The Awesomeness of Resuable Dishes!

Just a short post to talk about my newfound love of reusable dishes - primarily my IKEA plates/cups/bowls & cutlery. 

We have at least 3 potluck/celebrations a year - Enrollment, Halloween Party and Advancement. Every year I disposable plates and every year the plates are huge, the girls eat so much junk and there is so much waste. My guider friend Cathy has had the same set of IKEA plates for her guide unit for years and I asked her reasoning behind it - mainly is it worth all of the washing? I came to the conclusion that for the cost of disposable plates for 3 events I could get 30 plates/cups/bowls & cutlery which would serve us for years. They are a good size for kids (not gigantic), don't fold under the weight of food, don't get knocked over as easily and most importantly we are helping the environment by not throwing out one use dishes. 

So now after each event my dishwasher is a sea of rainbow plastic. Its really not that hard to take home a plastic bag of dirty plates and they store quite nicely in my basement. 

I'm glad we've switched over to reusable and I'm hoping I can encourage some other units to give it a try as well!

SWAPS!

I'm a guider who loves to craft. I love crafting tiny little things at meetings and camp to add to hats and backpacks. Making and trading crafts is a big thing in our guiding circles. Any little thing you can make and trade is called a SWAPS (Small, Watch-a-ma-call-it, Affectionally, Pinned, Somewhere). 

Every year we teach the girls about this guiding tradition and they are so eager to make things to trade with their friends and girls in other groups. A few big thing we stress with SWAPS are:

1. You never say no to a trade - everyone has different crafting skills but we want everyone to be included. We trade with everybody - sparks through to rangers.
2. Always use your manners
3. Make LOTS! Its heartbreaking for girls to get to an event and see everyone is Swapping and they have nothing to trade. If you make lots giving a handfuls of traders to a friend is no big deal and then everyone can participate. 

We've always had an amazing time with SWAPS. Do you do them in your Unit?

Birthdays Around the World

Over the summer we received several packages of badges and challenges from our UK Pen Pals. Over the course of the year our leadership team did their best to combine our Canadian Girl Guide programming with the badges from abroad so the girls could complete everything and have a ton of fun in the process. Over this one meeting we completed parts of the:

- Key to Active Living

- Key to my Community

- BC Colour Me Healthy

- Brownie Interest Badge: Your Day

- UK Birthday Badge

We started off the meeting by looking at healthy and non-healthy foods. The girls created healthy and unhealthy meals using various cards and then we turned it into a game. While wearing oven mitts and carrying the cards on wooden spoons, the girls had to gather their food cards one at a time and recreate their meals on the table on the other side of the room. They had to do this relay race style, rotating so everyone got a turn. 

This was HILARIOUS. The girls loved it and had so much fun! the oven mitts really make it a challenge!

After we talked about healthy and non-healthy food we talked about different celebrations and what each of the girl's traditionally do to celebrate their birthdays. Lots of things were similar - they have a party, open presents, have cake. We talked about how they thought kids in other parts of the world might celebrate too. In the UK, in China, etc. We have girls from many diverse backgrounds so it was really neat to hear about some of the traditions they knew. 

We then explored some tasty birthday treats from Austrailia. We learned about the special birthday treat "fairy bread" which I thought was very appropriate for Brownies. Essentially Fairy Bread is white bread covered in butter or icing and then dipped in tiny rainbow sprinkles. Obviously my children went nuts over this. 

We decided to do a fairy bread taste test. Each girl got a piece of bread which we cut into 4. One at a time we tried out butter, vanilla icing, chocolate icing and cream cheese icing along with lots and lots of sprinkles. They had the best time and many said that they would love to go live in Australia if this is what they can look forward too on their birthday. 

Have you ever done a Birthday Meeting? What kinds of things did you do to celebrate?