Top Ten Camping Tips for Girl Scout Leaders

Sarah's Girl Scout troop is hosting a workshop this morning on camping skills for younger Girl Scouts. We promised the leaders some camping tips. Here they are.

1. Don’t forget coffee! If you are a coffee drinker, you will definitely want coffee in the morning, and if you rely on the girls’ menu and shopping list you probably won’t have it. Most places you will be camping have electricity; bring an electric hot pot to make hot water, a Melitta-style filter or coffee singles, and a mug.

2. Even if the girls decide to make something disgusting for dessert involving doughnuts and marshmallows, you don’t have to eat it. Make this instead:

Spray a pie iron with cooking spray. Using dough from canned crescent rolls, take the dough for two rolls and leave them together as a rectangle. Put them in the pie iron, put a piece of chocolate in the middle of the rectangle and fold the dough over it from both sides. Bake in the pie iron over coals until brown. Don’t feel guilty. You deserve it.

3. Camping in the late fall or early spring is lots of fun and it’s easy to get the girls to go to bed when it’s cold and dark. But it’s very important that they are warm enough for sleeping which requires a real sleeping bag. When it’s really cold, add a pad under the sleeping bag (more insulation), a warm hat, and fleece or wool socks. Tip from backpacking: change clothes before getting into your sleeping bag. The moisture in the clothes you’ve been wearing will make it hard to stay warm.

4. Bring a folding chair. If you are old enough to be a leader you are probably too old to sit on the ground.

5. Most of the units in our Girl Scout Council camps will have a covered pavilion where you can prepare meals and stay dry even if it’s raining. If rain is expected, bring some craft supplies or games for “inside.” And don’t over-schedule your camping trip. Cooking and cleaning up after meals takes a long time, and the girls may enjoy some down time.

6. Girls may not know how to clean bathrooms or sweep floors, but will be expected to leave the site clean at Girl Scout camps. We cleaned a bathroom at the church where we meet before we went camping the first time.

7. Encourage meals without much clean-up! Silver turtles (cooked over charcoal in foil) and “walking tacos” (taco fixings in a bag of corn chips) both require limited clean-up.

8. The rule for tents is that the tent is only for the girls who are assigned to the tent. If anyone else is invited in, everyone will want to come, and someone will want to say that some other specific girl cannot come in. This is hurtful, so avoid this altogether by the rule that tents are for resting, sleeping, changing clothes, reading books, etc., for the girls assigned to that tent. Socializing and hanging out with friends is done elsewhere. And speaking of assigning – you’re the leader. You decide who’s in which car and who’s in which tent and who’s buddies with whom. This is a valuable tool; use it. Girls don’t need to be with their best friend all the time.

9. My daughter says I should write something about how to manage with your daughter in the troop. My husband used to pay her to be a good example and not cause any problems when he had her in a sailing class. I never have done that in Girl Scouts but always have had the same expectations. You can’t show any extra attention toward your daughter (the other girls will notice and deeply resent it). If your daughter is having a bad behavior day, one of your co-leaders should handle it and treat her just as they would any other girl in the troop. Have a frank discussion with your co-leaders about this now; they will probably not be comfortable disciplining your daughter in your presence otherwise.

10. You’re a Girl Scout leader, not a mom, even if your daughter is there. You are there to keep the girls safe. Let them do the work. They will learn from it and have a great time while you sit in your folding chair with your cup of coffee and supervise.

The Day Wikipedia Was Down

The two bills -- one in the House and one in the Senate -- were supposed to protect intellectual property. Wednesday of last week was the day that a number of big on line companies that are essential parts of daily life now for most of us along with more than 100,000 other websites asked their users to contact Congress and oppose the legislation. Wikipedia was down for the day, and the Google logo was covered with a black rectangle.

According to the New York Times, the organized effort to oppose the legislation began in the fall. The first alarm was raised by venture capitalists. A meeting in November brought in Tumblr, which hosts 40 million blogs. Tumblr posted an alert, which reached many in the tech community, and Reddit (another site with many tech company users), also became a hub for communication and organization against the legislation. According to Fight for the Future, a nonprofit organization that helped organize the protest, more than 100,000 websites participated in the protest.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) is an opponent of the legislation and has co-authored an alternative bill with Representative Darrell Issa (R-California). He told the New York Times that more than 14 million individuals - more than 10 million of them voters - had contacted Congress to oppose the legislation. “It’s going to be a new day in the Senate,” Sen. Wyden told the New York Times. “The way citizens communicate with their government is never going to be the same.”

