We Finally Earned the Elusive Polar Bear Patch!

This past weekend our Girl Scout troop went on a campout at Camp Kachina.  This is the 3rd time for us to camp at this camp.  This year was by far the coldest!  In Girl Scouts, if you camp outside and the temperature drops below 32 degrees, you earn the Polar Bear Patch!  This one is sort of hard to get and comes by chance!  Well....it got down into the 20's Friday night so we definitely earned it!  I wish I could have taken a picture of how I looked in my sleeping bag.  I had a ski mask and toboggan on my head, a tank top, long sleeve shirt, fleece jacket and puffer jacket on.  I had on leggings and pants.  I wore thick socks and fleece gloves.  Then I was inside my mummy sleeping bag with a king size down comforter folded in half, on top of that.  I.WAS.TOASTY.  I actually slept quite well as long as only 6% or less of my skin was exposed to the air!  Anyway, we all survived the night, some in better shape than others.

Here we are eating cold breakfast after a cold night!

Elle and her cabin mates.  We had screened cabins, but no electricity.

Ava and her cabin mates.  By this point, we had put up plastic over the screens to hopefully hold in heat and keep out cold.  But you could still see through the floor directly to the ground.

Making Encouraging the girls to brush their teeth at least once.

Me and my girls making memories!

This was Elle for most of the morning.  Her toes were so cold that it's all she could think about and talk about.  She wasn't a very happy camper for at least an hour.

Here's our whole troop...well all that came.  We were missing about 5 girls.

Then the troops (there were about 9 other troops there with us) split up into older and younger groups.  The older girls got to head inside to a heater and work on learning to tie knots in paracord.  Elle was just happy to feel her feet again.

Later in the day we went on a scavenger hunt that was more like a death march.  Seriously.

But, we survived and even found every clue.  I think we walked about 18 miles...give or take a few.

Here we are at our last clue.  Everyone started dropping like flies on the soft grass.

I made them pretend like they had fallen asleep, but I think if I had left them like this any longer, they might have!  

Our troop camped Saturday night too, but we came home since Shawn had headed out of town and I needed to pick Levi up from the babysitters.  It was sure a wonderful thing to crawl into our soft beds in our warm house on Saturday night...I did feel a little guilty that our troop was still out there....but not too guilty.