The Inaugural Girl Scout Cookie Booth

If I've been absent here more often than not this month, it's because I've been sucked down the Girl Scout cookie rabbit hole.

The kids are really into selling Girl Scout cookies. REALLY into it. They each have a goal of selling 200 boxes of cookies (I had to talk Syd down from making a goal of two THOUSAND boxes!), and they have been busting their butts to try to make that happen. I'm a little concerned, because they're each only at 114 boxes right now, and they have to split every order because they work as a team, so that's really more like 172 more boxes that they have to sell this month, but I digress...

Anyway, not only do the kids like this cookie-selling business, but it's also great for them. It's marketed as the world's largest girl-led business, and I can totally see that--the kids are learning about inventory, keeping accounts, managing money, marketing, sales techniques, philanthropy, figuring out how to meet their goals, and we haven't even talked about what their troop is going to do with their profits. That will be a whole bunch more planning and budgeting and philanthropy!

Of course, as young as the kids are, this is also a lot of work for the parents. And my whole troop is young. AND this is our first year in the cookie business! This is really stretching my abilities at money managing and keeping inventory and accounts, not to mention all the people skills that *I* have to practice as I assist the children. I'm not so much a people person, so it's kind of emotionally exhausting to do it for two hours at a stretch at a cookie booth, but good for me, too, of course.

The kids spent a lot of time last week preparing for their first Girl Scout cookie booth on Sunday. They didn't know what to expect, so I guided them into creating something like an academic fair display, since they've done those many times. Their centerpiece was a giant tri-fold menu that showcases each cookie:

I printed giant photos of each cookie (thank you, Google Image!).

The kids cut them out. Check out my reluctant cutter there!

They gave me the paper that they wanted for the background, and I glued and trimmed the background paper for them. They placed and taped the images and wrote the "menu."

They got a little distracted.

This was supposed to be an advertisement for buying cookies by the case, but we didn't have room for it on the table. I'm not sure what to do about that before our next booth.

 The kids also took photos of some of their Girl Scout friends, in uniform and holding several boxes of a cookie to recommend, and then I wrote each kid's quote next to her photo, along with her first name and age. That turned out particularly cute, I thought.

During their field trip to The Green Nursery last week, the kids picked up the idea to offer "prizes" to good customers, so I helped them make bookmarks out of empty cookie boxes:

A customer who purchased five boxes of cookies was invited to pick a prize.

And here the kids are at their booth!

Will did an amazing job with the customers--where did that shy little girl GO?!?--but Syd found it more of a challenge:

Good for her to stretch herself, though. People skills are VERY important!

Overall, the cookie booth went very well, although I wish now that we'd done a smaller-scale "practice" booth first; this Wal-mart booth was our biggest spot for the year, and we didn't meet the sales that I'd been told to expect. But now I know some things to encourage for next time: the kids had prizes for people who bought five boxes of cookies, for instance, but didn't tell the customers about them unless they purchased five boxes. At the next booth, the kids can announce that there are prizes, especially if they see a customer picking up three or four boxes to purchase. The kids also had a display for Operation Cookie Drop, but also didn't announce anything about it to their customers. At the next booth, the kids can ask customers if they'd also like to donate four dollars to OCD; Will started trying this while delivering a few pre-orders the next day, and although she didn't get any full $4 donations, one customer did let her keep the change from her purchase--that can definitely add up!

We've got another cookie booth this weekend, and the kids plan to spend more time this week refining their display; they want something on the front of that tablecloth, so I'll have to drag the felt out for them, and they need a way to fit in the extra advertising that was on that one display board that didn't fit their table.

Their booth is also on Valentine's Day, so I'm going to bring up the idea of doing some extra marketing towards that--the kids might want to encourage customers to buy cookies as a gift, perhaps with free gift wrapping or Valentine's Day cards. I have a list of Girl Scout cookie and wine pairings that I plan to print out.

And I have a HUGE piece of cardboard. I really, really, really want to make a sandwich board for a kid to wear...

P.S. Speaking of Operation Cookie Drop... The kids were looking for more ways to get donations, so I put a Paypal Donate button for Operation Cookie Drop up at the top left of my blog. A $4 donation will buy a box of Girl Scout cookies for our military. It's a way to get Girl Scout cookies into the hands of people who super want them, but aren't home to get them!

A Recipe for Children's Perfume (and Bubble Bath!)

