Saturday, March 20, 2010

Scouting Saturday

Nothing terribly exciting to report, but it has been awhile since I've chatted about scouts.  Let's go youngest to oldest here.

Richard got a cub scout shirt for his birthday.  Just a few weeks more and he can sign up to be a Tiger.  He is SO excited, it is not even funny.  Personally, I'm not looking forward to all of the tour a radio station, tour a fire department type of stuff.  But he is going to love it. Now if we can teach him the Cub Scout promise and law instead of the Boy Scout one.

Thomas is going bowling with his den on Monday.  He's thrilled.  He has the best group of dads ever leading his den.  Thomas has been busy making plans for Grandpa for this summer too... working on his craftsman activity badge.  It should be fun to see what kind of project they come up with.

William is steadily making progress towards new ranks.  He is also finishing up his third merit badge (Crime Prevention, more on that below) and starting his fourth.

Connor has some work to do to make Life Scout.  He hasn't been doing much on merit badges lately, though he'll be finishing off Crime Prevention soon.  He did spend some time in the past week trying to figure out a plan of attack for finishing off some merit badge requirements though.  He has quite a few that he is oh, so very close to earning.  I want to assign him some of the stuff for school, but I'm forcing myself to make him take the initiative.  It's hard though.  You know, just an hour here, or a half hour there, and he could have some of this stuff earned.

Crime Prevention merit badge.  This is one the two boys worked on last fall at a merit badge college.  They learned a ton, but still had a couple things to do.  The big thing was to go tour a jail or visit a criminal court trial.  I had told them I'd take care of that part, and I finally followed through.  What a great experience that ended up being.

We headed to court, visited the jury room (that was suggested to me by someone on the phone a few weeks ago) and they gave us a list of four courtrooms to try.  That was discouraging.  The first one was done for the day.  The second one had "Absolutely No Children Allowed" signs posted.  The third one we simply could not find.  And we were striking out on the fourth one too.

Some nicely dressed gentleman was hanging out -- a district attorney, as it turned out -- and he could tell we looked confused.  Turned out we were looking for "his" courtroom.  But they were doing plea bargains.  Not a trial.  I asked for advice... HOW do I find a trial that is appropriate for these guys to go to.  He started giving suggestions, and then decided to take us for a walk.  He suggested an economic case happening in another courtroom on the same floor.  We waited outside, while he slipped in to obtain permission for us to observe.

We did get to go to that one... and we tiptoed in, sat down, listened to two minutes of testimony relating to whether or not someone was feisty... and the court recessed for lunch.  Ugh.

An hour and a half later, we returned... and rode up the elevator with "our" judge.  He explained the basics of the case to the boys (some lady died and left her caregiver her $1.2 million house).  We sat through a bit over an hour of the case.  Without the coincidence of meeting the judge in the elevator, we would have been totally confused.

The boys still need to meet up with their merit badge counselor and talk about it.  But other than that, I do believe they are finished.  And I finally did my part :)

Anyone else busy with scouting?  Pinewood derbies?  Service projects?  Anything fun going on?


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1 comment:

Debbie said...

Hi Debra,
You're the winner of my DNA/Genetics science kit giveaway! Please email me your mailing address.