Crafts for the Apocalypse: Syd's Girl Scout Silver TAP

 

My kid wrote a book!

For Syd's Girl Scout Silver Award, she wanted to focus on the problem of tweens and teens spending too much time on screens. Syd really enjoys crafts and recipes and likes to follow tutorials to make new creations, so she decided that making a set of craft and recipe tutorials for other kids to follow would be a fun way to encourage them to put down their phones and pick up the cardboard and scissors.

Thus began one of the LONGEST Silver Award TAPs in history. OMG, I had NO IDEA what an involved process this would be, particularly when accomplished by the world's pickiest perfectionist.

First, Syd had to brainstorm and then settle on possible crafts and recipes. Then she had to test each one, discard the ones that she wasn't happy with, and decide on a final line-up. Then she made them all again, sometimes a few times, until she had the perfect process for each one. Then she wrote each tutorial, and went through a few revisions on some of them, because it's tricky to write a tutorial!

Fortunately, tutorial writing is exactly within my very specific skill set. 

Syd sent a draft of her tutorials to our Girl Scout troop to be beta tested, and revised some of the tutorials again based on her feedback. As all this was happening, and for the next several months after the tutorials were finished and polished, she was also creating all the art. She went through several drafts to create an original character to model the finished projects, and then a zillion drafts as she drew each of the illustrations. 

And, of course, the book needed an overarching theme, both for the illustrations and the cover art and title.

Thanks to the pandemic, the entire book became... apocalypse-themed. 

When Syd was FINALLY happy with her illustrations and art, she imported it all into Adobe InDesign and Matt showed her how to do even more edits and make the layout:

When Syd was happy with the layouts, she sent a pdf back out to the Girl Scout troop to proofread, made more corrections based on their feedback, and then made even more corrections after feedback from the MEAN GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION MOMSTER. 

Originally, Syd had the idea that she could present physical copies of her activity book to kids, perhaps at day camps or after school programs, possibly with a kit included or possibly in concert with some in-person programming. Obviously that was out, thanks to the apocalypse, so instead Syd created a blog to host free downloadable pdfs of her book, and then promoted it.

Syd still wanted to give out *some* copies, though, so she decided to have a few copies printed and drop them off in Little Free Libraries around town. She wrote a budget proposal and presented it to our Girl Scout troop for the funds, then emailed back and forth with a local printing company to get her order made.

And at long last, Syd had real copies of Crafts for the Apocalypse in her hands!

But only briefly, as off they went into all the Little Free Libraries in town:

I had hoped (and advocated for, and nagged about) the project would be completed and the paperwork submitted before Syd began her public school adventure this week. The paperwork isn't submitted, because apparently none of the brilliant minds in this family are brilliant enough to figure out how to create a multi-page pdf (SIGH!), but the rest of the work is done and the forms are filled out and the essays are written, so perhaps today will be the magical day when the pdf fairy comes down from on high to compile the essays and time logs and forms into one clean and efficient multi-page pdf.

This was the perfect project for Syd, even though it turned out to be way bigger than it needed to be for the Silver Award (the suggested time commitment for a Silver Award TAP is 50 hours; Syd put in over 90, and even then didn't log everything). She got to exercise her creativity, express her love of art and making things, and work through the big challenges of maintaining a giant project independently. 

And of course, the fact that her project concluded with a connection to Will's Silver Award TAP is especially sweet to me.

Now... on to Gold!

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Her Silver Award Ceremony

It's been a while, y'all! Since we last spoke, the kids went to California, then Matt and I went to California, then we all went to Hawaii (lots more on that another time!), and then we all came back home and slept not enough, and at odd hours. I'm sort of attempting to get back into the swing of normal life, so here I am, blogging like a normal homeschool mommy blogger for the first time in a month.

Next I might even go to sleep before 3am and wake up before 11am!

