Girl Scout cookies

Last summer, a lady from my church finally convinced me to start a Girl Scout troop.  I'd been avoiding her for about a year because quite honestly, we are just too busy.  I kept using this as an excuse until she finally said "look, if you are the leader, you can set the schedule to work around when you can do activities."  Argh.  I was running out of excuses.  She said I needed to find 5 girls and another mom to start up and we would be good to go.  Well, I asked G1's close group of girl friends and Moms if they wanted to do this and they said yes.... and my friend agreed to be my co-leader so we were officially a troop.  We met on a weekly basis last summer and did super fun things like go hiking, fly kites, play games, climb trees, go mini golfing all while talking about helping each other, being honest, and taking care of the world around us.  Before we knew it, our numbers had creeped up to 12 girls.  When school started up, we started meeting two times per month and moved into a curriculum that has us focusing on getting to know ourselves, our families, and our community all while intertwined with working towards doing a community service project.  And our numbers were now up to 16 girls.  And we had to add another leader to help out.  I was taking this as a good sign that girls were wanting to join our group....and the thing is...every time we meet, they almost all show up.  We have this amazing group of girls and families and we are having so much fun.  I am constantly amazed at these young ladies.  I have met new friends....so has G1.  And we now have a waiting list because we just had to cut off our numbers because we were getting too large.  Which brings me to the picture below.  Girl Scout cookie time.   It was a good thing I gave up Facebook for Lent because the whole Girl Scout cookie thing was a huge consumer of my time and I was doing cookie stuff almost every night for over three weeks (this doesn't include the previous 3 weeks in which I was monitoring G1 while she was selling cookies).

Just a portion of the goods.  It filled up two bedrooms in our house.  
And did I mention this was just the 1st of three shipments to make its way
through my house?? The hubby was pretty cool with
 how much time this took this until
I got sick of carrying the boxes up & down the stairs and decided to
start storing the sweet treats in our bedroom. 

Now I realize that some troops do way more cookies sales than we did....and I'm totally ok with that.  This was about the limit of what I could handle.  I barely talked to my friends (or my husband) for these three weeks.  In the end we sold approximately $12,000 of cookies (our troop doesn't get all the money...bummer).  And what I am super proud of is we only have about 12 boxes left (you have pre-orders and then you have to order blindly...some troops end up in debt a lot of money).  My team of leaders, parents, and girls just did so amazing and I was so proud of them.  It was A LOT of work from assisting G1 in selling and delivering her own cookies to helping manage the entire troops cookies orders and money.  The best part is that our troop now has some funds to do even more amazing things throughout this next year!!!  So, if you haven't heard from me in awhile....now you know why!  And next time a sweet little Girl Scout asks you to buy cookies, know that it is truly benefiting an awesome program!

Dance Competition Season

It's late winter so it means dance competition season!   G1 & I have kind of made it our thing this year to travel to the competitions together, sharing meals and conversations over the course of the day.  I love the young lady she is growing into!!  G1 is in a dance group this year, Junior Performing Company or JPC, that is mostly comprised of girls who are one to two years older than her (she and one other girl are a whole grade level younger than everyone else) so it's been great for her to be challenged and to grow as a dancer.  I could really go on and on about all the benefits G1 has reaped from dancing---self-control, body awareness, memorization, self-confidence, the desire to practice to improve (I'm not listing her ability to shake her stuff because I am not quite sure that is a benefit......)

JPC has done amazingly well this year too so that is a HUGE confidence booster for these little ladies.  Their dance "School Dayz" has won the top award in most of the competitions so far this year.  I love watching G1 dance and hopefully soon I will get a great video of her two performance dances to share with you.  If you are my FB friend, you can check out the video that another dance mom posted on my page...it has a lot of yelling in it, but it shows the dance School Dayz really well.

Rio

School Dayz

Downhill Skiing

Only took a few weeks to become tear free.

I think this is my third post about snow in what I have said is a very snow-less winter.  We took every advantage of our opportunities to ski this year and tried to hit the slopes almost every weekend for the afternoon.  G1 is a ton more independent this year and was able to ski pretty much of the mountain.  She enjoyed going up with her Dad when he was patrolling so she could be one of the first skiers down the hill in the morning and could close down the slopes at night.  W needed a little more prodding so we recruited some friends to help him out because it always seems like there are less tears when someone besides your parents are helping you out.  This plan worked amazingly well and by the end of the season, he was a cautious and controlled skier working on making nice turns down the hill.

The hazard of having a big sis....you get pink goggles until your
parents cave and buy you new black ones.  He was so excited to ski he
could care less what color his gear is!

 Now G2....there is nothing cautious or controlled about this wild man.  He flies down the hill.  He rarely attempts to turn and just heads straight down the mountain.  I will have to post a video of this little guy soon.

My Three Cute Skiers

Standing at the top of one of her fav runs. 
A black diamond that she liked to take me
down....possibly in an attempt to kill me?!?
Naw, she always waited patiently at the
bottom of the run for her slow Mom.

We had SOOOO much fun at the ski hill this year.  Have I mentioned lately what a fun stage our kids are in right now???  We are loving taking advantage of their incessant energy and eagerness to try new things right now.  Not sure who is more exhausted at the end of the day....the kids or the parents.

Cross Country skiing

My fav boys and black lab

So in my previous post, I was complaining about the lack of snow.  Here you can see some good snow...the problem is that it is at a pretty high elevation and there still isn't really much.  But we really wanted to try out the new cross country ski's we had gifted ourselves so we took the boys out in the sled and hit the trails.  I LOVE cross country skiing.  Even though I have only gone a handful of times now, it could easily be my favorite sport, even above running. Can't wait to put more miles on my ski's!