u/CK1277

I’m trying to rebuild my service unit. At the moment, we have (I think) 6-8 troops and 3 are active in the SU. It’s not a majority of troops, but it’s up from 0, so it’s at least progress. My questions are:

(1) if you ARE active in your SU (you attend meetings/trainings/events with some regularity), what makes it worth it to you to be active in your SU? Why are you there?

(2) if you ARE NOT active in your SU or if you are only minimally active, (a) is there a reason you aren’t active in your SU? (b) is there something your SU could do differently that would make it a value to you?

I’m going into my 14th year of being a Girl Scout leader for a troop that spans K-12. I see people talk about the general decline of students, but what I see is a decline in parent competency and I’m starting to question my sanity.

It’s not like there haven’t always been incompetent parents, but it just seems like it’s becoming more normal instead of the 1 or 2 problem parents.

Some examples:

Rather than making an effort to find the email with the information, parents will text me repeatedly to ask and if I don’t respond, they call. And if I have their kids with me (and therefore do not pay attention to my phone), they call their kids to ask questions like the time/place for pick up.

We will have a full day field trip scheduled and even if they didn’t read the email telling them to bring a sack lunch, we’re gone ALL DAY. Think for a minute: don’t you think your child is going to get hungry when you don’t send them with something to eat?

The schedule is consistent (1st and 3rd Fridays and the 4th Saturday of every month) AND you receive a paper copy AND there are Google Calendar invites. And yet I can count on a growing number of parents who ask the day of the meeting “is there a meeting today?”

We camp multiple times a year and we have a packing list that has been the same for YEARS and is sent out every time via email. People whose kids have been in the troop for years and have been camping a dozen times or more not only can’t be bothered to find the list, they don’t just stop and figure it out.

Being 30 minutes to an hour late to the carpool and being shocked we left without you.

It just seems like there’s an increasing number of parents who make no effort to be even minimally resourceful. The refusal to read emails is to the point where my middle/high school scouts have asked if they can add their email addresses to the distribution list so that they can get the emails themselves (and while not perfect, they’re a lot better than the parents).

After seeing Cookie Queens, several of my middle/high school girls have asked me if we can get letter jackets. I know there’s the one at the GS shop, but it’s a sweatshirt, not an actual letter jacket.

I’ve been poking around online looking at the sites to make custom jackets. I think those girls may just start a trend.

I have a DBJCSA troop, but I run the CSA’s together.

I found someone who will run the car care badge for us workshop style. Assume for the sake of this question that there are logistical limitations that would make it more trouble than it’s worth to separate the Cadettes and Ambassador from the Seniors for this meeting. Would you:

(1) let everyone earn the Senior badge
(2) figure out some Cadette or Ambassador badge that at least sort of have overlapping requirements…even if that takes some creative interpretation
(3) get the non-Seniors a fun patch

Or something else?

Girl Scout leader confession: Historically, I’ve just been so happy that they complete ANY badge that I don’t actually care if it’s the right level, but now that there are separate Senior and Ambassador uniforms, it would be a lot more obvious that I’ve let them do that.

The reason I ask is because I have a Girl Scout troop and we take part in an annual camping competition. One of the skill elements is a dinner competition where you get extra points for using various cooking methods including solar. They’ve done sun tea (which counts, but is boring) and now they want to move on to designing and building their own solar oven.

We live in Colorado so we get pretty good sun, but we’ve tried the pizza box version and haven’t even successfully melted cheese. We have time for trial and error, so we’re looking for solar oven styes that work so that we can figure out what elements are and recreate them.

I have several Coleman tents for my Girl Scout troop and the zippers on 2 of them started having issues. On one, one of the two zipper feet came unthreaded and on the other, the teeth only come together if you zip in one direction.

Tents are otherwise in great condition, so I’d prefer to repair the zippers if possible. I’ve read a few tutorials, but I’m wondering how challenging it is in practice.

Short version: I (48F) am extremely not flexible. When I bend over, I can reach just below my knees. When I reach behind my back, I can barely touch my bra strap with the tips of my fingers (reaching up) and I can get maybe 2 inches below the tops of my shoulder blades (reaching down). If I squat down without raising my ankles off the floor, my range of motion allows my knees to come almost equal with the ends of my toes. If I raise my ankles off the floor, I’m not sure how long I can go because my knees hurt.

I am slightly more limber than someone in a state of rigor mortis.

I have never been flexible by any stretch of the imagination, but with the onset of perimenopause over the last 3 years, it’s gotten a lot worse.

The trick here is that I am hyper mobile in certain joints. I am prone to shoulder dislocations, I‘ve dislocated my hip (that was while pregnant which is a whole other ballgame), my knees go backwards, and my elbows go backwards.

My goal is range of motion and mobility, injury would be counter productive. Suggestions for resources?

I have a DBJCSA troop, but I personally lead the CSAs.

