Be a sister to every Girl Scout: Australian edition

We had the good fortune to host a traveling, homeschooling, scouting family from Australia at our Girl Scout meeting last week. The girls are Junior and Brownie age, and their dad is a troop leader. Though perhaps he is a "pack" leader as their scouting experience is co-ed...but never mind, the important thing is that we got together for what we called a "Sharing Sisterhood" meeting.

17 Girl Scouts, 2 Australian Scouts, 3 leaders, a few moms, and baby siblings attended "Sharing Sisterhood."

The general idea was to share songs, games, and snacks from our different scouting traditions. My troop's choices seemed to follow a theme: bananas! Or, as the Aussies say, bah-nah-nahs. The girls had chosen two action songs, "There's no bananas in the sky" and "Peel banana." They had voted also to build a campfire instead of go on a hike, and to make banana boats instead of s'mores.

The visiting girls shared an Australian classic, "Kookaburra," which is popular in the US. One verse was new to us, and made us all laugh:

Kookaburra sits on the electric wire,

Jumping up and down with his tail on fire.

Ouch, kookaburra, ouch, kookaburra,

Hot your tail must be.

They taught us to sing it as a round, which we had not done before. 

I asked for clarification about the pronunciation of the bird's name: that first syllable is more like "cook" (rhyming with book, look, and took) than "kook" as in going bananas. Speaking of which, that crazy bird has a fabulous, hooting guffaw, which the Aussie dad demonstrated for us.

The Australian scouts also shared a game they learned from Italian scouts in Venice which, oddly enough, is a traditional English one. The song is "Do you know the muffin man?" played as a circle game. Most of my girls knew the words and tune, but the game was new to us, and was appropriately kooky and fun.

Next up was the Yes/No game, the source of which I can't remember. It's a good icebreaker and get-to-know-you game that gets kids moving. We mark one spot as "Yes" and another spot as "No" and place the "caller" in between. The caller shouts a question, and girls run to the appropriate spots to indicate their answers. For example, "Do you have a brother?" followed by "Have you traveled out of the country?" followed by "Do you have a pet?" gets the girls running back and forth. The girls often take turns in the role of caller, and sometimes even the quietest girl gets in on it when she asks someone else to shout out her question.

After these activities, we assembled our banana boats and put them in the coals of the campfire that Taryn and her new Aussie friend had built before the meeting. While the snack cooked, one of my co-leaders played guitar and led the group in a couple of songs.

Some music to pass the time

It was important to remember where you put your banana boat!

Messy banana boats!

After cleaning up, the Australian family shared pictures of their backyard wildlife: koalas, kangaroos, and goannas. In their picture, the goanna had found its way into their bathtub, and was not outside where he belonged!

To officially end the meeting, we got in a circle and did the "Weave," which has replaced a friendship squeeze as my troop's favorite closing activity. We gave each of the visiting girls a card that the troop had signed, a patch, and a bookmark with the Girl Scout Law and Promise. The Australians gave our girls patches, too!

Our council's new patch is so pretty!

There was some free form play, of course, given the setting. It was the warmest day of the season (up to that point!) and we were in a clearing in the forest beside a creek near a teepee. Some girls may have gone home with wet feet and mud on their clothes. We all smelled of campfire, I'm sure. To me, those are signs of a good meeting.

Taryn and her new friend

My favorite part of the day was making these new friendships. The connection is definitely not a one time deal! My girls found kindred spirits in the Australian girls, and they have exchanged emails and photos since our Sharing Sisterhood meeting. Beyond that, my family met up with them again to enjoy the cherry blossoms downtown -- but that is another blog post.

This event was one of my favorite moments in our troop's year! It gave the girls an opportunity to reflect on their favorite parts of scouting, and they were happy and enthusiastic to share them. All in all, I'm so happy that our troop embraced the opportunity to live out that last, but not least, line of the Girl Scout Law:

Be a sister to every Girl Scout.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a Pinterest board: Iceland travel planning (Part 1?)

I picked up the Travel section of the Sunday paper last weekend. My eyes landed on the weekly roundup of land, sea, and air deals. "We haven't been overseas for almost a year," Zed observed.

"Iceland Air is offering a package deal for a long weekend in Reykjavik for less than the cost of a roundtrip ticket," I replied.

"What, are we going to Iceland now?" asked Kathy, with a precocious eye-roll. She's only 8, but she's got the skills of a fourteen year old.

Just so you don't think we are impulsive, our answer at that moment was a good, solid maybe. 

A few hours of research, comparison shopping, and soul-searching later, our answer had morphed into yes. 

You say impulsive, I say decisive. 

