I Read The Chalice of the Gods, Because the Scariest Adventure in a Teenager's Life is Applying to College

The Chalice of the Gods by Rick Riordan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When my kid and I read The Lightning Thief, she was ten, and Percy was twelve.

Last week, we each read this latest book in the series. Now, my kid is seventeen, and so is Percy.

Reading this latest adventure of my kid’s all-time favorite book character, the character she’s stayed loyal to even as she’s grown up, is bittersweet as hell, just like everything else about this last year at home before college. What happened to that little girl who wore an orange Camp Half-Blood hoodie (with "Daughter of Apollo" printed on the back) and wielded a wooden sword and a cardboard Spartan shield that she'd painted a Pegasus on? Where is the kid who made endless batches of slime one summer while listening to The Demigod Files on repeat on my old CD player? Could I please have another day with that small daughter who traipsed around Greece with her American Girl doll, petting feral cats and lighting Olympic flames?

Just like Percy, my own little demigod is almost all grown up.

I am not mad, then, that this particular Percy adventure is lighter fare than the usual magical mayhem he gets himself into. In this book, Percy's big adventure is obtaining one of the three godly college recommendations that he needs to be accepted to his dream school of New Rome University. In order to obtain a recommendation, he has to go on a quest. It's demanding and complicated, there are snakes, but it's no Battle of the Labyrinth, thank goodness. My gods, can you even imagine if my kid’s favorite book character who happens to be her exact same age in this book and is also going through college application bureaucratic nonsense just like her had DIED (RIP Jason)?!? Or was betrayed by a loved one or ended the book on the verge of an apocalyptic war or got turned into a tree or was the subject of an awful prophecy, etc.?

Ugh, just parenting/being a kid in their Senior year of high school is hard enough, thank you.

So, the plotline of this Percy Jackson book, and the next two, may feel trivial to many readers, but I, for one, find it comforting and validating that the mythology is barely metaphorical here, and instead, Percy’s difficult adventures are quite like the difficult Senior year adventures of many American kids. Asking for recommendations IS hard! Coming to terms with growing old(er) is hard! Preparing to leave your best friend is hard! Realizing that you’re going to miss a lot of big moments with your family in the coming years is hard! Moving away from young siblings is hard!

But to tangentially speak about the actual book for a moment, instead of just my own personal feelings ABOUT the book, I am thrilled to report that, unlike the hot mess that was The Sun and the Star: A Nico di Angelo Adventure, The Chalice of the Gods is, happily, good! It felt like a way quicker read than what I remember from my other Percy Jackson adventures, but maybe that’s just because it was fast-paced throughout. I learned a couple of new gods, which is always fun, and enjoyed the deep cuts and callbacks to other Percy adventures.

The only bummer to the book is that I feel like we’re all just meant to ignore the fact that Ganymede is an honest-to-Zeus human trafficking victim. It’s very disturbing, and I didn’t really know what to make of the tone there. Lighthearted-esque, but clearly Ganymede is being held against his will. Zeus has one line of dialogue about Ganymede that’s not sexually explicit but you know what he means, and what he means is gross. Also, Ganymede is canonically a CHILD! He’s Percy’s age, if he’s even that old! Which means that he’s my kid’s age! I’m glad he got his cup back, but he’s still enslaved to his abuser, sooo...

Deeply troubling Zeus sex crimes aside, The Chalice of the Gods is beautiful and sweet, and I loved it. I’d have no idea what was happening or why if I came in cold, but if you read and loved the previous Percy Jackson books, surely you’ll love this one, too.

As for the rest of Senior year… well, my own kid is planning a completely unironic Percy Jackson-themed set of Senior photos, complete with her Camp Half-Blood hoodie, her sister’s Ren Faire sword, and a post-production chimera or two created by her graphic designer father. Over Christmas, she and I plan to buy ourselves a month of Disney+ so we can unironically watch the Lightning Thief reboot. And she has GOT to get her own set of college recommendations completed, even though at the moment she’s acting like this is a feat much more challenging than wrestling the god of old age.

When she and I read the next book in the series, she will, for the first time, be older than Percy. Stay tuned for my whole other set of tears on that day!  