In many ways, our CSA program is quite successful. This coming year, I have 14 CSAs (3 per grade level except I have one 6th grader and only 1 Ambassador). I have good retention, they actually like Girl Scouts, I don’t have any girls who are only there because their parents are forcing them (I’ve had that in the past and OMG it’s miserable for all involved), and they’re friends with each other outside of Girl Scouts despite none of them attending the same school.

What I cannot motivate them to do is choose badges. When we do a badge, it’s either because I’ve found a way to make an activity that they’re already doing meet the requirements of a badge or because I get tired of them spinning their wheels and just throw something at them. They have fun and they’re lovely to be around, but all efforts at getting them to choose and plan their own badges is met with apathy.

I tried getting them to split into small groups and be responsible for planning a badge, but they just couldn’t bring themselves to close the loop and actually finalize it. I don’t know if this is an executive dysfunction or what, but I need a better strategy that works with older girls.

There are 11 meetings that need planning and can be devoted to badge earning.

I have a large multilevel troop, and I have been leaving for a long time. When I first started leading, VTK did not accommodate multiple levels, and so I never bothered learning how to use it. I am open to giving it a fair shot, particularly considering all of the free content that it has.

My first obstacle, is I can’t figure out how to properly show our troop meeting calendar. The options are only weekly, biweekly, or monthly and that doesn’t match up to our meeting schedule. We have something going on the first, second, and third Fridays of each month as well as the second and fourth Saturdays. Other than making everything and event, is there a practical way to set up the calendar?

I also thought about setting it up so that there is a meeting every Friday and just not adding any plans for the fourth and fifth Fridays, but does that make it look confusing from the parent portal? I don’t have a child in the program, so I don’t know how to view what it looks like from the parent user perspective.

Share anything that makes your troop run a little smoother, makes life a little easier, or makes the experience a little better.

Some of my favorites:

• Whenever we camp/overnight, I put a period kit in the bathroom. It has pads, hand sanitizer, and dog poop bags for disposal.
• Keep a binder of your favorite camping recipes so when the girls are planning the camp out, they don’t get stuck in a food rut. It also helps to stack the deck with food you like, so that you don’t get stuck eating the same thing every camp out.

I’m a 40H. I need an underwire for both my day to day bras and my sports bras. But it’s hot and the under boob chafing is going to be the death of me. Antiperspirant doesn’t cut it.

I carefully clean and dry it when I get home from work (I go to the gym on the way home), use a light dusting of medicated powder, and let the girls go free range and the chafing just won’t heal.

My troop is out of Colorado and we are planning to travel to Massachusetts July 2027. We’d like to stay at Friendship House, but I’m not seeing how far out you can make reservations. What’s the booking window?

I am a very inflexible person. Even at my best, I have never been able to reach my own toes. I also have hyper mobile joints in my knees, hips, elbows, and shoulders which you might think would make me flexible, but it just makes me prone to dislocations.

My work out is either 10 minutes or 20 minutes on an elliptical to warm up (20 if my primary focus is building cardio stamina, 10 if my primary focus is weight training) followed by a weight training circuit (2 rounds if I did the 10 minute warm up, 1 round if I did the 20 minute warm up), and a walking cool down. I stretch in between the elliptical and the weights and again at the very end, but they’re random stretches that I just happen to remember and I feel like I could probably be more effective.

My (48F) standard workout is 10-ish minutes on the elliptical to warm up, 2 circuits on Egym machines (there are 9 machines total and each circuit takes about 20 minutes), and then stretching to cool down.

I don’t have huge fitness aspirations. I’m down 12 lbs and I have another 30 to go. Mostly it’s about aging well. The Egym machines have you do each exercise 15 times and I’m really fighting to get through the last 5, so I think all my settings are sufficiently challenging but not overwhelming.

When I’m doing the leg extension machine, my left knee cap has a sharp stabbing/burning pain almost immediately. It’s not even across both knees which is why I’m questioning it.

It’s twinging when I walk up the 2 flights of stairs after my work out to get to the locker room, but then it goes away and all is well.

Is that normal or red flag?

I can’t wrap my brain around feeling safe where there isn’t anyone close enough to hear me scream. Does your brain not send you intrusive thoughts about serial killers in the first place or have you figured out how to turn it off or what?

My troop has its own camp song book because I invariably develop camp song amnesia as soon as I’m put on the spot to remember a song.

It’s time to put out a second edition because we’ve learned a bunch of new songs and I got the bright idea to make a guitar version with chord notations. It turns out that formatting the tab notations so that they match up to the lyrics is a more labor intensive project than I had initially anticipated.

I have access to google products, most Microsoft products, and canva. Ideas?

My preferred camping style is tent camping at a walk in site in an established campground. I get privacy but also shade, potable water, bear boxes, a picnic table, a fire ring, and vault toilets.

My kids are 14 and 19 and while not chronically online, they do like to keep their phones charged (so do I). I bring the iPad with a few movies downloaded because we like to watch a movie together in the tent before bed (it’s the only way I can still get them to do movie night with me). And I have a handful of camping gadgets that are rechargeable.

We end up bringing a few charged battery packs with us, but if I do something stupid like forget to charge the SUP pump, battery packs won’t cut it.