Spring Camping with the Scouts

Before school let out, we had our annual spring campout with the Cub Scouts.

This is the spring campout meant for the younger Scouts, which means that the older, experienced Webelos like Alexander are in charge and lead the camp-out.

Our activities this years included the always-popular BB gun shooting.

And archery.

New this year: bottle rockets, which they assembled on their own. 

And then shot off. The kids LOVED shooting off the bottle rockets.

We also spent den time learning how to tie knots, and we hiked all around the property. 

Its part of the official Chisholm Trail, which is kind of exciting for Scouts since they are in the Chisholm Trail district.

Ryan had a lot of fun hanging with his friends.

And Alexander LOVED being one of the "leaders of the pack."

His highlight, though, was the webelo-only campfire after lights out, where they made s'mores. The rest of the pack has to make do with "Cracker Barrel" time of cheese and crackers as a pre-bedtime snack. But the big, mature Webelos? They get fire. And chocolate. 

Aloha, Blue and Gold

Last month, we had our Blue and Gold ceremony. The theme this year was Hawaiian, which you might think is a cute, easy idea. But with boys, little hula dancers in grass skirts is not their idea of a cool theme. Still, they were pretty into the leis we bought them to wear.

After years of neither den ever winning any kid of table decoration or cake decoration award, I took matters into my own hands. I wish I had gotten a better picture of how cute the table for Ryan's den ended up turning out.  Each boy had decorated their own brown paper surfboard, and we laminated them for their placemats. I bought some new sand pails at the dollar store and filled them with sand and put shovels and little drink umbrellas in them for centerpieces, and I brought in all the shells I had around the house and filled them in some of my old cylinder candle vases from our wedding. I also picked up some of these cardboard flowers and scattered them around the light green tablecloth. And guess what? We won second place (out of 14 dens) for table decorations! Color me happy. A new ribbon for our den flag.

Alex's den went with a true "Hawaiian" read on the theme, and one of our moms made this cake. And just in case you couldn't figure out what those cake blobs in the middle of the blue jello were, she printed out a map of the Hawaiian Islands. And we ended up winning second place for the cake! What a pleasant change of events, from never winning, to winning for both dens.

The boys had a great time, and our now on their way to being Bears...

And Webelo IIs. Yikes! Stop growing, Alex.

Inks Lake

A few weekends ago, I had a bunch of girlfriends come in to Austin for a reunion (last get-together: five years ago in Chicago). I'd been planning it for months, so needless to say, when I realized the campout with Alex's webelo den at Inks Lake overlapped, oh well, I knew what I was doing.

So thanks to Carolyn for taking all these great pictures for me.

And Finally ... the Blue and Gold

The Blue and Gold ceremony is the Scouts' annual "graduation" ceremony.

Every year, there is a theme to the evening's activities.

This year, it was a Western theme.

Each den in the pack has to decorate their table, and there is a cake decorating contest.

And each  den puts on a skit before the new patches are handed out.

Both Alex and Ryan loved their evenings all about them and their friends.

Bonus mustache picture. Because every blog post deserves a mustache picture.

Still more Scouts: Pinewood Derby

Carl posted a while back about the boys' cars they were making for this years Pinewood Derby.

The event was a great success.

Alex built the Blue Angel, and Ryan built the Lego Racer.

Its so much fun to watch the cars racing down the tracks.

The boys had a fantastic time that night.

But the icing on the cake was that Alex's car, for the third year in a row, was a Top 10 finisher for speed.

Go Alex! He came in 8th place.

And while Ryan's car (for reasons unclear to Team Danger's engineering division), was nowhere near the Top 10 (coming in somewhere in the mid-forties for speed), he still managed to win the award for Most Colorful Pinewood Derby Car.

His good friend Derek won best Tiger Scout effort, and they could not contain their joy.

The irony of Ryan winning Most Colorful? I had nothing to do with the car or the painting. When I saw the finished product, I politely questioned to Carl (never to Ryan) why the decidedly un-Legoish color was used for yellow, and the un-legoish green and purple were used. To which Carl responded that Ryan had picked them himself, so that was it, and I was silent thereafter. Still... I thought the traditional lego colors should have been used for Ryan's Lego Racer. Amusingly... another lego derby car was at the Derby this year, and I quickly noted they had used the expected four primary lego colors. Since Alex's den hosts the Pinewood Derby, I was privvy to the fact that the two lego cars were the finalists for the Most Colorful Award (the voters didn't know it was Ryan's car). And the reason Ryan won over the other lego car? Because his had MORE colorful colors , and not just the typical ones.

Which just goes to show you that I can, in fact, be wrong every once in a (non-lego colored) blue moon. (Although I will note I was TOTALLY right that we needed to buy a yellow paint pen to write  "1", "US NAVY" and "Blue Angels" on Alex's car. And I'll note that Carl also agrees he was wrong that we didn't need to add the text.)

The best part of the evening, though? Despite the huge amount of work and effort for the den to host the Derby, despite the wrong lego colors, despite the yellow paint pen, despite the fact that one brother's car was WAY faster than the other brother's car... we still came home with two smiling, happy boys, two trophies, and two happy parents.