Survived on...Slop

I am not complaining in the least about the total lack of snow to "survive" on yesterday. It was a little cold, a little windy, it rained lightly for about 10 minutes and it stayed right around 40 degrees. It was lovely! But it was also muddy, deep and thick. It was that kind of mud that sucks at your shoes and threatens to keep them. If you weren't in mud, you were in completely saturated grass in which you sank, just slightly, with every step. But even that wasn't so bad, because it could have been so much worse. Everyone knew we had completely lucked out with the weather yesterday.

I took six girls along all in their screaming orange hats. I could spot them across Green Meadows and through trees. Other adults would point them out to me-- "There goes your girls!" Indeed, they made quite an impression. I'll have pictures of them soon.

There were nine stations that you had to travel to throughout the day: Lashing, knots, compass, land skies, fire building, flag ceremony, trivia, sawing and first aid. Awards were given out at the end of the day for patrols that performed well or did something that got the judges attention. When my girls got First Place for lashing, I couldn't believe it. I actually yelled "No Way!" right after they announced it in that big echo-y room and everyone turned to stare at me. My girls were not impressed with me but very much with themselves for this. They also got a "Cool Award" at the Flag Ceremony, the trivia game and the land skies. For being their first time ever trying something like this, they did incredible. They stayed in a good mood and had fun, which was pretty much all I was hoping for.

And what did I do all day? There were enough leaders there to make two adult patrols to do the stations. My patrol consisted of myself and four leaders from New London who all knew each other, but we hit it off right away. And we totally kicked total ass all day! We built our fire, cooked and ate our pancake in nine minutes. (A patrol of Senior Scouts beat us by doing it in seven!) We did the first aid challenge and my teammates carried me in blanket a fairly long distance and never dropped me. I'm very thankful for that! We got First Place at almost every station, completely stomping the other patrol of adults. (We found out around dinner that the other patrol of adults didn't even go to half of the stations and at the ones they did go to, mostly they sat around the fire, chatted it up with the judges and drank cocoa. So we got "First Place", but we were competing against nobody.) I'm very happy that I ended up with the leaders who felt like actually trying because I would have been miserable in that other patrol. By the fifth or sixth time that I had to go up at the awards ceremony to get my medallion, my girls said that weren't going to clap for me anymore because it was too boring.