AnniePoo

It's only allowed when you want the last piece of cheesecake and someone else takes it.

On a pack level (small town): Membership is up (60 compared to 54 last year), fundraiser slightly better than last year, used uniform donation & requests for these uniforms way up. Request for financial assistance (i.e. pack covering cost of events) increasing also, but we've promoted this heavily in the last year, and it's a steady increase. Our yearly pack registration fee is $30, same as at least the last four years. We waive this fee for needy families. We're promoting thriftiness in the pack this year, including no gift exchange at our Christmas pack meeting - used to be $5 limit but this year we wrapped the pinewood derby kits for each scout (in newspaper) and that will be their gift. Overall, we're doing well, but we're being careful and planning for increasing tough financial times ahead.

On a district/council level - membership decreasing, fundraising down also. In my opinion, economic woes at council level partially due to a few large unnecessary capital expenditures over last ten years.

We have a 6-lane track for our pack of 60 scouts. We run Tigers first, and each scouts gets to run 6 times, once in each lane. The computer averages the times. Tigers only compete against Tigers, etc. We have an open class at the end where sibs & parents & leaders can compete, and it's a lot of fun.

We have our Winter outing in the local camp's lodge staring the night before, which is an optional overnight (inside) campout complete with a million games, crafts, night hike, etc. We make sure the kids don't get bored. This continues up until the lunch before PW derby, provided by the pack (BBQ, hotdogs, etc.). We get good participation, and since a lot of extended family members come to watch, we schedule our Friends of Scouting presentation right before the races start.

Send me a PM and I can e-mail you the Word file of our PW Derby rules.

Our pack charges $30 annual dues for the first scout in the family, and $25 for each additional scout.

A couple of times a year we request (i.e beg) that scout families donate outgrown uniform items and pack T-shirts back to the pack. At the first pack meeting of the year, we give them away to anyone who needs them. This system works well for us. This year we had more donations than ever.

We handed out more brag vests to pack members last night. If you search this forum, you'll find a link to the pattern. By buying the felt on sale, it costs us a little more than a dollar per vest to make them for our Cubbies, and is easy to do. My son, Web I, picks where he wants me to sew each patch on. During a couple of our Webelos camping trips at WI state parks this summer, he earned Junior Ranger patches, and I sewed them on his vest also. Let them have fun with it!

"Even moms who don't need to work, work for personal satisfaction and leave their children in daycare which isn't a good environment for exploring boundaries."

How about dad's who don't need to work, but do for personal satisfaction?

Good article by Mike Rowe (a.k.a. the "Dirty Jobs" guy) about making Eagle.

http://blogs.discovery.com/mike_rowe_answers/2008/11/mike-offers-a-p.html

We are putting together a songbook for our pack. I'm digging around on the web, and will also use the best ones from the BSA songbooks. However, we're trying to include as many new ones as we can. We'll include campfire songs, action songs, repeat-after-me songs, etc.

Any of you out there willing to share your favorite songs?

Thanks!!!

Annie

I always bring the kids with me when I vote.

If the other adult is willing to supervise and assist the scout during all den and pack activities, and is willing to fill out an adult application, then I would recommend that you allow this.

We book group sites in state parks for most of our pack camping trips and Webelos camping trips. By making the reservations waaayyyy in advance (I have next year's reservations already made), we can get the best large wooded sites away from the family camping areas. The state park system gives nonprofit youth organizations a big discount, so it typically costs us $30 total for a weekend group site reservation. Most of the parks we go to are within a one-hour drive.

Our pack pays the reservation fees, and we charge families $5 per person per night, which covers the cost of food, aluminum foil, paper towels, etc. We're currently using most of my family's camping equipment for cooking, although our local troop has a few things we can borrow, but are in the process of slowly accumulating camping equipment for the pack. My fellow Webelos I leader and I hit rummage sales and clearance sales big-time this summer and have three pack totes full of plates, cups, bowls, silverware, utensils, and misc. stuff.