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My Girl Scout Troop Earned the Ambassador Photographer Badge on an Overnight Trip to Cincinnati

 

And we had such a fun time!

Back when my multi-level Girl Scout troop was younger and very actively earning lots and lots of badges, we followed the philosophy that not every activity got you a badge. Sometimes we all worked on stuff that only the Brownies earned badges for, and sometimes we all worked on stuff that only the Juniors earned badges for. It was always fun regardless, and there were always lots more chances to earn badges later.

I do NOT follow that philosophy with my older multi-level Girl Scout troop. Up until her graduation, my now-college kid was still pretty active in earning badges independently, but the rest of the troop isn't interested in badge-earning unless it's something that we all do together. And considering that we only meet once a month or so, and many of those meetings are for travel planning or service projects or day trips or Higher Award stuff, not badge-earning, I really want to make our few and far-between badge-earning opportunities count for everyone.

So on this overnight trip to Cincinnati, the Ambassadors AND the Seniors all earned the Ambassador Photographer badge (when we earn a Senior badge together, I find an equivalent badge, whether it's official, retired, or "Council's Own," for the Ambassadors to earn). I rewrote the badge activities to better support the activities we'd planned and the skills the kids would get the most enjoyment out of learning, and off we went!

Step 1: Explore photography resources.

The kids were NOT super excited when, standing in our meet-up spot of the grocery store parking lot at the crack of dawn, just after throwing all their gear into the chaperone cars and just before getting themselves settled in and falling asleep for the two-hour drive, I pulled a GIANT stack of photography resource books out of a tote bag and divvied them up. 

Just a little light reading for the trip to Cincinnati!

These were all library books, and I tried very hard to choose ones that would be interesting to the kids, so I don't think it was too tough of an ordeal to have to endure. Here are the books we explored:

The goals were to see plenty of beautiful photos on a variety of topics, to build context for the history of photography, to get curious about various photographic techniques, and to be inspired to take their own beautiful photographs!

Step 2: Take animal/nature photographs.

The Cincinnati Zoo was the perfect place to practice taking nature photographs! 

The kids who are already well-practiced in photography concentrated on taking interesting photos from interesting angles, but most of the troop really just seems to use their smartphone cameras to take pics of their friends and their cats, so they concentrated on taking well-composed, well-focused photos. It's more difficult than you might think to take a sharp photo of a far-away animal!

While at the zoo, one of my Girl Scouts borrowed my DSLR and took what is possibly my all-time favorite photo of me:

Just me hanging out in the turtle enclosure with my turtle pal!

Step 3: Take city/architecture photographs.

Cincinnati is MUCH bigger than our pokey little college town, and there were lots of interesting things to photograph as we walked around on our own and with our food tour. The nice thing about architecture is that it stands still for you, so all the kids could concentrate on sharp focus and interesting framing.

I like how my college kid, now official Troop Helper to our troop, picked this interesting angle for her shot:

Step 4: Take food photographs.

Is there a more important skill in today's society than that of taking beautiful photos of your food?

We upped our food photo skills on a guided food tour through downtown and Findlay Market, concentrating on taking appetizing, Instagram-able photographs of all the various small plate items we were served:

My own photography was helped by the fact that I quickly got WAY too full to actually eat all the delicious food I was served!

Step 5: Take river/bridge photographs.

At the edge of downtown Cincinnati, there's a pedestrian suspension bridge that crosses the Ohio River to Covington, Kentucky. We walked it as a troop, taking lovely photos of the vista across the river and of the bridge, itself.

I don't think that I tend to take very nice vista photos, a deficit that I prefer to blame on my basic kit lens:

I found a weird sticker of a camel to photograph, though!

One of my Girl Scouts entered a photo contest using a photo that she took on this bridge, and it looks freaking amazing, all crisp lines and saturated colors and interesting details. You will not be surprised to learn that she won first place in her category with that photo!

Step 6: Embellish/display photos.

Yes, there are only supposed to be five steps to earn a contemporary Girl Scout badge, so just call this my insurance that even if a kid skived off of a step, she'd still do enough work to fully earn the badge.

Besides, we had a whole evening in our Airbnb to hang out, and there's nothing better when you're hanging out with your buddies than doing lots of craft projects!

