Last weekend was another adventure in camping with almost a dozen girls ages 9-12. We have a good (excellent, really) parent involvement and there were five adults to ride herd on the girls.
We spent Friday and Saturday nights at a Girl Scout camp located on the coast. Saturday, we got up at 6am (after going to bed at nearly 1am) so we could be up, dressed, breakfasted and at the tide pools 35 minutes up the coast at the ideal time of 9am. One of the rules I've laid down for the girls is that they must be cheerful in the mornings even if it kills them. I tell them if they don't feel cheerful, they've got to fake it. They've not let me down yet.
So we spent about an hour at the tide pools (tons of mussels, barnacles, barnacles on mussels, anemones - some at least a foot long and six inches in diameter, small dead jellyfish, a couple of starfish, and lots of colorful seaweed and algae) and continued up the coast to the aquarium. This is the same aquarium that housed (pooled?) Keiko of "Free Willy". They turned Keiko's pool into an undersea garden passageway where you can walk inside a plexiglass tunnel and look around at the sea creatures swimming beside, above, and below you. Check it out at http://aquarium.org.
We stopped and hiked up to a lighthouse on the way back and looked out over the cliffs to the surf pounding the rocks below and the sea lions body-surfing a short way out.
The girls were pretty worn out by the time we got back to the camp but it didn't stop them from learning and playing old, fun games. I don't know what this first one's called but you measure the distance from your opponent by putting one foot in front of the other with your toe to the opponent's toe of their front foot. Bringing your front foot together with your back foot, put your hands up with elbows bent and try to knock your opponent off-balance by slapping against their hands without losing your own balance. The first person to take a step or fall into the other one loses. For some reason, the girls all wanted to take on the dad who is 6'4" and weighs 240 lbs. One of them actually caught him by surprise and knocked him off-balance. It was quite hilarious to see the girls less than 5 feet tall and weighing no more than 85 pounds match up with him. They usually ended up on their backsides.
The other game they played is called "Slap". Again, you stand facing your opponent with your hands held out in front of you. One of you puts your hands palms-up and the other's is palms-down lightly touching each other. The palms-up person then quickly tries to slap the backs of the hands above. The trick is to be fast enough to slap the other person's hands or quick enough to yank your hands away without getting slapped. The hands return to neutral (palms-up/palms-down) and the slapper tries again. If the slapper misses, they exchange positions and the slapper becomes the slappee.
We finished off the evening with a dance (each girl doing her own thing on a slippery floor and with sock feet) after a candlelight supper of spaghetti, salad, and bread since it was Valentine's Day. What could be more romantic than a candlelight supper with four good friends and eleven "daughters"?
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