Juniors earn AMUSE

The girls wrapped up their Amuse Journey at our last meeting of the year. This is a Journey that they have worked on diligently since the first few meeting this school year. They spent 10 meetings talking about “Speaking Out” and “Reaching Out” to try on new roles in life and to recognize stereotypes and how to combat them. They had a “Try Out” portion of the badge work where they talked about roles and what they thought might be a good fit for them, like being a veterinarian, the President, a business owner, a volunteer with the community, a pop star, a mom, a wife, a sister, a teacher. And how they will likely balance many different roles in their lives and already balance so many at their young ages.

We concluded our Journey with a special speaker. Toni Milyard invited the girls to Re/Max 4000 and talked to them a little about stereotypes that she has overcome. How she went from viewing herself as a “farm girl”, to building a thriving business in our community and balancing heath, spirituality and all the other roles that so many of us juggle on a daily basis. She was insightful and honest and really captured the girls’ attention. They asked thoughtful questions and really helped lead the meeting. Which is a great segue to our next set of “Girl Lead” meetings!

This Award, which they received at that filed trip, was a big deal and we are very proud of their hard work.

THANK YOU Toni!!

Parade of Lights

Saturday was our town’s annual Parade of Lights. The Parade is a pretty big deal here and the streets are always lined with onlookers even when the weather is cold. And…this year, boy-o-boy was it COLD!!! Even with temps in the single digits and a wind chill something more ridiculous than that, we also had a good turn out of girls (thanks to parents willing to drop off their daughters) bearing the weather for the parade.

Thankfully we learned after last year that you MUST turn in your registration as early as possible to not have to wait for hours, towards the end of the parade route, for your turn up Main Street. We drew the #12 spot and got in and out really quickly.

The theme this year was Holiday Wishes…so we opted for a float of GIGANTIC Girl Scout Cookie boxes because don’t you just WISH you had some right now 🙂

Luckily cookie season is just around the corner!

One of our troop dads, Dave P. (shown in first photo next to his handy work!) does the construction of our float. He does a super great job, even including benches for the girlies to sit on! His wife, co-leader Heidi, was responsible for organizing our troop for this event this year, and with the crummy weather and a few other logistical challenges/changes, still pulled through with flying colors. Troop 2214 is very thankful to have support like this!

Special thanks to our council for allowing us the use of EVERY cookie costume they have! It helped our float be more festive to have Girl Scout cookies handing out treats to kids watching the parade!

Juniors take a trip to St. Mary’s

Recently, our Junior girls got to take a really cool field trip to the St. Mary’s helipad. One of the medivac nurses is a personal friend of one of our troop leaders so was able to give a personalized tour of the facility.

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We were lucky that the helicopter was there even though it was on standby to go out. Each girl got to sit in the helicopter and we went out on the helicopter pad as well.

The flight nurses were great talking about different situations. And we saw the equipment they used with the little babies.

We then went down to the NICU and one of the Neonatologists who was a female visited with us. Because we are working through a journey focused on female stereotypes and strong role models, we were very excited and lucky to see so many strong female role models on this tour.

The tour was amazing and the girls had great questions.

SPECIAL thanks to Angie Novak and her pals for the time and experience. We are very grateful!!

A few seconds of “fame”

A few of our girls sang Christmas Carols at the Junior Service League meeting this week. If you watch the clip in the news article you can see our girlies for a few seconds. ENJOY!!

http://www.krextv.com/news/around-the-region/Giving-Back-in-a-Big-Way-234180611.html