My co-leader and I brought all the supplies that the kids needed to create photo stickers and magnets and embroidery floss-wrapped Mason jar lid photo ornaments. It was my excuse to get even more use out of my sticker maker!

Because we obviously wouldn't have our photos from the trip to work with yet (I've been eyeing portable photo printers but I just can't convince myself to pull the trigger on one), I'd asked the kids to upload 6-12 previously-taken photos to a shared Google Drive, then I got them printed and brought them with me to the Airbnb. 

The kids did a lot of baking and chatting and watching TV and playing games and snacking, but they still managed to find time to make themselves stickers and magnets and Mason jar lid ornaments!

If we'd had more time to play around with this badge, I would have loved to have the kids collaborate on a photo book of our Cincinnati trip. I love the idea of them incorporating all of their photos together to make one souvenir album, and I think something like that would be a sweet memento. But these big kids are busy, and after we got home from our trip they had to move onto all of their schoolwork and college applications and extracurriculars and part-time job. Instead, I encouraged everyone to upload their photos to our Shared Google folder so we could all see all the beautiful photos everyone took on our overnight adventure to Cincinnati!

Here are some more photo display and embellishment ideas that I have my eye on for future projects:

• photostrip bookmarks
• DIY Polaroid picture
• Polaroid photo coasters
• marble magnets
• Memory game
• popsicle stick photo charm

Two Days in Cincinnati with My Girl Scout Troop: On the Second Day, We Got Some Education and Ate Ourselves Silly

The previous evening, all my Girl Scouts were still going strong when I was beyond ready for bed. I left them to their own activities of working on photo embellishment crafts for their Ambassador Photographer badge, playing card games (Professor Noggin is still a hit even with these big kids!), eating snacks, watching TV, and just generally having a lovely time together, but I asked that before they, too, headed up to bed, they load and start the dishwasher.

I woke up on this morning long before any teenagers, so I tumbled out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen to pour myself a cup of cold-brew coffee from the refrigerator, and I found that the kitchen? Was PRISTINE! Not only had the kids loaded and started the dishwasher, as requested, so that all the dishes were sparkling clean and ready for breakfast, but they'd also tidied up and organized our kitchen island full of snacks, and spray cleaned the stovetop and all the counters, The space looked as nice as it had when we'd checked in!

I LOVE traveling with teenagers!

The oven was still not working, so the camping-style breakfast sandwiches we'd envisioned, with all the different ingredients baked on sheet pans, then sandwiched inside English muffins, wrapped in foil, and warmed up back in the oven, were a bust, alas. But at least breakfast sandwiches, unlike the previous night's pizzas and cookies, are amenable to being cooked on the stovetop. After my first cup of coffee, I prepped leftover meats and veggies and cheeses that kids might like to mix into omelets or scrambles, then whenever a teenager appeared, I directed her away from my jug of cold-brew coffee and towards her own homemade breakfast prep.

If a kid told me she'd never cooked her own egg before, I just handed her off to another kid who had. Stretch those leadership skills, Girl Scouts!

We had a REALLY full day of sightseeing ahead of us, so as soon as we'd all finished breakfast, we packed up and headed back out into the city. I 100% had a panic attack about the lack of parking in downtown Cincinnati, and at one point, as I drove in circles around the city streets, pretty sure that our entire lives would just be circling these same five blocks until we died, a Girl Scout in the passenger seat literally held my phone up so my co-leader driving the other car could coo reassurances at me via speakerphone, so hallelujah that eventually an extremely kind parking attendant of a completely full parking garage directed us to another garage that had space for us.

It turns out that Pink was playing a concert in the downtown baseball stadium that night, and everyone in the world was planning to be there!

But first, a museum!

The Ohio River was a very important crossing for the Underground Railroad, and there are numerous important Underground Railroad sites in both Ohio and Indiana, so we planned to spend the morning at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center to educate ourselves on these topics of local and national history.

The museum was VERY interesting, and I think we all learned a ton, but sensitive content warning: the exhibit on contemporary human trafficking is going to be way too dark for a lot of younger kids. 

There were also art and fashion exhibits--

Look who has now graduated to Troop Helper!

--and the incredible exhibits on the Underground Railroad.

