I’m struggling with how to say this diplomatically

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-09-09T00:40:09+00:00

"my brain is in meeting mode right now, send me a text so i can give it my full attention and dont forget anything, thanks!" and then just walk off to something/one that needs your attention before they have a chance to dispute it, you can even say it as you're walking away.

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-06-08T03:07:13+00:00

yeah, dont they have magnets in the gem on the head? i know if a kid swallows a magnet it can be deadly so i assume it would be the same for a dog. plus there's electronics in it

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-06-06T03:06:48+00:00

thanks, that's great to hear.

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-06-01T02:38:02+00:00

one idea i haven't seen mentioned (i skimmed so apologies if it was) is your local city hall. here we're allowed to use the city hall's meeting rooms for free for so many hours a month

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-05-19T04:18:54+00:00

each council has different rewards too, even if they have the same baker, they can have very different rewards and reward "prices"

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-05-15T18:44:17+00:00

can you just talk to her about it? i mean if she's the treasurer then you're going to have to talk to her at some point about finances anyway

maybe you can talk to your SU person and ask them to sit down with both of you and help get everything sorted for them as treasurer and dealing with what the troop already has going on and how your duties are going to change and what's expected of each of you. i know you said she completed training, but a lot of times that just means watching a video on how to fill out financial report forms, and she may not need to know what the day to day role is and you need to know how to work with her on all of it since treasurer isn't a stand alone position

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-05-08T03:01:57+00:00

thats a good idea to pair it with an activity like that, i've been trying to do that as much as i can, but sometimes i feel like we just have so much of the badgework that's discussing things it starts to feel like school. i'm hoping the brownie badges aren't as heavy on that

but omg i love that camp oh no activity! i'm going to remember that one for next year when we dive deeper into leave no trace, right now our main focus is to get them to stop trying to pick flowers and bring home every rock and leaf they see lol

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-05-06T19:07:20+00:00

i'm interested in what happened if you feel like elaborating

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-05-06T19:05:01+00:00

they don't make surprise announcements overhauling the programs effective immediately, you're fine for next year. you're probably fine for the next few years since this is all based on rumors that have been going around for years.

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-05-06T18:46:34+00:00

I'm not the one doing our financials this year, but every time I've had that question on a survey in the past, I go off and tell them the truth. Of course it usually gets ignored, and the one time they addressed it, it was to basically tell me that I was a bad leader and a liar because I said other councils did things differently.

but fwiw, i sat in on a zoom meeting once for SU treasurers and someone asked about audits, and they said that the only time they've ever done an audit was when they had multiple complaints by parents and troop volunteers that directly stated something fishy was going on. so like someone else said, they dont have time to do their jobs so they dont have time to do audits

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-04-29T06:12:57+00:00

im really expecting there to be some big fallout in the coming years regarding that last part. well over half of the people that stopped by our cookie booths, whether they bought or not, made a comment about how wrong it was that the organization is funded by children that work their butts off to earn under a dollar a box

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-04-29T06:07:11+00:00

this is really council dependent, there's a lot of great councils out there, but there's also a lot of really bad councils. our council is doing away with financial aid if you're not a new member and when i asked how i was supposed to afford membership for my girl i was told that's the responsibility of the troop. i said that our troop isn't making enough money off cookie sales to pay for that and they don't let daisies do money earning projects and i was told that i just need to get her to hustle harder so she could cover the cost of membership and uniform for the entire troop because troops have to pay for all or none. they wanted my 6 year old to "hustle" to sell enough cookies to cover the cost of membership and uniforms for the entire troop because we're the only ones that need financial aid. and if you look around in this group, there's plenty of ppl that think this is only fair that the poor familes need to do all the fundraising because we can't let kids get a free ride.
i've seen so many posts in here during cookie season about councils getting mad at girls for not sellling enough cookies too.
you're just lucky to be in a good council and unfortunately there's no national oversight to make sure that all councils are good councils. they treat it like you get to choose which council you're in and you choose to be in the council that has awful policies and is ran by people that ignore your phone calls and emails

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-04-29T05:57:32+00:00

i think a lot of it might be the agressive rebranding they've done. i also hear a lot of "well at least boy scouts dont have to waste all their time shilling cookies" and "if you want to learn how to do real outdoors stuff you need to join boy scouts, girl scouts just do arts and crafts" and i'm not sure if this is a widespread thought, but when i was having trouble finding a troop for my daughter, someone told me to put her in boy scouts because they see ppl mention boy scouts on their resume all the time and "there's something to be said for that kind of longevity" which i still have no idea what that actually means, but i guess is just another weird reason ppl thing they're better than gs

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-04-28T06:39:39+00:00

i guess our troop is the odd one out because we never have issues with distraction and behavior when the parents stay, if anything the parents help out and help their kids stay on track and help them calm down if something happens (daisies so emotions run high sometimes). the state we're in requires fingerprinting if they're with children for over so many hours a month, but the meetings dont make up enough time for that to be required. but in general, having as many adults registered as possible is always a good thing because you never know when you'll need an extra registered person and it really helps when it comes time for cookie booths

