Scout-O-Rama

Ryan and I had a fun weekend. Thankfully, it was considerably better than last weekend. By the way, a BIG thank you to all of you who helped us through the challenges of last weekend. A special thanks to Kristin and Abby for the awesome “ladies’ (and kids) night out” distraction on Saturday night, and to the whole Ulmer family for your perfectly-timed visit on Sunday. We know we are very lucky to have all of the great family and friends that we have.

So…today was the much-anticipated Scout-o-Rama at the South Towne Expo Center. Some of you know the drama of last year’s Scout-o-Rama – Ryan went with me, as he has to most scout events for the past two years. However, even though he participated in all of the booth activities, he was not able to earn any of the awards (including some that were given on the spot) because he was not an official scout. As you may have guessed, to a seven-year-old, that seemed very unfair. He has been looking forward to this year’s Scout-o-Rama ever since. Needless to say, we spent the WHOLE DAY there today! Imagine…thousands of enthusiastic cub scouts and longsuffering leaders and parents as far as the eye can see from 9 am to 4 pm. Isn’t that how you’d choose to spend a whole Saturday?

Our pack had a booth – we taught everyone who came by about the scientific method, the properties of solids, liquids, and gasses, non-Newtonian fluid dynamics, colloids, and polymerization. In order to illustrate all of those – my teacher friends will all know what we did – we made ooblek and glurch with the scouts as they visited the booth. It was obviously very messy, which 8 – 11 year old boys (and their older and younger siblings) LOVE! We helped each boy that visited our booth complete the requirements for the Science belt loop.

Ryan was quite motivated all day. There were a lot of booths that offered either all of the requirements for a belt loop or most of the requirements, with just a couple of additional things to do at home. Ryan wanted to do ALL of them! He got so excited every time we rounded another corner and there was another belt loop booth. It was really cute. He earned eight!
There was also a pack that had their own “sport court” created. Ryan did the football throw and got five out of five! He did the basketball throw and got ten out of ten! I stood there absolutely amazed! You should have seen his grin! He also enjoyed digging for fossils, panning for gold, golfing, and a variety of other fun activities.

I had a fun experience there, too. We ran into the family of a guy that I dated for quite a while about 18 years ago. I haven’t seen them for a long time, but, interestingly, had just been thinking about them the past couple of days. Ryan and I were walking along, and I heard a very loud, “Is that Melanie Inman?” (You know not many people refer to me that way these days.) It was great to see them and catch up with them. I always enjoyed being with them and traveling with them, and always thought very highly of them. And I'm not just saying that because they may be reading this. :)

It was a long day, but it was a lot of fun. It will be exciting for Ryan to receive all of his awards at next month’s pack meeting.

Oh, yea…and Ryan pulled another tooth!