afternoon getting things picked up and organized. I was pretty proud of it by the time I left to pick the kids up from school. (However, please don't ask me about the guest room! LOL!) I told the kids on our walk home from school that we didn't have time to mess around, that they needed to get their rooms picked up before anyone arrived. They did a pretty good job as well. The house was at least presentable.

We had 6 girls here at the meeting. One was unable to attend because she didn't get my email on Friday and they had made other plans. The girls weren't actually bad at all. The biggest thing that had me stressed out was that one of the mothers decided to stay. Not that mothers aren't welcome, but when they have 3 other kids besides the one attending the meeting, it makes for cramped quarters! Our house just isn't big enough for the 14 people we had in the kitchen/dining area! See why I needed alcohol to calm my nerves? When the Mom said she wasn't sure if she needed to stay or not, I told her that it wasn't necessary and that if she needed to run some errands, to feel free and do that. She apparently didn't get the hint. As I said, it's not that I didn't want her there, it was more because there just wasn't room! She ended up sitting on the steps that go upstairs with her baby and younger daughter. The older daughter was helping her sister, one of our Girl Scouts, on her project and I think she was also hanging out with Gage. Emma was a bit too comfortable since it was at our house, so she kept running to her room and getting different things and she was having a hard time focusing on what we were supposed to be doing. One of the girls in our group is the daughter of our school principal, and thankfully her Mom pulled a few strings and we should be able to meet in the library (I'm sure this is news to you Juanita!) in the future. I hope that turns out to be okay with my friends in the library! :-) I don't think I will stay sane much longer if we continue to hold the meetings at our house.


Here is a picture of Emma, Jadyn, Paige, Mackenzie and IsaBelle working on their project. This was taken before Emily and her family arrived.

Hmmm.............when you look at this picture it doesn't necessarily scream CHAOS! You can't see the 100 other people behind me! :-)

Jadyn and Paige working hard on their Daisy birthday hats.

Emma and IsaBelle working on another coloring project together.

Here are all the girls in their Daisy hats. They turned out cute.

We had everyone here for an hour, and we seemed to keep things moving along. I know I had Kara nervous at one point because I was waiting to see if the mom and extra kids were going to leave before I got started into our meeting. After I could see that wasn't happening, I went ahead anyway. I'm not sure how many girls actually listened to my little story about the woman who founded Girl Scouts, but it was a neat little story.

We played a few games of "eye tag". That seemed to be a big hit, and it was an even bigger hit later at suppertime. Gage and Emma were really having fun with it and we played it over and over. Everyone sits in a circle and puts their heads down. At the same time, everyone raises their heads and looks at someone. Anyone who makes eye contact with anyone else is out and the game continues until there is a winner. It is a fun and fairly quiet game.

I had supper going in the crockpot which was very well planned. It certainly helped us to get supper overwith before too late. The kids also wanted to carve their pumpkins tonight and I said they could only if it was agreed that I didn't have to help or clean up! I just wanted to be the photographer. Everyone agreed, so pumpkin carving went on after supper.

Gage and Emma digging the guts out of the pumpkin.

Scott is the master pumpkin carver at our house. He really is pretty darned good at it, if I do say so myself! Last year the kids drew pictures of what they wanted their pumpkins to look like and he pretty much had the pumpkins looking identical to their pictures. They wanted to do the same thing this year.

Gage wanted his pumpkin to be a Clone Trooper! Big surprise there!

Emma drew out a simple pumpkin face. She wanted the mouth to be a circle so it could be "puking it's guts out".

Emma's pumpkin is nice, eh? I wouldn't be surprised if it causes anyone coming to our door to toss their cookies. LOL! Gage's Clone Trooper turned out pretty good, although this picture doesn't prove that.

Here you can enjoy the master pumpkin carver at work!

Once again, I am glad today is over and am ready for a new one to start tomorrow!!! I'm going to have to stop wishing these days away! November will be better...................it has to be. I've been pulling gray hairs out left and right, so the stress has to lessen or I'm going to be bald soon!