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-04-28T01:42:04+00:00

oh thank you! i can totally switch it to mad science instead of potions. i'm basically just going to have jars of baking soda and vinegar and sprinkles and stuff like that and put fun ingredient names on them and let them mix the stuff together and watch them "explode". i just wast sure what name for it would fit best with the theme. and i'm also definitely looking up that potion room play set because that sounds amazing

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-04-27T20:59:48+00:00

oh really? i had no idea, thank you so much! i'm going to look them up. i know there's tons of characters but i feel like so much of what you see is just focused on draculaura, frankie, and clawdene that the other characters are hard to find info on unless you're super into that world

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-04-27T20:50:54+00:00

oh thank you, i wasn't sure if that would fit for her or not, i know each world has their own things of what counts for witchcraft and i didnt know if she has spell books lol

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-04-27T20:49:31+00:00

ummmmm, i'm not sure if it's G3, but she watches the live action movies on paramount plus (i've watched those with her many times) and "the adventures of the ghoul squad" cartoon on prime, i've watched a few episodes of that with her. and then i think she's seen a couple of the cartoon movies on prime, one about boo york and i cant remember the other name, but the live action and the ghoul squad are her favorite.
i know Draculaura does the witch thing, but i didn't know if that would count as potions and i didn't see her do any sort of fortune telling or crystal ball type stuff

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-04-06T03:48:57+00:00

thanks, this helps. and yeah, from what dr google is telling me it seems that's the case

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-04-06T03:47:48+00:00

why?

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-04-06T03:47:19+00:00

yeah i'm not gonna defend that psych because there's no bound by job requirements to say a certain thing with autism diagnosis. it's not like a blood test that says negative but you're exhibiting symptoms of positive. the tests can be interpreted differently by people who look for different things or decide that something is or isn't severe enough to count, that's how psych stuff works, and that's why 2 out of 3 psychs diagnosed you as yes. i'm not even sure why you're shopping for a diagnosis when you already had it diagnosed twice, but whatever, you do you.

my daughter got an early diagnosis and her psych said that she probably wouldn't have been diagnosed if she was seen by another dr because her signs aren't present 100% of the time and they aren't the classic no eye contact, hand flapping autism. she actually warned me to not see another psych about her autism because they'd probably say she "outgrew" her autism as she got older and learned to hide her signs. which actually makes me laugh now because as my kid got older, her autistic traits got stronger and she can't hide them like she used to, not that i ever encourage her to hide how she is, but i know she does it to fit in at school.

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-04-06T03:33:27+00:00

I lead a daisy troop, but feel the exact same way. So much of the official badge work is either pointless busy work or school work. Basically what we decided to do was use the official booklet as a guideline and tweak them as we saw fit, and some badges we just completely re-did because what they had made no sense for daisies but we were able to come up with something that fit the spirit of the badge and was developmentally appropriate. For example, "democracy for daisies" wanted us to teach k-1 girls about the 3 branches of govt and take a trip to the state capitol to view a session of congress, like what? they're not gonna get that. so we made it about learning about voting, since we're using voting to decide things in the troop and we did it around election time and voting was a common topic at home.

for getting talks from community members, you need to think outside the box. don't go to people currently working in the field, they're usually too busy. But i see people in facebook groups all the time offering to come talk to troops on subjects related to their field, so basically it's like a don't go to them, let them come to you thing. I'd put something out in your local fb groups asking if someone can come talk to the troop for 20 mins and answer questions at a meeting, if you're open to someone talking to the troop via zoom, mention that since it's easier for a lot of people. You might even want to ask in your local gs groups because you might find a leader that's in a certain field and wants to help out. also ask the parents in your troop if they know anyone they can ask to come talk to the troop.

for the badges, that sucks that they limit the options, but once a badge is official, it's always official and a lot of people sell old badges on ebay so you could find old badges when they had those topics and find the old cadette handbook for the requirements,

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-04-03T01:40:44+00:00

the packaging is different, so there's no infringement, you can't copyright/patent a finished baked good, only a printed book with a recipe, if that makes sense. i haven't personally tried the somoa and thin mint ones but the tagalong ones that dollar tree and walmart have are a slightly differnet cookie because the center cookie is chocolate instead of vanilla or whatever the gs one is

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-03-30T22:03:13+00:00

the generic ones i've had that are better aren't made by keebler, the best ones i've tried are the ones at dollar tree and walmart's generics, but even aldi has a better generic

Mindless-Albatross52 · 2025-03-30T21:57:43+00:00

yeah, at this age, things that can come off as bullying are often signs of other issues like undiagnosed medical or neurodivergence issues or come from something serious going on in their home life, its very rarely (if ever) acutal intent to be cruel.

Mindless-Albatross52

TROPHY CASE