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!