Syd LOOOOOOOVES to make "children's perfume":

As you can see, it's really just a combination of flavored extracts and water, with funnels and REAL little bottles--the cute little glass bottles are very important, I'm told--and labels written on (Sydney's Vanilla Cupcake Perfume, etc.).

I actually don't own a ton of extracts--basically just vanilla, peppermint, and almond--so poor Syd's perfume recipes are limited, but if your kid was super into it, or if you wanted to let kids make perfume at a party, there are actually a ton of flavors. I wouldn't say no to some homemade orange/chocolate perfume, myself.

To make bubble bath instead of perfume, Syd says that you should use soap (we use Dr. Bronner's liquid soap) instead of water to mix with the extracts. 

This particular photo is from a few months ago, so I can also tell you that this stuff lasts, as I just emptied out a bottle that I recognize from this batch a couple of days ago, in a mass commandeering of all the little bottles so that I can make more alcohol ink. 

Because in this month, when I've got 700 boxes of Girl Scout cookies in my house and am running three different cookie booths for my troop, and am creating and sewing TWO Trashion/Refashion Show garments out of patterns that I still need to make, I also absolutely need to be thinking about how to make a faux stained glass TARDIS using picture frame glass, dyed school glue, and homemade alcohol ink.

I mean, right?

Cicadas in the Summer

I'm currently working on our homeschool photo portfolio for the 2013-2014 school year, and I'm spending an inordinately long time perusing my summer photos.

Such warm! Such green! Such outside!

During my perusal, I rediscovered these photos. I'd been inside or out, puttering on one thing or another, when the children called out to me--"Come see the cicada!"

Indiana is known for its cicadas, and we've got plenty of them, but even so, it's not so usual to see a live one, nice and green, freshly shorn of its old exoskeleton. I ran to get the camera, and shot these photos while Will took no notice, lost in her study:

Although warm and green would feel nice right now, we are nevertheless happy in our very first winter in our house. Will is planning a butterfly garden AND a koi pond, and I purchased far too many growing things that will arrive and expect to be planted in the spring.

Add to that a large future order of netting and steel mesh. I hear that chickens love gardens and raccoons love koi.

Work Plans for the Week of February 2, 2015: It's Girl Scout Cookie Time!!!

Who wants Girl Scout cookies?!?

We had a great homeschool week last week, with the kids getting all their schoolwork done, and leaving plenty of time for us to watch Indian superhero films, eat ice cream for dinner, go hiking, and play, play, play!

This week is all about the Girl Scouts, especially those cookies, 32 cases of which Will is currently dividing up in the family room. The kids have orders to deliver, money to manage, and a huge cookie booth at Wal-mart this weekend to prepare for and then run. Non-cookie work gets fitted in wherever it may.

Other academic work will consist of an assigned book for each kid each day (it's usually just something that I think will interest them, and they only have to read it and then talk about it with me), and daily practice of typing and piano.

MONDAY: We started this morning with a Girl Scout field trip to a local business. My friends Scott and Abby started their small natural baby store 8 years ago with just the two of them, and today it's a successful business with a storefront right on the square downtown, a warehouse for online orders, and a staff of part-time employees. They gave the kids a tour of both their spaces, discussed the benefits and challenges of managing your own business, walked the kids through their work flow, and answered all their nosy questions (yes, Will totally asked them how much money they make every month):

My two have already been thinking about how to apply their advice to their own cookie selling.

We went straight from the tour to our volunteer gig, where the kids worked hard and helped for two hours (with one small break for Saltines and peanut butter, and an Otter Pop at the end), and then we went straight to the big Girl Scout cookie delivery on the other side of town, to pick up our troop's initial order. It may surprise you to learn that I don't actually tend to run errands during our "school day," just because that's not how I want to spend our school time, but Girl Scout cookies are the exception, of COURSE. And now Will is in the other room with our troop's master order list, dividing the cases up by kid and filling out receipts to be signed by moms.

Other tasks to be completed today are research to make an infographic on Przewalski’s horse, math (Syd has Math Mammoth, and Will has a worksheet on equivalent fractions, to be used with fraction manipulatives), and the beginning of Syd's week in her Minecraft Homeschool class.

TUESDAY: Free day!!! Our day has already run so long that I'm actually going to encourage the children to leave today's math and science until this day. Other than that, we'll stay home and play until Will's evening Robotics Club.

