Were you ever a boy/girl scout?
When I was in kindergarten, i received this long list of extracurriculars that kindergarteners could sign up for. I'm not sure why I decided to sign up for girl scouts. Maybe because my mom was a girl scout. Maybe because my grandmother used to teach us girl scout songs on family campouts. Maybe because we were given this list and I figured I had to pick something from it and I didn't like the idea of playing any sports. But I signed up for girl scouts.
My troop met in the art room of our elementary school. In kindergarten, we had a pretty small number of girls. I think. I can't really recall. But it does seem like our numbers more than doubled the next year. I didn't like a lot of the girls, especially after we got into first grade. I thought they were kind of mean and kind of rude. They were always talking, and we were always getting in trouble.
So, in second grade, I switched troops. So, in second grade, I was new to troop 1580. I didn't really know anyone. And I was shy. But my first day I made a couple of friends. I liked 1580 so much more than the troop I had come from. We did a lot of crafts. We would get little pony beads for wearing our vests and bringing our books and then, when we had enough, we got to make key chain lizards or dolphins or whatever.
Throughout Brownies and Juniors, our troop was kind of large and kind of polarized. There were a few sets of "cliqueish" friend groups, but we all got along relatively well. We went to Colorado when we had pretty large numbers. By the time we got into middle school, our numbers were dwindling. Which, is kind of sad, but it made those of us who were still there closer. The clique-tendency died down and we were all just friends. We went to Branson at some point, and then on a Mexican cruise, which was super cool. When we graduated in 2010, there were six of us. We all went to Florida to celebrate. It was a grand time.
I remember, at times, I hated girl scouts. I was quiet and shy and grumpy and kind of lame, so I didn't really have a lot of friends early on. There was also a lot of stuff that we did that, quite frankly, I didn't want to do.
But some of my best memories are girl scout memories. Plus I made some awesome friends there. Like...
Caitlin: http://henleyatlas.tumblr.com/ And Sammy: http://veldted.tumblr.com/
Especially during high school, when I was dealing with a lot of depression, Girl Scouts was one of the few things that kept me sociable. And, honestly, we did a ton of cool stuff. So.