Y'all. This is a literal 1800s slave pen:

One day, out of nowhere, a nearby property owner on the Kentucky side of the river called up the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and claimed that on their property was an old tobacco barn that local legend said had once been used as a slave pen. Would the museum be interested in it?

Through archival research and physical evidence, the museum was able to verify that this building was, indeed, an actual slave pen. They had it carefully removed from the site, then carefully rebuilt, exactly as it had been, inside the museum. 

It's so sad, and so powerful, and such a testament to the importance of knowing your local history. Neighbors transmitted this story of the building's former life from generation to generation, orally, from the early 1800s to today. People passed the story on to the current property owner, who had no historical connection to the property and no way of otherwise knowing its history. And that property owner, instead of discounting the story or just ignoring it, recognized its importance and reached out to the museum. It wasn't too tough to verify, but without that word of mouth, and that property owner's initiative, that slave pen would be rotting anonymously in its field today, because historians don't just roam the back roads, looking for important things that have been forgotten, and they don't just troll the newspaper archives, looking for places that might still be there. It's our job to preserve our own local histories, to pass down stories to the next generations, and to research our own properties and families to see if there's something important to discover.

At least, that's what the docent said to me when I mentioned that I've got kind of a weird old building on my property, too. I was all, "Oh, but it's not important like THIS building!", and she was all, "Well, why don't you get your butt down to your county archives and make sure." So I guess I have a weekend project this autumn!

You can see more about the slave pen here.

I also thought that the exhibit on other local sites important to the movement of enslaved people was interesting. The photo below says that it's a buffalo trace, but I think it looks like a holloway!

Eventually, six hungry Girl Scouts and two hungry adult chaperones left the museum and walked a couple of blocks over to our meeting point for our food tour!

I was VERY excited that the kids picked this activity! I'd never done anything like it, and it was so fun! It was part walking tour, in which we'd follow our guide while she told us about the history of Cincinnati and its local food scenes, and part tasting experience, as we dipped into several restaurants and shops and markets and ate a sampling of their offerings. 

bangers and mash at Nicholson's Pub

Tyler Davidson fountain: it's an actual water fountain, too, and has a spigot you can drink from!

This is the hotel where Pink was, and there's the car waiting to take her to the stadium.

The tour ended with Belgian waffles at Findlay Market. Funny that a year ago, I'd never been to a downtown market like this, and now I've been to two different ones in Ohio and two different ones in London!

We practiced our food photography during the tour. Those Ambassador Photographer badges aren't going to earn themselves!

The kids enjoyed browsing around the market, and a few bought delicious souvenirs. My troop helper "forgot her credit card," and yet still ended up with some fudge somehow, ahem. College students are supposed to be spoiled when they're back home with you!

Not gonna lie: I was too full after that food tour, and the overwarm, overcrowded streetcar back downtown did NOT help, blurg. Time to all get some fresh air and some beautiful photos of the river by walking the Roebling Suspension Bridge!

As a bonus, at the time there was actually a Roebling Suspension Bridge photo contest underway, which I encouraged all my Girl Scouts to enter... and one of them WON!!!

And then somehow the kids were all hungry AGAIN, so we walked to Graeter's and bought them all ice cream before finally heading back to our cars that were safely and miraculously parked in the middle of the downtown chaos.

I was so tired that I blasted my Favorites playlist the whole way home and sang along loudly to every single song to keep myself revved up, and the kids in my car were so tired that not one of them uttered so much as a peep in protest. You're welcome for the two-hour concert, Girl Scouts!

Postscript: I wrote a three-star review of our Airbnb, mentioning the oven problem and the host's lack of communication. The next day, the host hit me with a Resolution Center Reimbursement Request for over a hundred dollars, claiming that we'd stolen a USB port and broken the dishwasher door. When Airbnb asked me if I wanted to file a rebuttal, I wrote them a 29-page Google Doc that used photographic evidence both from our stay and the Airbnb's listing to prove that the host was lying, and documented a pattern I'd uncovered in which whenever a guest posted a negative review of their stay, this host would write a public response that said they were going to file a Resolution Center Reimbursement Request against them. 

Airbnb decided the issue in my favor. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!