Last weekend

Last weekend was the Fall Cub Scout Camporee for Mitchell's pack. One - two nights in length, depending on how well you like to camp. This is our second year doing it and both times we've opted for one night because of the rain. Wet camping, especially when the temperatures drop as low as 20 - 40 degrees at night just doesn't excite me.

What can I say? lol I'm not THAT tough.

It's bad enough that they don't have anything but homemade port-a-johns in the camping area. Honestly, that is what I dislike the most. Getting up in the middle of the night literally freezing my butt off just to go pee. The "outbuildings" (and I use the word building loosely) have half walls on ALL sides and shower curtains. You have to hover over the pit of waste while dodging the millions of spiders that live there. Totally not joking about the spiders. I have never in my life seen so many spiders and grand-daddy longlegs in one place. Then you get to wash up in the icy cold water trough if you remembered to bring soap & don't mind loosing a couple fingers to frostbite.

I don't mind camping. Honestly. I guess I'm just enough of a city girl that I prefer an actual bathroom facility with warm running water if I'm camping with a large group of people in the middle of Fall. Since I don't do this all that often and my kids absolutely LOVE it, I will suffer. I hope that they know how much they are loved. lol

So, we skipped the rainy Friday night camping and headed up EARLY Saturday morning. The campsite is about an hour & a half from our house, so we got up at about 6am. We hit the road around 7am in order to make it to the campground for Mitchell's first activity (knots) that started around 8:45am.

Most activities were about 45 minutes-an hour long. 45 minutes of tying knots. Not kidding. Mitchell enjoyed it but I'm not sure he really mastered any of the techniques. Since the Cub Scout motto is "Do Your Best", it only matters that he tried. So we got to check that section off in his book. Yay!

From 9:30-10:15am they played team games and then from 10:15-11:00am they played Scout games. I have NO idea what the games were that they played though. I wasn't sitting close enough to hear the names/rules and I didn't recognize what they were doing. It really doesn't matter what it was called. They had fun doing whatever it was and we checked off the team/Scout game sections in his Bear book.

The rest of the day looked like this.......
11:00 - 11:45 BB Shooting
11:45 - 12:30 Archery
12:15 - 1:00 Lunch
1:00 - 2:00 Whittling Chip
2:00 - 3:00 Whittling Chip
3:00 - 4:00 Skits
4:00 - 5:00 Volley Ball
5:00 - 7:00 Dinner & Clean up
7:30 - 9:30 Campfire
9:30 - 10:30 Night Vision\Star Gazing
10:30 Taps

While shooting guns & archery are always at the top of Mitchell's list of favorite things to do, I am certain that getting his first pocket knife and earning his Whittling Chip (basically permission to carry the knife at appropriate Cub Scout events) was what he enjoyed most. He was bouncing off the walls to use his knife. He wanted to find sticks just for the purpose of whittling. lol

As always it was a long and tiring day. Hiking all over the place to get from one activity to another will wear you out when you aren't in shape and believe me when I tell you that Michael and I are NOT in shape.

I seriously thought that I was gonna get a good night's sleep because I was so exhausted by the time we made it back to the tent that night. The kids went to sleep and didn't move other than sliding down further in the sleeping bag in order to keep warm. Between my indigestion from the chili we had for dinner and the hurricane force winds threatening to uproot our tent, I couldn't sleep that much at all. It doesn't matter though. The smiles on my children's faces in the morning was all I needed to keep me going.

Walking between activities.

Practicing a skit on the bridge.

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