Or maybe it was the post-coffee-and-waffle high.

The first time I planned an overseas trip as an adult was in 2010. Back in those dark ages, there was no Pinterest. I did Google searches, and jotted down info on sticky notes, and stuck them on a map.

Four years later, my first step in planning a trip is to multitask with Pinterest, Google, Facebook, Flickr, and Spotify. I've got indie Icelandic music streaming as I search blogs, tour companies, and Wikipedia. I've added movies filmed in Iceland to my watch list  on Amazon Prime. YouTube has Icelanders teaching basic phrases in their language. I stick pins on a Google Map that I made for the trip.

I also use the relatively old school online library catalog -- within minutes I can put holds on as many books on Iceland's culture, geography, and tourism as I want. When I go to pick them up, there will be an entire shelf of books tagged with my name.

This is going to be a self-referential post: when I publish it, I'll pin it to my Iceland board. I haven't quite figured out what the organization standard is on Pinterest. Should I use hashtags? What works for me is to put the name of the country first, then the city (if it applies), and then a phrase reminding myself what I liked about the site.

It turns out that going to Iceland is not so impulsive. My husband just found an email I sent him two years ago with a link to a company that does family tours of glaciers, geothermal pools, and volcanoes. So maybe the journey does not start with a step, or a Pinterest board. It starts with a dream of horseback riding through lava fields "someday."

Iceland! I can't wait to see you.

Better than a pumpkin pie

We have had the most spectacular autumn. Somehow, all the trees coordinated their peak color to happen in sync. There have been riots of red, outcrops of copper, and my favorite, yellow, glows in the sunlight. Taryn, Kathy, and I took a walk in the late afternoon to soak it all in.

The creek that runs behind the house empties out into a lake. We paused at the wooden footbridge to admire the view. A pair of mallards floated nearby. Kathy said she spotted "duck eggs." That would have been exciting! It turned out, they were just golf balls. 

We were chilly, even though we walked briskly, sometimes one running ahead, the better to call the others Slow Pokes. We walked backwards, forwards, sideways, up hills and down, but the late afternoon sun only dappled the path and couldn't warm us. We won't be going out again without layers.

Dinner was Dorie Greenspan's Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good. As she recommends, I riffed on the recipe. We like Italian sausage, provolone, and mozzarella. It makes a filling dinner, and we discussed if we should fit it onto our Thanksgiving table. I suggested the pumpkin instead of a turkey, but was voted down. Perhaps it will show up again in the days after the big meal. I'd better snag another pie pumpkin from the store before they disappear for the season! 

I Promise You Won't Suffer

I Promise Not To Suffer: A Fool for Love Hikes the Pacific Crest Trail by Gail D. Storey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You know this book has to include some suffering, despite its title. A memoir of hiking the PCT would not be complete without some major hurting.

The trail starts in California at the Mexican border, and ends 2,663 miles later at Washington's Canadian border. That number speaks for itself: my feet are sore just thinking about hiking that far. Add in walking through desert, climbing alpine heights, crossing ice fields, and fording raging streams. And bears!

The PCT hiker's interior journey can be just as full of pain as her physical experience. That's why I keep reading memoirs of the trail. This author had a lot going on in her head before she started the trip, and her time on the PCT brought many anxieties to the surface.

On this list is her dying mother, who had promised to be alive when the author finished the trail. Another is her husband, whose dream inspired the couple to sell their house and live on the PCT for six months.

One question I have when I start one of these memoirs is, "Will the author finish the trip?" I won't answer that question here, for fear of spoiling it. I will say, that in the end, the journey's weight is in the author's interior transformation. It's a good addition to the list of Pacific Crest Trail memoirs.

View all my reviews

Other memoirs of the Pacific Crest Trail include:

• The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind -- and Almost Found Myself -- on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Dan White (which I read and enjoyed)
• Wild, by Cheryl Strayed (here's a link to her interview on NPR)
• The Trail Life: How I Loved it, Hated it, and Learned from it, by Julie Urbanski
• Skywalker: Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Bill Walker

Those last three are on my to-read list. Have you read any of these? Or better, hiked a part of the trail? Been a thru hiker on the AT, or attempted any journey like these? I'd love to hear about your experiences, first-hand or otherwise.

Rain, Mud, and Sugar Cookies

Five muddy miles, done!

It's been raining here for five days straight. A tropical storm and a nor'easter met in the skies above us and decided to settle down together. Waves of rain slosh down, dreary skies become the norm, and the kids don't want to leave the house.

