Giggling Gaggle o' Girls

Also known as Brownies. We had the funniest meeting tonight. We started out talking about plants. Moved on to our take home science experiment. Nothing is more fun than telling a group of little girls that they are going to grow mold! :) This is a testament to the 'cityness' of my girls. I got a chorus of EEEWWW!!! So we set up our experiment. We took 2 pieces of bread and wrapped both in tinfoil, but with one we put a moist papertowel. Next week we shall see what grows. I'm not 100% positive the moms are too happy with the project either. :) Finally for our citizenship badge we talked about voting. It is such a testament to the power of campaign ads the way these kids can recite pieces of them. They are all supporting Kerry. I tried to encourage them to not say, but...8 year olds are hard to shut up. They remember so much about the ads, it was frightening. One of mine even knew Prop I892 (which in my drunken stupor I couldn't identify the correct number) and told me that I should vote against it because kids will be late to school because they are watching the gambling machines. (Totally a scene from the commercial). They were like little parrots of what they had heard from I can only really assume, their parents. "We need to get Bush out of office, he isn't taking care of the people." Cracked my shit up. They even knew the "I'm John Kerry and I approve this ad." I think the parents may have also been a bit surprised by both how animated the kids were about voting and how much they retained from the ads. I look at this and am fascinated. And a little sad. I realize these are kids, but there are so many adults out there who get influenced by these ads too and that makes me sad. Next week I'm hoping to get the point across that many of these ads are finger pointing and manipulative. I also spoke with one of our public safety officers. Young, African American woman who is new to the U. I asked if she would be willing to talk to the kids about safety some evening. She was touched. :) And I like that I can have an African American guest speaker since 6/7ths of my troop is African American.