scoutermomks

Eagle, my husband actually said I should just put everything in our wagon and pull it to the campsite. I gave him an appalled look and told him no, I guess his idea wasn't that far out there!

Thanks for the response. I'm not looking to get details about the course, I just don't want to be one of "those women". You know, the one who seems clueless about camping and brings her Taj Mahal-size tent and then has to lug it through the woods I will check with some of the other leaders and see if they have a tent I can borrow or recommend one to me since I'm in the market for a smaller one anyway.

This may be a dumb question. I'm attending Woodbadge next month and have received my packet with the equipment list. My concern is with the second weekend. The information I have says we will backpack the "majority" of our gear to the campsites. It isn't a long distance but I'm wondering if they expect us to carry our tents and sleeping bags in addition to our packs. I only have our big 12'x10' family tent and a pretty heavy sleeping bag. I am looking into buying a smaller tent anyway but I'm wondering if I would be the only one there with a huge tent if I don't buy a smaller one before the course. I do plan on talking with the other leaders in my pack who have previously been to Woodbadge but I'd like to know others experiences too. So at your course what size tent did you take? Did you have to carry it to the campsite the second weekend?

My first car doesn't really match my age. It was a 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass. I got it right before my 16th birthday, in 1996. I grew up in a family of car nuts and knew I wanted a car with personality. It was a V6 though and didn't have quite enough power for such a big car so I ended up selling it and buying a 1990 Mustang. Still waiting to buy my dream car, a 60s 4 door Lincoln.

As a new leader this year I wish someone in my pack would have told me about the Resource Guide. Those first few meetings went ok and the boys had fun but it would have taken a lot of stress away if I'd had the den meetings plans to help me out from the start. I did eventually find them online and I have used several of them. Not always exactly as written, I have added to and taken away as needed to fit our den's needs, but they are a great starting point for someone that is totally new to being a leader. I have noticed that in the first supplemental meetings plans the wording is a little confusing. For Supplemental Tiger Den Meeting A it encourages Tiger Cubs to participate in the pack's summertime activites and then says "It is recommended that the den (now a Wolf Cub Scout den!) plan an activity or outing at least once a month during the summer so that the den will qualify for the National Den Award." Come summertime my Tigers will be Wolfs and won't be able to work on anything in the Supplemental Tiger Den Meetings but the wording in the guide makes it seem like even though they are Wolves they still work on Tiger activites.

Thanks for the idea, I think my Tigers would think that was really cool! I know they all really liked printing bookmarks at the old printer's shop at our local living history museum. I just might have to have them try this at a meeting over the summer.

I was also going to give the tip about using something non-dairy but I see Hawkrod beat me to it. After last year's mess our Pack decided to not used whipped cream at all for pies this year. Our "pies" were just pie plates full of pudding. Even with the dairy the pudding didn't start smelling. It was actually kind of nice to spend the rest of the meeting smelling the vanilla pudding my son got to smash into my face

Thanks for all of the info and the size chart. I guess now I just have to figure out what size to order. I'm in the process of dropping some extra pounds and I don't want to end up with a shirt that will be huge by next year but I also don't want one that I have to shrink into. For the price I might just order two and hope that one is the right size!

I didn't do much research before I bought my current uniform shirt, just went into the Scout shop and bought one that fit the best. Well, it's a men's shirt and I really don't like the way it fits or the material. Scoutstuff.org has the Centennial Ladies Boy Scout Uniform Shirts in the closeout section for $4.98 and I've finally decided to just break down and buy a new shirt before I go to Wood Badge in April. Looking at the sizes available it seems that the sizing is done by chest measurement. Does anyone know if the measurement listed is for the shirt itself or for the measurement you get when measuring yourself?

Loved the Darth Varder one! Even though I was in a room packed with other Steelers fans and couldn't hear it, it was still great. Made me think of my Star Wars loving son

Forgot to come back and tell everyone thank you again for the ideas. The 3 Tigers that showed up Friday night had a great time earning their art belt loop!

Our Tigers seem to like anything that has to do with paint so I try to keep that in mind for any crafts we do. At the beginning of the year I had a tendancy to have them do a craft just to have something to do and I could tell they got a little bored with it so I've started trying to tie any crafts we do in with a requirement or elective and they seem to stay focused better. The poop tube relay. I can't take credit for it. Our current ACM ran that station. She had PVC pipes already assembled into the tube and left one endcap off. The boys formed two teams. One boy from each team ran down to where the tubes were, put a coffee filter on the ground and dropped a rock on it (they were going to use Baby Ruths but the ACM wasn't able to get to the store before the campout). Then the boy took a plastic grocery bag, put his hand in it and picked up the coffee filter and rock (like you would if you were picking up after your dog on a walk). He put the bag with the filter and "poop" into the tube, put the other endcap on the tube and ran back to tag the next boy. We had a little bit of time left after they had run the relay a couple of times so we had them take some of the plastic bags and find as much trash as they could before it was time to go to the next station. That station ended up being one of their favorites!

Lots of great ideas, thanks! I'm sure I'll be able to come up with an hour's worth of fun. Our CC's husband is a police officer so I'm going to be getting ahold of him this weekend and get a day figured out to do 2G. The ADL was trying to schedule it in the bigger town close to us so it would be more exciting but honestly I don't think our Scouts will mind going to the smaller station. BTW, our Pack has figured out how to make LNT a little more fun for the Cubs. At our last Pack campout we had a LNT station where the boys talked about LNT and then did a "poop tube" relay race (without real poop of course).

I am a Tiger DL. My ADL was supposed to get us scheduled to do a police station tour this week. I hadn't heard back from him so I emailed him earlier this week to see if he'd gotten it scheduled. Last night I got an email saying that not only had he not been able to schedule it but that he and his son were dropping out of Scouts all together. I knew he had been working overtime lately but a little warning would have been nice. So now I'm stuck with trying to come up with things to do at our meeting tonight. I have a couple of games in mind (hard to do too many when we'll only have 3-4 boys there) but I really don't want the whole meeting to be games. We've done all of the den meeting requirements from the book and a few electives. Last week we made bird feeders and the week before that we learned magic tricks. Any ideas?

Thanks for the ideas! I think I'm going to try the drawstring clips to see how that works, maybe in addition to doing the double loop through the double loop through the bottom bead. We're a Tiger, almost Wolf, den and I've realized that these boys can make a mess with anything!

Our den is working on a den doodle. Each boy is going to paint a wooden star and then put his name on it to hang from the main part of the doodle. I know that we'll need to have string of some sort on each of their stars to put their beads on but I have no idea how to keep the beads on the string and still have the boys be able to add new beads. Do we just tie a knot in the end of the string and then untie it everytime one of them adds beads? I really don't want to end up picking up beads after every meeting.