Party Time with The Girls!

As you all know, I'm a the leader of a Girl Scout troop. My loyal band of seven had our annual after-school Christmas party this last week.

The one thing I really appreciate about our annual shin-dig is the girls always make the presents for each other in the gift exchange. We draw names and discuss the rules every year. And they always, always, always say that's the best part.

And I love to see what they come up with.
One of the things BabyD's "Secret Santa" gave her was a tree ornament made from a real tennis ball. BabyD took up tennis this year. Santa-Girl even customized it with her name.

LittleD's giver made her brownie cupcakes with pink frosting (her fav) and a bookmark with a Yellow Lab on it.

After I loaded the girls up on sugar: Cupcakes and ice cream. We got busy on our special craft project. It's really easy and might be a good service project or gift for some older folks in your life.

My Scouts love to do crafts and we got this idea from one of the moms--she's a nurse at a rehabilitation center for senior citizens. My girls wanted to do a project to serve others--something we're always talking about. She said the patients are always losing their glasses. So, we decided to make beaded neck chains for their glasses--the kind librarians are notorious for. (Sorry to stereo-type any of you would-be librarians out there! My sister is a librarian, and I haven't seen her dawn one yet.)

I actually found those little loop-ends at JoAnn's. They come 30 to a pack.

LittleD and I spent about an hour pre-cutting the string and crimping the loops on ahead of time. This helped us jump right in at our Scout meeting, since we had to eat, exchange gifts and make 30 of these before we left.

I got a good deal on assorted beads. The girls just jumped in and started stringing their own designs.

I think these came out beautiful. I sat and crimped the other end as they finished them up. We had a pretty good assembly line.
We did make some of them with plain leather cord for the men. (We didn't think 88-year-old veterans would appreciate the pink and silver beads as much.)

Check out the first batch:

Pretty cool, huh?

We have a half-day before Christmas break, so the girls and I are going to put them in cute little gift bags and hand deliver them to the patients, along with Christmas cards and maybe a carol or two. They've visited nursing homes before, and they are quite excited to go.

I love that these girls, who range in age from 10 to 13, are so willing to give of themselves and share the love of Jesus to some seniors who don't get a lot of visitors, let along gifts. They genuinely enjoy talking to these seniors and hearing stories about when they were young.
One more way that the kids remind me to be a better person.