pizza makes everything better

our girl scout meeting last week combined valentine's day craft stations with a sleepover.  it'd been awhile since we'd done one, and with our meetings only being every other week this year we were glad to be able to squeeze it in at all.

i decided to do a couple of simple food-related stations.  the first one involved pretzel rods, melted white chocolate and lots of sprinkles.

the other one was just as easy - i'd baked up some heart-shaped sugar cookies, frosted them in various colors, and provided icing gel writers and even more sprinkles so they could each decorate one.

my co-leader had them working on decorating little tote bags and then wrapping yarn around heart-shaped templates to create a wreath.  that last one took forever and killed lots and lots of time.

this left me with some downtime too, and i used some of that leftover white chocolate to make some of those pretzel treats we love so much.  check out the "mega" m&ms - they really are huge!

we usually assign a parent to bring a snack for the meetings.  this time, though, because i knew we were going to have plenty of sweet stuff, i had them bring stuff for the girls to make themselves a sandwich.

then it was time to pass out valentines:

a couple of the girls were there just for the meeting, but weren't planning to sleep over.  we had another activity planned for the rest of the group, so when those two left we gathered around to split up into groups for a scavenger hunt.

while the old lady kept an eye on them in a corner of the room, my co-leader and i scurried around putting all of the scavenger hunt items in various spots throughout the space we had to work with.  they had to work together to find everything in the right order, and then all of the little trinkets (hula hoop, play-doh, slingshot...all from the dollar store) were pieces for them to use to create their very own game.  they had to make up the game and figure out rules for how to play it, and that proved to be pretty hilarious as they put on those creativity hats and got to work.  each group got to make their own game, and then when they were ready they all got to rotate through and play the games that their fellow scouts had made up.

meanwhile, the old lady and one of the other dads were busy trying to get the projector set up so that the girls could watch a movie after they got changed into pajamas and got their bedding situations all set up.

it was kind of funny trying to figure out what setting to go to on that projector to turn the movie right side up.

and because the old lady, my co-leader and i are all trying to do that clean eating deal, we were excited to splurge on a pizza for our dinner that night.  i was cracking up when i saw what they had ordered:

when we finally had everything figured out and everyone was all settled down, i got them to let me do a group photo:

the old lady looked pretty comfy too.

because it was already past 10:00, we opted not to let the girls go wild on the movie candy my co-leader had brought and instead served up bowls of popcorn.  sorry, kids.

and for no good reason, we were situated right behind this pole, which totally kept me from being able to see the movie.  it was "trolls," by the way.

the girls started falling asleep one by one, and it was about 11:30 by the time the movie was over and we shut everything down for the night.  they seemed pretty zonked out, but the three of us slept terribly as we always do.  everyone was up by 7:30 the next morning, and most of them had their stuff all rolled up and packed away by the time their parents started arriving to pick them up.

this will be the only sleepover for the year...but maybe next time we'll have had our outdoor camping training completed so that we can finally do a backyard campout in tents or something fun like that.  my co-leader isn't a camper, so it's going to be interesting to see how that all works out.  heh.