WEDNESDAY: LEGO Club, horseback riding class, and Magic Tree House Club take up almost this entire day. On top of that, I'll only be asking the children to complete another lesson in Math Mammoth, and Will can continue to work on another essay contest.

THURSDAY: Again, we'll spend much of this day out and about. Will has a writing class that will take up much of the morning, and we'll go from there to our homeschool group's Gym Day at a local community center. The children will have their Hoffman Academy keyboard lesson, and can begin to work on the cookie booth that they'll be running this weekend.

FRIDAY: The children will have a grammar lesson using First Language Lessons, and they'll spend most of the morning at math class. Our Girl Scout troop will be presenting Mongolia for the Girl Scout World Thinking Day celebration later this month, so we'll be listening to the Mongolia chapters in The Story of the World on this day, and answering the comprehension questions. Will has ice skating class, and Syd should finish up her week's assignments in Minecraft Homeschool.

And there will be more cookie booth plans to plan!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: On Saturday, Syd has ballet, then both children will do something special with Matt, and then they have Chinese. On Sunday, they'll be running a Girl Scout cookie booth at our town's Wal-mart, and Will also has chess club.

It's a busy week, I know! There's a lot of out and about in this week, which I get tired of, but the kids never do. It always amazes me that what I might see as scut work (selling cookies?!?) might be a major source of joy in their lives, and my attitude must therefore be adjusted accordingly. So out and about we will go, stand in the cold and sell cookies we will, and at the end of each day, well, kids who've been out and about all day need to go to bed early and get their rest...

...and their mommas need to watch TV and eat Girl Scout cookies!

My Latest: Boxes and Broken Toys

a round-up of oatmeal container crafts

a tutorial for building your own box set case from scratch

a review of the creepy post-Apocalyptic novel, Bird Box

and a tutorial for repairing the broken leg of a toy horse by inserting a metal pin

Now that it's February, you may expect that I will only be willingly discussing T-shirt leotards and Girl Scout cookies for the next month.

Girl Scout cookies!

T-shirt leotards!

At least February is a short month, right?

Recently Sewn, Kid Edition

Well, these aren't *very* recently sewn, since you can see our Christmas tree in the background of one photo, but they are among some of the things sewn by the kids in December.

Will started this project simply as a plain embroidery project, using a transfer of starbursts from my Jenny Hart Stitch-It Kit. After she'd finished the starbursts, she decided that she wanted to turn the project into a Christmas gift for Syd, so I traced out Sydney's name for her lightly in pencil (it occurs to me now that I should have encouraged Will to do the writing, herself. Ah, well...). I think Will did an excellent job embroidering Syd's name, in particular:

Aren't her stitches nice and even?

She then used my sewing machine to turn the embroidery into a little pillow.

Syd is constantly making doll clothes, and I catch photos of them only rarely, so I feel lucky to have an image of this creation:

Syd mostly likes to use tape and ties to construct her clothing, but she's recently begun to add in some hand-sewing, as well. 

More recently, the kids have abandoned sewing projects for elaborate block building, at-home aerial silks performances, and their ever-elaborate imaginative games involving toy horses. I hope to incorporate them into some aspects of sewing their Trashion/Refashion Show garments, however, so hopefully soon you'll see even more examples of children's sewing projects!

Work Plans for the Week of January 26, 2015: Essays and Indianapolis

Last week was a very successful school week. The kids worked with minimal fuss, enjoyed playdates with friends, and then on Friday, we skipped school altogether after math class, and instead went hiking and spelunking with some buddies.

See? Spelunking!

A creek runs through the cave, and although everyone wore galoshes, children's galoshes still aren't that tall, you know? My friend and I decided that we'll return to this cave in the summer, wearing Keens, and perhaps we won't leave again until fall.

And hiking:

This week, we've got that make-up day, more essays to work on, a couple of new classes to begin, and a field trip to Indianapolis.

The kids' daily book assignments (one each daily, in addition to the hours of pleasure reading that they do independently) include picture books on the theme of diversity, a history of the Pearl Harbor attack, folk tales, and more picture books about Georgia O'Keeffe.

MONDAY: We're back at our regular volunteer gig today, after skipping last week so that the kids could do a different service project with the Girl Scouts. The kids also skipped their Hoffman Academy keyboard lesson, since that was the day we went spelunking with friends instead; the lessons are short enough, however, that I'm considering having the kids complete two lessons today. It's not really necessary to do that, since I never worry that they're "behind" in anything, but still... it's worth asking them about to see what they think.