Maybe someone anticipated that the Internet -- a disruptive technology that seems to be reshaping how we do everything -- would one day be able to do this, but I didn't. What an amazing series of events. Let's see what happens next.

Visiting Auburn Avenue

Yesterday was the day that we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday. It's a national holiday, but the event it commemorates took place right here in Atlanta, not very far from where I am writing this. But even though I've lived in Atlanta for years, I hadn't visited Dr. King's birthplace until a few months ago. In order to complete the requirements for a Boy Scout Merit Badge, Iain needed to visit a National Historic Site, and this was the one he selected.

We went on a Saturday afternoon, only to learn that the tickets for tours to visit the birthplace were long gone for the day; if we came back in the morning, they said, we could get tickets for tomorrow. So we came back the next day, were first in line, and got tickets for the first tour of the morning.







It's a two story house that didn't go straight from Martin's birthplace to being a National Historic Site, but the home has been restored so that most of the rooms appear much as they did at the time that Dr. King was a child. There's a formal downstairs parlor, where the children practiced piano, his sister's bedroom, his father's office, the dining room, and the kitchen; upstairs, a room the family rented out to boarders, the master bedroom where Dr. King was born, and the room he shared with this brother. All of the King children were born at home; Dr. King's father did not want his children to be born in a segregated hospital.

We were at the end of the tour, standing in the hallway outside of Dr. King's childhood bedroom, when our tour guide, a young African-American woman from the National Park Service, asked if we had any questions. There was a question about Ebenezer Baptist Church, and a couple of questions about the restoration of the house. Then someone on the tour, a middle-aged African-American woman, asked our tour guide if she ever felt Dr. King's presence in the house. It was a question that surprised me; it probably is not a question for which the National Park Service provides a suggested response in its training for tour guides. Our guide didn't need anyone else to tell her what to say. She only paused for a moment before she said that sometimes she does feel something when she's in the house alone, a sensation, she said, that gives her goose bumps.

I don't believe in ghosts and I suspect that our guide didn't either. I do believe that what happened in that house and nearby at Ebenezer Baptist Church made the United States a better country. In his column this weekend in the New York Times, Paul Krugman wrote, "When we observe Martin Luther King’s Birthday, we have something very real to celebrate: the civil rights movement was one of America’s finest hours, and it made us a nation truer to its own ideals."

It's our history, and it really matters.

Epiphany: Chalking It Up

Today at Haygood we celebrated Epiphany. Epiphany (technically January 6) is notable in our house as the day that we can first make King Cake. But it's not the entire significance of the day, and this morning at the church service we were introduced to a new tradition (new for me, anyway), of blessing the house for the new year.

We got a piece of white chalk to bring home and write about our door "20 + C + M + B + 12." The first number indicates the century since Christ's birth, the letters are the initials of the names of the Magi, Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, and the last number is the year. The numbers and letters are separated by crosses. The letters can also stand for Christus mansionem benedicat - may Christ bless this house.

Since this morning, I've learned that this is traditional in some places in Europe. I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to write it inside or outside, so I decided to do both. And the white chalk didn't show on the light painted surfaces above the door, so I used a piece of pink sidewalk chalk instead. Now I've got the chalk blessing above my front door and a mezuza, left by the previous owners of my house, still on the frame of the back door.

If only I had time to take down the Christmas tree and make a King Cake, I would feel like I was ready for the season. But for today, I'll have to settle for chalk markings above the door.

Closing the Circle

A few months ago, there was a special offer from Ancestry. They were getting into the DNA testing business, and as an introductory offer they had a certain number of DNA tests they were offering for free to their subscribers. I clicked on the button to reply that I was interested, and sometime later got the white cardboard packet in the mail. There was a business reply envelope, addressed to Ancestry's laboratory with a barcode on the back, and instructions about how to link my samples to my Ancestry account, and three cotton-tipped swabs in a smaller white envelope. I followed all the instructions, took my samples as directed, and dropped it in the mail. They said it would be a while, and I haven't heard anything back yet.

