What a DAY!

Ohmygoodness; what a day! The kids, both my kids and the girls in my Brownie troop, were WILD. One of the Brownie moms is a middle school teacher and she said her students were WILD too, so much so they gave her a migraine, poor thing. :( I think it was the weather. Today was absolutely gorgeous but cold and getting colder as the day wore on, and that's about all I can figure as the cause. It was still a good meeting except for the girl who went home crying because a ball hit her in the face. (It was an accident but I know it still hurt.) :( I introduced the girls to the patrol system and had them do the planning for the meeting. They picked out the songs and the games, led the opening and closing ceremonies and the Pledge of Allegiance, and decided on the discussion question for the day. I was very proud of them for taking charge. :)

On another note, my cookie mom is a total saint for not killing me, even though she has just cause. (When I told DH what happened he said he'd hold me down if she changes her mind.) ;) See, it's like this. I try to be all organized and together but I'm really quite scatter-brained, especially when things get hectic. So for the last meeting we met at the cookie mom's house and it was hectic, giving out cookies, going over what the girls were supposed to do at booths, working on our "Cookies Count" Try-It and some other projects, and so forth. During that time the Saintly Cookie Mom hands me an envelope to deposit. I say OK, I go by the bank all the time so I'll get it in there ASAP, I put it in my financial folder for the troop, then promptly forget about it. THEN when we are in the thick of it and running cookie booths she gives me another deposit. I dutifully get this one in the bank (thank heavens) and get the receipt back to her like I'm supposed to, thinking I'm done with the deposits I was supposed to make. Now today she goes to reconcile everything while she's at my house after the meeting. She works on it for a couple of HOURS and it's not reconciling! She's short almost $200.00. We hold "recount after recount" but it still comes up short. I'm kind of at a loss and I'm fooling around with other things, getting a deposit of field trip money ready to go to the bank, etc., when I notice an envelope in my financial folder. Oh, must be money from our Fall Product sale since I know I have some outstanding balances on that. I open it (you totally know where this is going, right?) and I'm still saying "nut money", but then I look at the note lines on the checks which say "COOKIES" very clearly. I'm still thinking this must be a mistake, this is nut money, right, so I look at the dates, which are all from January, and...DING...the light bulb goes off. THIS IS THE MISSING COOKIE MONEY I HAD IT ALL ALONG I'M SO EMBARRASSED AND I'M SORRY I'M SUCH A GOOFBALL AND PLEASE FORGIVE ME!!!!! So she adds it all up and indeed, it is the missing money and everything balances and I THINK she's still my friend...

Cookies!

I am up to my neck in cookies! It's that time of year- Girl Scout cookies, and with 3 girls in Girl Scouts we have a bunch of them floating around the house. At least this year The Youngest isn't just swiping them; he actually paid for a box with his own money! That's progress. :) I went with The Middle Child to sit at a cookie booth in front of a local supermarket for 2 hours and I have several more booths to go before it's all over. The little girls are earning money for a trip to NASA where they get to sleep under rockets! The big girls are earning money for...something. They decide after the fact. They've been to NASA already, a water park, a theme park, and one year when they didn't earn a lot of money they did a "trip" where they house-hopped and went to a bunch of local things like bowling, roller skating, etc. The troop earns a small portion of the price of each box, the bakery gets their share, and our local council gets the rest. The council uses the money to pay for council staff, camps, training, and programs for the girls. We've also started, as of the past couple of years, to collect money to buy cookies to send to the military. That's a good program- support Girl Scouts and the military all at the same time! People actually gave some donations towards that today; it was nice. I just have to get through cookie season without gaining any weight back! ~:-O