10 Years and a Speech

Diana has been a Girl Scout now for 10 years. On Friday evening, there was a ceremony to acknowledge the girls with their 10-year pins, as well as honor the girls who had completed their Bronze (Junior Scout), Silver (Cadette Scout) and Gold (Senior Scout) Awards. The Girl Scout Gold Award is comparable to the Boy Scout Eagle Award. My troop are all working on theirs...

On Saturday, the Annual Meeting for our Council was held at our local community college. It moves around to different locations every year, and it was our turn to host it. I had Renee spend the night, so she & Diana could help with setting up the tables & decorations. They were also supposed to serve the cake later on.

Besides the other hats I wear in Girl Scouts, I'm also a delegate. That means I'm supposed to attend these annual meetings, vote on changes in policy and leadership, and then report back to my Service Unit with details. This year was exceptionally long and boring, because we are being "realigned" from 4 councils into one for the whole state of Oregon. This should help with things like the price of cookie boxes staying consistent throughout the state (instead of our boxes costing $4.00, and Portland's only being $3.00). It's also supposed to help keep the training for leaders more consistent, and we should have more use of different facilities throughout the state, vs. just the 2 camps we had for our council.

Every year at the annual meeting, there is a flag ceremony (of course) and a girl scout does a short speech. Diana was chosen this year to be the scout. I knew she was supposed to give a speech, but I thought it was for a different Girl Scout event, later in May (and she is supposed to speak at that one too). Don't ask me how this slipped my mind, but poor Diana only found out at the girl recognition ceremony on Friday night that she was giving a speech on Saturday morning! Whoops! My bad!

She did great though. The topic was "What Girl Scouting means to me." In part of her speech she said, "Girl Scouting has also taught me to be prepared for things I don't expect, like being told I have to give a speech the night before I'm supposed to give it!" She did credit Girl Scouting for giving her great skills to work at her current job - the lawyer she works for was impressed by her long history with scouting, and figured her integrity, honesty and responsibility would be a good asset to his office. She talked about learning to make friends with people she didn't expect to be friends with, and about being confident and teaching others. Diana also asked, "Will Girl Scouting help me to become independently wealthy and never have to pay taxes? No." That got a good laugh :)

When she left the podium, she got a standing ovation, which was really cool, but just embarassed her. The president of the council came over later to shake her hand and tell her what a great job she'd done. Other people congratulated her as well. I was happy that she enunciated well, and didn't speak too quickly. Plus, she kept it short. The leader version of the same thing was nice, but was pretty dang long. I think that lady had 5 sheets of paper to read from!

Diana & Renee hung out in a break room watching TV while the meeting went on, waiting to serve the cake. Around 3:00, I didn't see anyone putting out cake, and things were starting to wrap up, so I located some of the ladies in charge. Turns out the cake was supposed to be served at lunch! The staff at the college had forgotten to put it out - and now it was locked in the kitchen, since the staff had already left! Whoops! If someone would have told either the girls or me when they'd be serving, we would have reminded them - but no one did, so there you go. I guess they'll just have to freeze the cake somewhere and bring it out at the bridging ceremony. I don't know what happened later, I had to get the girls back home.

Most likely, we'll have to attend Annual Meeting next year, just because I *should* have 4 girls getting their Gold Awards. They should be presenting at the Annual Meeting besides getting the award at the girl recognition ceremony on the night before. Hopefully, that one will run a little more smoothly next year.