Boy Scouts and Lake Huron

David's first experience with Boy Scouts wasn't exactly all he had hoped...in fact, it wasn't at all what he wanted.

We got the kids packed early and ate dinner at a reasonable time. This gave us time to get to the Pack Meeting with lots of time to spare, so that David could sit for a bit and observe before joining in. He sat and observed, alright, but wouldn't join in with any of the other boys who were running around. He patiently sat through an awards ceremony, and then they tried to play an ice-breaker game with the 30-40 boys who were there. The idea was to break everyone into two teams and have them all take off their shoes, and run a relay race retrieving their shoes from a big pile and tagging the next person. Well, this upset David anyway, since the boys weren't exactly listening and following directions, and then when they told him to take off his shoes, he turned and looked at Dad, crumpled, and burst into tears and wailed, "I hate Boy Scouts!"

Sigh.

The noise and the pandemonium were overwhelming for him anyway, but the shoe thing got him pretty badly. He also cries when the airport asks him to take off his shoes.

So that didn't go well. They then started to play Simon Says, which is OK; the guy leading the thing told the boys that they had to be completely silent in order to play, so that they wouldn't miss anything that was said. David perked up a bit...while he still felt the need to sit on Dad's lap, he started to pay more attention and lean forward. After a couple of minutes, he looked at his Dad with some confusion, and said, "Dey not being silent, Dad." Well...uh...no. Do you want to play? Oh, no. Not a chance.

Double sigh.

Once the Pack Meeting broke up and he could play with his sister, he was off and running with her again. Doug and I were so irritated with him...we're thinking what he mostly needs is the smaller Den meetings where he'll only have 5-10 other boys to deal with, where he can get to know them and make some friends. He's generally not this bad about joining in...he does fine with roller skating lessons, I've seen him joining in with other kids when he takes his classes at the Science Center, he joins in doing group projects with the GRC classes. He admittedly had trouble with karate class...I don't know. This, of course, makes Doug wonder if the kid is socially stunted. While I have the same thoughts, I have to ask if expecting and accepting complete chaos is a requirement as a little kid. I was telling this story to a friend and she said, "Oh, not like he's introverted and doesn't like chaos to begin with!" Very true. Hmmm. OK, there's a pattern there...he does very well with small groups of kids. Both the pack meeting and karate class had 30+ kids in them. Science Center classes usually have only 10 to 15 kids in them, and they break that into smaller groups. GRC is the same thing, extremely small classes. Roller skating, too. I'm SURE that Lauren won't have any issues with big groups of kids, but David sure seems to.

On the upside, there are some camp-outs coming up that should put him in a better mood about the scouts. I would think that the idea of lots of order, procedural steps, and a focus on good citizenship would appeal to his little engineering-type brain. I think this just happened to be a bad introduction. Too bad, though.

After the meeting we went back home, packed up the rest of the stuff, and then headed for Canada. (This sounds much easier than it actually was.)

We passed through Indianapolis at around 2:30 a.m., but thought even our good friends there wouldn't appreciate a drop-in visit at that hour. (Well, OK, maybe if it was just the two of us, but adding two sleepy, cranky kids wouldn't be a thrill.) We made excellent time, and we were in Ann Arbor by about 8:30 a.m. We stopped at another friends' home, and they were nice enough to make us breakfast and let the kids run around and play with THEIR kids for a couple of hours. It was right about then that we tumbled to the fact that we'd had the kids get into pajamas before taking off...and therefore they had left their shoes back at home. They had none with them now. And David hadn't packed a belt. (Mr. Tall And Lean has to either run around wearing a belt all the time or wear pants that are WAY short on him.)

So...it looked like we'd need to buy two pairs of shoes and a belt. Our friends' kids had a shoe size that fit Lauren, so they let us borrow them (besides, they're Hello Kitty shoes!), and then we went to Target to get shoes and a belt for David.

We crossed over into Canada at Port Huron a few hours after that. Customs was amazingly simple...we just provided birth certificates for everyone and some drivers licenses for us, answered a few questions, and we were on our way.
"Aside from your clothing, what else are you bringing with you?" the customs agent asked.
Doug thought. "Uh...laptops," he said.
"For Mom and Dad?" she asked.
"Yup."
"Ok. What do you for a living?"
"I'm a Systems Analyst. She's a homemaker."
"She works harder than you do."
"YAY!" I said, applauding. "THANK YOU!!"

We stopped in at an Italian restaurant where we had spaghetti and a type of ravioli with spinach and ricotta cheese, made with a creamy tomato sauce. We had hoped to find a place to eat basically on the water, but there didn't seem to be any. We did stumble onto a nice park area which had access to the beach to Lake Huron. It also had squirrels...little BLACK squirrels, which I've never seen before. They're so CUTE! We scoped it out and then took the kids there after lunch. We intended for them to play a little, and perhaps take off their shoes and socks and go wading. Lauren made this into an art form by falling into the lake and soaking herself. (See Lake Huron pictures here) Of course after that, she hauls herself onto shore and is caked with sand. By the end of it, we had to strip off both kids and put them back into the car naked.

We drove to the suburbs of Toronto like this, finally arriving at the hotel around 9 p.m. or so. We wrapped the kids in their blankies and took them inside to the room, then went back and unloaded the car. Doug parked and we got the kids re-dressed, hung up their wet clothes, and walked to the A&W, which SO wasn't regional or interesting, but...we we hungry and exhausted by this point. (36 hours in the car with a couple of hours of dozing only will do that to you!) When Doug got his change back, it was (duh) in Canadian dollars, so he came back to the table, tossed the change onto the tabletop, looked and me and jerked his head towards David, and walked away again.

I had been pretty big on this...I wanted David to understand country borders, flags and currency, especially since these are some of the things that we had covered in History last year.

David looked at the coins (for some reason ignoring the dollars) and picked up a Canadian $2 coin. "Look!" he said. "It's a new quarter! Can I keep it?"
"That's not a new quarter," I said. "Look at the pennies."
He dutifully picked up one of the pennies. He furrowed his brow.
"It's...it's...new." he said.
"Sort of..." I waited.
"Oh!" he said finally. "I get it! It's...um...um...from Canada!"
"Yup! It's Canadian money," I said. "Look at the five dollar bill."
He LOVED the strip of laser-paper along the edge.

We ate our burgers and such, and then headed back to the hotel. We all pretty much fell into bed at that point. There were two beds, and the kids got tucked into one, we took the other. I, for one, deeply appreciated the down comforters. Zzzzz! (emphatic Zzzzz.)