The girls say they don't want to go outside and stomp in puddles because they don't have rain boots. When did they start to care about keeping their feet dry? These girls used to stomp in puddles all over town, in the least appropriate footwear.

For entertainment, Taryn has been baking treats. She googled a recipe, and, on her first try, made the best brownies ever to come out of our oven. Next up were "green velvet" cake pops. I took a turn with "apple pie" muffins, which were meant for breakfast but didn't last that long. Today, she and a friend made sugar cookies with orange icing and black sprinkles.

I think I haven't been setting a good example. I didn't run outside in Thursday evening's deluge, choosing the treadmill, a DVRed episode of Top Chef, and dry feet instead. In fact, our only outside time has been the dash from house to car, to library/dentist/friend's house, back to car, back to house.

If a race hadn't been on my calendar, I wouldn't have gone out into the weather this morning, either. I would have missed out. In the woods, I felt like a kid again. I got my feet soaking wet, I was covered in mud, and I loved it. Seriously, [I am addressing you, Taryn and Kathy] you don't need rain boots if you want to get wet.

At home, I hosed down before leaving for the dry sauna at the gym. The cold had a good grip on my toes and fingers, and was hard to shake off, even in 175 degrees. I baked myself in that cedar paneled room and thought about what made this morning's race so fun. Being on home turf was easier than driving an hour to the starting line. The camaraderie on the trail was great, with two friends in the race with me, and another volunteering at an aid station along the way.

But the secret ingredient? The special sauce was the experience of sloppy mud, the shining rocks, the flowing creek, the sound of wind in wet leaves. All thanks to the rain.

On the next rainy day, Taryn and Kathy, let's go on a walk with the intention of getting wet. I will make you hot chocolate when we get home, and you won't miss having rain boots.

Cats happen

Reader beware: For animal lovers only. The following post contains sappy memories and mild anthropomorphism.

I adopted my cat, Peanut, when I was in grad school. My then soon-to-be-ex boyfriend sputtered, "Why did you do that without asking me if I like cats?" I learned something valuable with that conversation, that any partner of mine would have to take a package deal: me and my cat.

After we got married, Zed (who doesn't love animals but tolerates them) and I rescued a cat whose sister was adopted without her. Miss Parker and Peanut became friends in their own cat way. When our first baby arrived, Miss Parker became a nanny cat, and protected Taryn from Peanut, who kept trying to head-butt our infant.

Miss Parker taking her turn watching infant Taryn.

Taryn pulled herself up and surprised Peanut.

Years later, after the deaths of these much loved feline family members, I promised myself that I was done with pets. It is too heartbreaking to say goodbye to these little souls. Miss Parker had feline leukemia and died too soon. Peanut stayed with us for a good, long time, but her kidneys eventually failed, and all four of us were devastated after her death.

No more cats. 

That arrangement lasted for four months, until a cat arrived in our lives: we agreed to foster a stray who had wandered through my friend's neighborhood for a while. Fostering turned into forever after Taryn and Kathy fell in love with Eli. I loved him, too, but I let the girls mount a campaign to talk their daddy into keeping the cat. It's harder for him to say no to them than to me!

One cat was enough.

Then our dear friends announced they were moving out of state and needed some help. Could we watch their cat for a couple of weeks until their house was sold? It was fun to have a second kitty in the house. Eli followed Ginger around, trying to get her to pay attention to him. When she drank from the bath faucet, he sat on the side of the tub and watched. When she left the room, he left too. When the canned food was good enough for her, it was suddenly good enough for previously picky Eli. Ginger charmed the humans, as well. She rearranged the girls' stuffed toys, leaving them in a pile on the landing. She howled in the night, perhaps a love song to the toys she had herded. Our friends moved away* and took Ginger with them.

We missed that second cat.

Our solution was to adopt two kittens. The older one was the last of his litter to be adopted -- saving the best for last -- and the younger one was that rare cat singleton. Tank and Rascal became brothers in their foster home, and wanted to stay together. They fit right in with Eli, who, at seven years old, is experiencing a second kittenhood. He rumbles with his new brothers, chasing them up the stairs and being chased back down. He grooms them and cuddles with them. He wrestles with them and is generally gentle.

Tank, Rascal, and Eli love their wet food.

Three cats watch the falling leaves together.

So now we have three cats. 

Our spending at PetSmart has, predictably enough, increased. The vet bill is only slightly horrifying. The girls are thrilled. Zed reminds me that it is my turn to clean the four litter boxes. 

I woke up last night with three cats keeping me warm. I'm pretty sure they just wanted to wake me up to feed them, but I am choosing to believe they were purring their love for me.

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*We miss our friends, too! But that would be a separate post.