It is stunning, really, what DNA testing technology is now available to consumers. In 2007, New York Times reporter Amy Harmon wrote a series on new developments in genetics; there was one story about families with children with rare genetic abnormalities that now -- following genetic testing -- find each other through genetic counselors, or through the internet. 23andMe has been offering genetic testing to consumers for several years, and costs have dropped rapidly; they have a growing subscriber base, and for $99 and a $9 a month subscription, you can join. 23andMe also offers the opportunity to participate in research studies to their subscribers, and many of them do participate; although it is still in the developmental stage, this kind of research, based on volunteer participants who offer their genetic data, is exciting and potentially transformational.

Another of Amy Harmon's stories was about her own experience of looking at her own genome, through 23andMe. She wrote about not wanting to test her 3 year old daughter, who she didn't want to feel limited by her genetics at such a young age, but not feeling any such reluctance about testing herself. "Whatever was lurking in my genes had been there my entire life. Not looking would be like rejecting some fundamental part of myself." Yes. Exactly.

So the Ancestry offer got me thinking about my maternal inheritance, and what I might learn. Having no Y chromosome for testing (that's only in men), the focus would be on the maternally-inherited mitochondrial DNA. I knew that my great-great-grandmother was Mary Caroline Hall. She was said to be born in North Carolina in 1839, probably in the part of Rutherford County that later became part of Polk County. Her mother was said to be Sarah Green, and I found supportive evidence for that name on the death certificate for one of Mary Caroline's sisters. Sarah Green is said to have been born in 1822 to Henry and Sarah Green, but I've found little evidence to substantiate who her parents were or where they come from. County boundaries have changed, and Rutherford County is on the North Carolina-South Carolina border; there seems to have been a lot of movement back and forth between Rutherford County and what became Spartanburg County, South Carolina. I don't know that it will be possible to find much more; there may not be any documentation, anywhere, and I may never know more about my great-great-great-great-grandmother, whose name may have been Sarah, and whose last name is unknown.

Having spent a fair amount of time over the last couple of months, trying to sort through Halls and Greens along the North Carolina-South Carolina border, suddenly I am really curious about what the DNA test will show. My mitochondrial DNA came from these women whose names I can't even find, and then from their maternal ancestors before them. So, we'll see. I'm not expecting much; all I may find out is that they were from northern Europe. I think that maternal ancestor was Scotch-Irish, and probably emigrated before the American Revolution. But maybe I fill find something out that surprises me.

But all of this has already led to one good thing. My daughter Sarah was named after an ancestor, Sarah Berryhill, who turns out -- apparently -- not to exist. At least we don't have to change her name.

The Dress

One day last week I took Sarah to buy some fabric to make a dress for homecoming. On the way back home, I asked her if she remembered the dress I had found in my mother's closet, when I went through things after she died. It is pink, with a satin bodice and detached lining, and an organza skirt, ornamented with small bows of pink satin ribbon. There is a pleated ruffle around the neckline and shirring in the front of the bodice. I could find no manufacturer's tag; perhaps it was made by a seamstress rather than being purchased at a store.



I've wondered about this dress ever since I found it in a box on a top shelf in my mother's closet. A bride's maid dress, perhaps, from the 1930s? But no one had any money during the 1930s and it doesn't seem too likely that anyone my parents knew would have had a wedding with bridesmaids -- my mother got married in a dark red suit at her parents' house. But the dress is very long, definitely too long for my mother to have worn it. If it was hers, she never wore it, and if it wasn't hers, why did she have it on the top shelf of her closet? Was it a gift that was treasured, even though she never wore it, or purchased for a special occasion that never happened, so the dress was never hemmed?

Sarah said she remembered me showing her the dress. I told her I couldn't figure it out, since it was too long for my mother to have worn it. We both mulled it over for a moment, and then Sarah said it was a mystery dress.

I had thought about donating it to the theater department at the kids' school, but I haven't. Now it hangs in my closet, on a purple plastic hanger and covered with a plastic bag from Macy's that isn't quite long enough. If at some point in the future one of my daughters has to clean out my closet, presumably they will remember where it came from. If not, they'll be puzzled; it's too long for me, too.