This Seven-Year-Old Girl Scout Vest is Graduating

Congratulations to every high school graduate in the Class of 2024!

And even bigger congratulations to every Girl Scout vest that's been hanging on by an invisible thread since its owner first Bridged to Cadette way back in the sixth grade! You've got cat hair all over you, you haven't been washed in at least five years (because god forbid the dye in those crappy fun patches bleeds!!!), you've been camping and you've been to Mexico, you've fallen into the mud and into the fire, you once got lost for three months but it turned out you were just in the garage that whole time, and one of your badges is sewn on upside-down, but you made it.

You're finally graduating, too!

Who knows what memories and stories this Girl Scout vest will bring to my kid's mind in future years, but I love looking at it and remembering all the adventures that inspired these messily-sewn, overlapping awards. I remember how the kid wrote her first full French-language essay as part of earning that Anne Frank fun patch, and how we spent that first pandemic summer visiting all the Girl Scout camps in our council to earn that Camp Adventure series:

The troop trip to St. Louis! The family trip along the Garfield trail! The overnight at the Newport Aquarium! The Girl Scout camp where the kids all played pirates for a week and couldn't wait to tell me about their midnight raid on the director's cabin and how she'd chased them across camp in the dark in her golf cart!

My personal favorite awards are the pins that you can only receive by visiting a site significant to the Girl Scouts. The kid will always have an official reminder that she's pilgrimaged to Juliette Gordon Low's home and to Pax Lodge:

And she'll always be able to remind herself how many cookies she sold each year!

I love the older badges and IPPs that she's earned. I'm pretty sure I had to ebay that Cadette Trees badge, and it's easily the oldest thing on her vest:

I also really love the Make Your Own badge that she invented and designed and painted herself. She wanted to learn how to play the keyboard, so she made it into a Girl Scout badge and she did it!

No longer being a "Girl Scout Mom" is one of the transitions that I'm working to come to terms with this summer. Yes, I can still volunteer with my Girl Scout troop, and yes, I can continue to volunteer with the Service Unit and the council, and yes, I'm a Lifetime Member so I'll always be a Girl Scout, but you know what I mean. Beth is the second-worst character in Little Women (Amy is the worst, obv), but I really get that part where she gripes about why does everybody have to grow up anyway and why can't they all stay home like her and keep putting on plays in the attic and publishing the family newspaper, etc.

Instead, my brave young Jo is going to march out into the world (see what I did there?) soon, leaving her old mum behind. Thankfully, I taught her all the important Girl Scout life skills already: she can make a kick-ass fire from scratch, she knows three different ways to emergency evacuate a fellow human (I didn't tell the kids at the time, of course, but one of the ways will be particularly useful for moving ambulatory but extremely drunk friends...), she knows what to do if she's lost in the woods, she can upsell you out of every dollar in your wallet, she knows at least four different methods of tie-dye, and she knows that the whole point of learning a new skill is to use that skill in service to others. 

So into retirement this seven-year-old Girl Scout vest goes, and off its girl goes to make the world a better place!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!