I'm a Salty Old Girl Scout

Yesterday I drug my mostly-not-so-sick butt out of bed and took Julia to her first ever COOKIE RALLY for Girl Scouts. I was a Girl Scout for years and years, until I was in high school, but I don't ever remember us doing anything like this. Back then it was more like "Here are your order forms, maybe sell some cookies." In fact, I tried really hard to remember SELLING cookies while I was there but couldn't for most of the meeting.

They had older girls on hand to talk to the little girls about how to sell cookies, how to be safe, what to do, what not to do, how to always use good manners etc. It was actually a really cute event because all the activities were divided up into games.

That's how I ended up getting salty.

We were playing BINGO - learning about lots of Girl Scout Cookie related words. The girl doing the calling says "OK this is the symbol of the girl scouts. It's the clover thing."

Apparently my face froze or I shot daggers out of my eyes or something because she stop and looked at me.

"Trefoil," I said trying to be calm. "That's the GIRL SCOUT TREFOIL. It has a name."

She still looked at me like I was crazy, and just said "Oh" like this was news. So at that point then I was fully loaded on prednisone, years of Girl Scout training and just being who I am. I responded "I'm subtracting 10 Girl Scout points from you."

Now I'm torturing a 16 year old. She says "Really?" Then I felt bad and said "No, not unless there are real Girl Scout points that I don't know about. ARE THERE?" 

My kid won bingo. NO REALLY SHE WON IT LEGIT NOT BECAUSE I TORTURED THE CALLER. I think.

We got to sample all of the cookies, and she like all humans decided that SAMOAS are the nastiest cookies on earth. I don't think I saw a single kid take more than one bite of those. I also lament that there aren't SAVANNAHS any more, Do-Si-Dos aren't SAVANNAHS. Savannahs were better. 

Regardless of my irritability it was an adorable event, I think the older girls loved having the little tiny ones there to show things to. As an old Girl Scout it was fun to watch and think about all of my years of earning my patches, all of my time spent sitting around tables in church basements dressed in green doing crafts and planning activities. 

I think it's weird I can't much remember selling cookies. I know for a fact my dad would NEVER take stuff to work to sell for me. And I wasn't allowed to go door to door ever because that's unsafe and if you think I'm over protective you SHOULD HAVE MET MY PARENTS. It was while she was doing an activity that what seems to be my ONLY memory of cookie sales popped up. Our troop used to go to GRANTS (imagine if Walmart and an old fashioned Woolworth had a baby - that was GRANTS) and put up a card table outside. One year in probably 6th or 7th grade I was on crutches because of a basketball injury - and we realized that we were getting sympathy sales because of the Girl Scout on crutches.

Suddenly I was the approach person. A little girl with long blonde hair in her green uniform, on crutches, is apparently someone people couldn't resist because we sold out of cookies quickly. We thought it was pretty funny. 

She won a bracelet at BINGO. What's that on it? THAT'S A TREFOIL says I. 

It was a pretty good day, despite how bad I felt.