Please don't be jealous of my mothering skills.

Scouts started back last night.  Sarah is now a Junior Girl Scout and Peter is a Weblo 2.  He will officially move up to the Boy Scouts in February.

Sarah is way more excited about scouts than Peter.  She is such a social butterfly and she loves to be on the go.  Peter prefers to stay home so that he can play Minecraft and Pokemon until he decides it's time  to go outside and wander around with an unloaded AirSoft gun or occasionally a very large stick.

Peter does love to go camping though so he's excited about a trip they will be taking in October.  And Sarah is most excited that her troop is going to be on a float in the Midway Christmas Parade again this year.

Sarah got a new vest this year.  It's green and replaces the brown Brownie vest which replaced the blue Daisies vest.  I was excited that it was time for a new vest (every two years) because I totally ruined the last one.

None of her fun patches were  iron-on and I don't sew so I used liquid stitch to glue them on.  That didn't work as she would come home from every meeting with a glue mark on her vest where a badge used to be.  Sometimes she would come home with the badge but usually just the glue mark.

I asked one of the other mothers what they use and she said she told me she used Gorilla Glue.  And Dan happens to have a big bottle of it so I set to work gluing a few fallen patches back into place on her vest.

And guess what?

Gorilla Glue puffs up and expands when you use it.  I did not know this  and figured the more glue, the more stick so we ended up with a Brownie vest that looked like this:

Check out the nice creamy colored glue that puffed up, oozed out and hardened.  Nice, huh?

Check out what the glue looks like after it puffs up and hardens and then the badge STILL manages to fall off!  Really nice!

And then there were the badges that hung on for dear life.  And at that point, I gave up!

I spoke to another mother whose daughter always looks so neat and clean and lovely and I learned the trick for patches and badges - BADGE MAGIC!  I ordered some from Amazon.com and it truly is magic.  It's basically a thin, sticky film that you cut out in the shape of the badge and press on to the back of the badge and then press the badge onto the vest.  It is super easy and it's super sticky so it works like a charm. 

Sarah was thrilled with her new clean looking vest.  Let's see if we can keep it that way!

Peter's got a different problem.  All of his badges were iron-on so he doesn't have the embarrasment of a crusty looking uniform. (Not that he would care anyway. Unlike Sarah, he is extremely unconcerned with his appearance.)

When he started Cub Scouts in first grade, I bought his shirt a little large to get extra wear out of it because the Cub Scouts stay in a blue shirt until they become Boy Scouts.  He is now on his 5th year of this blue shirt. And at this point I figure  he might as well stay squeezed  into  it until February when he becomes an official Boy Scout and has to switch to a tan shirt.

So I guess I have until February to figure out what size shirt I could get him that would last him for the next 6 years?!

Nothing screams Eagle Scout like a man-boy stuffed into a tiny shirt walking around outside with a large stick.

Right?