Yes, scout leaders should be limited to people who (in increasing order of importance):

Have a pulse

Are breathing

Have extra money to spend as a scouter

Think they have extra time

Like to have fun

Are energetic, have a positive attitude, and believe in what scouting has to offer for kids

I don't want to redo the syllabus - I just want to inject some (brief) ideas, fun, etc into the existing training.

I'm the new Cub training chair for our district, and would like to liven up the NLE training a bit. I've read some good suggestions on this forum, but do any of you Cub trainers have some ideas that have worked well for you?

Thanks in advance,

Ann

Uh oh. I have two tents hanging in the basement right now that I haven't found time to pack away. Hubby rolls his eyes at all of the camping gear but hasn't said anything. He has spent more on birdwatching stuff than I have spent on camping gear (so far anyway).

Uh oh. I have two tents hanging in the basement right now that I haven't found time to pack away. Hubby rolls his eyes at all of the camping gear but hasn't said anything. He has spent more on birdwatching stuff than I have spent on camping gear (so far anyway).

and BALOO in the spring.

As a new trainer, I got a brand new CS Leader position-specific training guide the other day. The guide has a DVD in the back, and the presentation is supposed to follow the slides in the syllabus. It doesn't, but skips around in the wrong order. Hubby (computer geek) caught that the slides are in alphanumeric order, which means that they are in the following order:

1, 10, 100, 101, 102.....108, 109, 11, 110, 111, 112.....118, 119, 12, 120, 121.....

For obvious reasons, the presentation is impossible to use. Is everyone having this same problem?

We camp the Webelos once a month, at a different location each time (state parks mostly). This seems just about right, and if I camp in between with my family once a month, then I get to camp every other weekend!!!

I've had good luck with 4-man REI domes (Camp Dome 4, etc.) for car camping, and these are a reasonable size for 2-3 adults or 3 kids. REI Half Dome HC 2 is a good backpacking tent for 2 scouts. REI periodically has great sales on tents.

Get rid of the cots. If a fat older lady like me can sleep on a pad on the ground, then so can scouts.

I'm going to paint mine like this:

http://www.lizardkingarts.com/hikingsticks.htm

It's real, but another pilot program. I just talked to our DE, and they haven't received much information about it yet. Looks like it has real possibilities, although there's no way in heck that we can implement it this year with this much short notice. As I told our DE, we do our major pack planning in the middle of summer and there's no way I'm going to recommend to our pack leaders that we add this to the to-do list for the year. Next fall would be realistic.

Thanks for the input. I'll talk to our district trainers to clarify that BALOO-trained leaders for Webelos campouts is an additional district requirement. I just want to make sure I don't tell anyone something that is incorrect, and there is obvious confusion in our district about this.

"watch out for the DVD with the new CS Leader Specific Training, it does not work well". No kidding. I tried to look through it yesterday, and it's not helpful at all. What I need is a CD with a simple power-point presentation of the material in the new handbook. Is this available?

"Have you taken the Trainer's Development Conference yet?" There is one scheduled for March, and I'm planning on taking it.

Thanks,

Annie

Our Webelo I den is making them next month. I cut the sticks in August, we de-barked them on our August camping trip, and will finish them off over the winter. The kids will trim them, sand them down, and have the option of decorating them with any combination of carving, staining, painting, or woodburning. I took our Bear leader out to cut sticks for his den in September, and also cut enough for a friend who is a Bear leader in a neighboring community. The kids are pretty excited about it, and we're letting the siblings do them also.

Most of ours are hickory (saplings), although we have a few cherry & aspen. Poplar is a good wood for this also, but we don't have it near here. Hickory saplings are numerous in our area, and are strong and straight. Cherry dries nice and light, and aspen is very light and strong. My mother-in-law has a couple of hundred acres of woods near here, with a million hickory saplings, so I cut approximately 1/10 of the hickory saplings in a 20-acre area.