Will needs more hands-on experience with fractions, so I've invented a game for the kids to play with me today that involves fraction circle manipulatives and fraction dice. It should cover adding mixed fractions and both like and unlike fractions, so I think that it will help Will a lot. Syd will play, too, of course--one of the reasons why Syd is generally so quick at her math is this leg-up that she's always getting by sharing Will's hands-on enrichment.

Syd also has her Minecraft Homeschool class to work on this week, so that's sort of an invisible lesson slot in her work plans. It works out well, though, because Will has a biography of Anthony "Kapel" Van Jones to write this week, and it will give me time to focus one-on-one with her.

Finally, the children's horseback riding instructor is retiring from her post this week, so she deserves two lovely cards with lovely notes inside from two grateful little girls.

TUESDAY: The kids have their first meeting of a science club at our local community college on this evening. Will attends a robotics club there on alternate Tuesdays, where she is apparently a star programmer of LEGO Mindstorms, so I expect that this program will be equally excellent.

In Math Mammoth this week Will returns to fractions, and Syd reviews rounding and estimating. It should be an easy enough week for both.

The children's horse breed homework this week is the Lipizzaner. They've done this one before, but their new horseback riding instructor loved the infographic that they presented to her last week so much that she's requested that they begin to collect them into a binder, so some review is expected.

Syd knows exactly what she wants her Trashion/Refashion Show entry to look like, but she still needs to draw it for me in full-color detail. I'm afraid that I'm going to end up sewing it again this year, but I've suggested that she add capes to the costumes that she's designing, and if she likes that plan, she should be able to do much of that sewing herself.

Although the kids are working hard on their Girl Scout cookie selling (want to buy some Girl Scout cookies?), Will is intent on earning all the Junior badges before she bridges to Cadette, and so really needs to work on this every week.

WEDNESDAY: Verbs are our focus in First Language Lessons, currently. The kids are bored by the scripted lessons (as am I!) but love the diagramming, so we keep trucking through. Both horseback riding class and aerial silks class take up most of the rest of our school time on Wednesdays.

THURSDAY: Free day! We'll actually be spending the day in Indianapolis on this day, volunteering at the fossil prep lab at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, and then either staying there to play for the rest of the day or going over to the Indianapolis Museum of Art to see their exhibit on Georgia O'Keeffe.

FRIDAY: Math class and Will's ice skating class also take up much of the school time on this day, but there are a few things that we'll also try to fit in. I have an idea for a physics experiment that I think the kids will enjoy--making zip lines for toys--and we still haven't gotten around to checking out typing programs! Something always seems to come up, and it's an easy lesson to put off if we're crunched for time.

The children should both be finishing up final drafts of essays on this day, as well. Perhaps we'll have a little family party that evening to celebrate!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Saturday brings ballet class for Syd and Chinese language class for both kids, with space in between for them to do something special with Matt (and for me to get a bunch of work done, hopefully, allowing me to have more family time later!). Sunday is totally open, and we'll either spend it playing at home or, if the kids and I didn't go on Thursday, at the art museum with Georgia O'Keeffe.

My Latest: Popcorn, Summer Camp, and Hands-on Math

a round-up of what to make for sleep-away camp

a round-up of popcorn tutes and recipes

and a tutorial for the newspaper cubes that the kids made to give them hands-on experience in calculating volume

The newspaper pillars are tricky to build with, as they present a whole host of build challenges just for that material. Once I stepped in just to hold parts until they'd been supported, so that both kids could focus on the engineering and construction, the project was much less frustrating for them. A much easier material to work with would be balsa wood posts, but that would go against my desire that the kids complete the project simply with what they had to hand.

It would be interesting to try this again in nicer weather, when it can be prefaced by a stick hunt in the woods, and then we can see if sticks are easier than newspaper pillars, or if the bends and waves in sticks will just make them a different type of challenging material to build with.

For now, however, it's no matter. Will, who prior to this couldn't quite work out why volume is calculated the way that it is, now has the concept down cold. Tomorrow, then, she leaves geometry behind for a while and returns to fractions.

Fractions, I think, will also be a very hands-on unit. So many pies! So many Cuisenaire rods! So many coins and counters and puzzles and graphs!