The end of an era

As you probably know, I've been a cub scout dean leader for nearly 10 years now. I took a year off when we were living in Japan, but otherwise, it's been a pretty constant thing in my life. When I was first asked to do it, M was a year old, and he was the first boy born into my mom's side of the family in 40 years. My knowledge of cub scouts was that the boys wore the shirts to school on certain days of the week.

I quickly caught on, and absolutely adored the job. It kept my inner 10 year old very happy.

The last six months or so have been very difficult though. Our group only had 1-2 cub scouts, and neither were really great about coming. My co-leader had a lot of things going on in her life that made attendance difficult for her.

I really wanted S to join girl scouts as a Daisy, but there were no openings in existing troops, and they were forming a new troop. A couple of the would-be leaders flaked out, so I decided to make a change.

I told the ward that I wanted to be released from cub scouts, and I filled out all of the paperwork to be co-leader of S's Daisy Troop. The ward officially released me yesterday.

It's kind of a bittersweet moment. I loved my cubs, I really did. I was ready to move on and do something different. Now that I'm officially out though, I'm mourning the loss.

I have to admit I'm a little overwhelmed at just how much work there is to start a new troop. I'm sitting here staring a pile of money that needs to be deposited in the bank, but first I have to select a bank and set up an account. We were assigned our troop number, which is good. My co-leader is an amazingly motivated and creative person, and I think she's going to make it a lot of fun. We have a mentor leader who meets at the same time who is willing to help, as well as have her Cadettes help. Our service unit leader is also helping out, both with set up AND being willing to be our cookie mom this year. Amazing.

Our next meeting is going to be a birthday party. We're celebrating the birth of our troop, as well as the birth of Juliette Low, the founder of Girl Scouts. We've asked the girls to each bring a small gift (like crayons, glue sticks, tapes, etc) to give to the troop.

I figure once I get organized, the whole thing will go well. I'm not worried about meetings, it's just the administrative side of things. I've agreed to be in charge of money, and need to find a good spreadsheet to keep track. I may have to give in and buy Excel; I've been using OpenOffice and/or Google Documents.