Our Girl Scout council's Girls of Distinction ceremony to honor the highest awards takes place once a year, in June, so even though Will finished her own Silver Award last fall, she had to wait until this month for the official recognition and I swear to gawd, I have rarely been this excited to draw a line under something and get it fully in my rearview mirror. I know I was only the Girl Scout/project advisor, but this Silver Award nonsense has been agony, and so miserably disappointing and frustrating. I would have never been able to predict that after my kid worked as hard as she could to erect something for the community, some members of that community would seemingly work just as hard to tear it down.

Literally. Her first Little Free Library was repeatedly vandalized, and Will repaired it every time, until it was finally stolen, apparently ripped from its post so hard that part of the base was left still screwed down. Will did a lot of troubleshooting with that one, a lot of problem-solving, and finally decided to install a second Little Free Library in another economically-disadvantaged area that appeared to be better-populated and tended, and hopefully, therefore, less prone to crime. That Little Free Library lived for seven months, at least, but guess what we saw when I drove Will to restock it the very freaking day BEFORE Girls of Distinction?

Poor kid. She filled out yet another police report, while I thought silently to myself that at least we could stop worrying about it now. Seriously, every time we drove to check on the damn thing my stomach was in knots. The second we left it I'd start worrying again. And for good reason, it turns out. The Little Free Libraries that Will built clearly weren't sturdy enough to stand up to deliberate destruction, but I don't know what would be, unless she'd made them out of steel with giant spikes welded to them, as her dad eventually suggested.

But even though Will has already earned the award and the project is considered complete, she's still not giving up. Little Free Library #3 will be installed on our own property this summer, right by the mailbox where we can all keep an eye on it. And if this one gets destroyed, too, I am going to burn this entire state to the ground.

ANYWAY... let's forget about all of that, shall we, and focus instead on the lovely Girls of Distinction ceremony. I mean, Juliette Gordon Low herself was in attendance!

Miss Syd was not excited to meet the founder of the Girl Scouts, silly girl, and is giving me that newly-minted teenager "I'd rather be anywhere else but here" non-smile. Disappointingly, for the first time in several years the council chose not to honor top cookie sellers at Girls of Distinction, so my 1,000+ selling girl there, as well as her 1,000+ selling sister, as well as the SIX other 1,000+ selling girls in my troop, were not invited and honored for that major accomplishment. Big mistake, if you ask me, but whatever. I'm just a troop leader who spends my own free time and money working with actual girls, not an administrator getting paid to sit in an office, so what do I know?

My own favorite part of Girls of Distinction is the display area, where Gold Award Girl Scouts show off their Gold Award projects. It's a terrific place for younger girls to get ideas and inspiration (you know who'd really benefit from the opportunity to see these displays? The hard-working and high-achieving top cookie sellers, just the kind of girls that council ought to want to motivate and encourage!), and this year, especially, my own girls pored over them. Syd is at the stage of feeling overwhelmed and intimidated by the scope of the Silver Award project, so it was good for her to see what other girls accomplished for their Gold, and Will is deep into brainstorming for her own Gold project, and found several projects that inspired her, most of them nature-oriented, I was interested to see. One girl's project involved encouraging her community to keep chickens and donate their eggs to the hungry, something that is right up my own chicken girl's alley, and the project below involved creating educational materials on bat conservation for a local nature center:

Will already volunteers with two different children's museums; perhaps there's a potential Gold Award project somewhere in there...

Here we all are, ready to celebrate!

And here's my girl's big moment:

Here's me glad to have that over and done with!

Here's Will dubious about yet one more round of applause:

And here's Syd more than happy to take every souvenir pen at the table and click them all incessantly for the next four hours:

The girls' grandmother flew from California to attend the ceremony with us, and afterwards we all played out and about--

--until it was time to pack the three of them off to the airport and on to California for Camp Grandma. I lasted about twenty minutes away from them before I was sending them photos:

And yes, Matt missed them already, as well:

I guess we'll give ourselves the rest of the month to rest on the laurels of Girls of Distinction, but then it's high time to get back to work; I thought I was stressed mentoring one girl through her Silver Award, but starting July 1, our family will contain another girl working towards Silver, and another girl getting ready for Gold!