The mom's group meeting was very interesting. We had a "Panel on Purity" with discusion topics on purity in doctrine, purity in our marriage, and general purity in our home. The first topic, I remember thinking Right On! through many parts of it. Teri talked about how our modern culture is diluting and making gray the areas of right and wrong. It is something that I've always known - that TV and internet and pop music and modern thinking is polluting our doctrine. I'm kind of conscious about the things to which I expose my kids. Walter and I only listen to objectionable music or movies when the kids are not around. But after this session, I realized that's not good enough. I found myself, throughout the week, being self conscious of the things to which I expose MYSELF. My kids aren't the only ones who need to practice the disipline of purity. I was talking the other night with a few of the ladies about music. My pastor's wife asked what I had on my Pandora and the first thing I said was pop-music and Brittany Spears! Of all the wonderful music I have programmed into my box, that was what came to mind first. Shame on me.
Our date night was really cool. Walter and I went to see "Tao: The Martial Art of Drumming" at Bass Performance Hall. Have you seen these things? These people have massive drums as big as a car. One guy was beating it with something that looked like a baseball bat! It was an hour-long show of beats and drums and dancing. Good kind of grown-up time with my hubby.
So, let me tell you about my Girl Scout thing. World Thinking Day is a "special day for Girl Scouts and Girl Guides from around the world to "think" of each other and give thanks and appreciation to their "sister" Girl Scouts. The delegates chose February 22 as the date for Thinking Day because it was the mutual birthday of Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement, and his wife, Olave, who served as World Chief Guide." So, to celebrate, many councils hold a Friends Around the World event where several troops come together and each represent a country. We chose India. So, for the past month, we've been learning about India in preparation for Friends Around the World.
We started off making paper peacocks, the national bird of India. The girls traced their hands to use as feathers and their feet to use as the body. I checked out a few childrens books from the public library that had lots of nice photos of Indian dress, food, architecture, and traditions. I made tikka masala, which is a chicken dish with an Indian sauce served over rice. It's actually one of our favorite weeknight meals and the girls loved it. We learned about henna "tatoos" and I made my own using red tempra paint. The girls, my co-leader, and I took turns painting each other's hands. We also made our own saris, which was loads of fun. I got for each girl, a large piece of fabric and we stamped Daisy flowers on them with fabric paint. (I also ruined a pair of work slacks with the paint. Doh!) The following week, we had a little tea party wearing our saris. I brought cinnamon tea and made almond tea cookies. I also made a lemon cardamom rice pudding, but it didn't turn out well and the girls rejected it (with good reason!).
But because I had such a busy week, I didn't really have time to prepare our display for the event. Friday was really my first opportunity to work on it. Nothing like the last minute, eh? So, after work, I stopped by the craft store and picked up a few little supplies. After dinner, Chloe helped me cut yarn for our paper-doll's hair. I cut out the letters I-N-D-I-A from yellow construction paper and affixed them to our paper peacocks as the title for our display. And then after the kids were in bed, I went to print out the pictures and text for our display board. DEAD.PRINTER.INK.CARTRIDGE. It's 9pm and, because the printer is so old, I can only find the cartridges online. I just want to put in a plug here for my peeps at the 24-hour Kinkos on Bryant Irvin for saving my rear! I submitted my PowerPoint slides online and they had it printed and ready for me to pick up. Granted, my pick up time was 1 am, but what are ya gonna do? I assembled all the rest of my materials and supplies in the mean time. Walter cooked up another batch of tikka masala for me to bring.
I caught a second wind somewhere around midnight. At 1:00, I drove down to Kinkos to pick up my prints, drove home, cut and framed the display pieces, cleaned up my mess, and finally got to bed around 2:30 am. Oh! and part of my display was a translation of some English words to Hindi. But when I got my stuff back from the printer, I saw that the Hindi font didn't get picked up. It was just blank spaces. So, I had to go back to my Google translator and hand-print the Hindi script into the blank spaces. (I picked up on the phonetic patterns, though, and realized that despite the odd looking characters, it's not that much different from our own language.) Alarm clock rings at 6 am and I roll out of bed to the aroma of coffee being made by my wonderful husband. I packed the car, gathered my daughter, and arrived at the center just after 8 am. The event went off without a hitch. They started earlier than they told us, though. Chloe represented us in the parade of flags because she was the only one there at the time. (I had planned for one of the other girls to have been able to do that though because she took it upon herself to research the flag of India using the internet and made a report to share with the troop at one of our meetings!) The girls had fun and learned a lot. We stamped the other troops "passports" with our India stamp and painted their hands with our "henna." One of my wonderful girls' mom brought a life-saving bag of items that came from India that we were able to talk about. For instance, the word shampoo came from India and it means head massage. The game of Chutes and Ladders came from India as a game of morality; it was called Snakes and Ladders. Buttons came from India, but were used as a decoration rather than a fastener.
Chloe stamping a passport for a girl from "Greece"
Mrs. Jones giving one of our guests a "henna" tatoo
When I got home, I thought I was okay and relieved Walter for a little bit. But at the first quiet moment, I crashed. I fell asleep and came out like a zombie at dinner time.
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