On Saturday morning, we’re taking twelve of our Brownies away for a sleepover – a mini-camp, indoors and just one night. On Monday, if I’m not too exhausted, I’ll tell you all about how it went but today let’s talk about how it was planned.
First up was Tawny Owl, our licence holder, deciding it was about time we did another camp. We put a poll or two on the leaders’ WhatsApp group and eventually narrowed down a date for it, bearing in mind that she and I in particular are very busy with other Guiding things. Our cast of characters: Tawny Owl, Barn Owl and I are staying for the whole thing; Brown Owl and Young Leader Little Owl are coming just for the day on Saturday.
Then we went to Barn Owl’s house and made a plan. We picked a venue – somewhere with indoor accommodation because they’re Brownies and it’s so much easier when they’re quite little, but with plenty of outdoor space and preferably some outdoor adventurous activities. Then we looked through the activities to find some that were suitable for girls that age. That took quite a lot of debate but what we finished on was traditional climbing (I vetoed autobelay on the grounds that the rope doesn’t “catch” you until you jump, which means if you’re frightened and clinging to the wall, you’re never going to be able to get down) and caving. We also wanted the campfire circle and we wanted orienteering around the site as an option. Then there was the possibility of the games room and the outdoor trampoline space. We put this all into a draft timetable along with a rough idea of meals and crafts and stories and priced it up.
Then we sent out a letter asking for interest from the girls. Because of the cost of the building and the activities, we needed a minimum number and if we didn’t meet it, we’d either have to cancel or we’d have to invite the other Brownies in the area to make up the numbers. While the parents deliberated over it – or just sent the money immediately – I had the job of doing the paperwork. Tawny Owl was more or less in charge, Barn Owl was doing the actual booking and I was doing the paperwork, which meant a risk assessment and the REN form, the Residential Event Notification which has to go to your local commissioner twelve weeks before any residential event. While we were at it, we also assigned jobs. As licence holder, Tawny Owl is basically in charge, as I said. That left the two major jobs, first aid and catering, to be divided between me and Barn Owl. Barn Owl volunteered for first aid, since I absolutely cannot deal with sickness and that left me food.
The risk assessment is a massive document but helped hugely by the campsite, which has a ton of them already done. The building is risk-assessed and the activities are risk-assessed, which is great because none of us are qualified to write a risk assessment for climbing or caving. I could make a stab at it but I’d miss about half the points. I also had to write a general residential risk assessment but Girlguiding has that sort of thing pre-filled on the website, so you just go through, delete as relevant, add in details, mark down extra precautions and so on. Many of them are perfectly sensible but when I got to “have you taken into account what happens if it snows?” I wrote something along the lines of “We’ve got more to worry about than the girls getting cold if it snows in the UK in June”. N/A to all the stuff about fireworks and ice and animals and so on. Then I sent it off to our district commissioner, along with the REN part 1 and the preliminary activity plan.
Every residential has a theme. It’s a tradition. We’d come up with three potential themes – Moana, Aladdin and Pirates – and we put it to the vote at Brownies. I was jumping up and down for pirates, myself but the girls, obviously, voted for Moana. I have nothing against Moana but if you’re doing a Moana-themed camp, there need to be watersports. Sailing taster lessons.
Next we had to put a date for a parents’ meeting in the diary which meant we had to have a second meeting to plan the details. What crafts are we doing, who’s running them and what do we need? We had a theme so even if the adventurous activities didn’t strictly fit that, what crafts and non-adventurous activities could we theme? What else are we doing? What exactly are we eating? What have we already got in the first aid kit? What do we need to put on the health forms and what do we need to replenish? What do we need to remove? What can we leave in there but not use on the girls? And as we flicked through the notes of interest from the parents, why didn’t we know about this major medical issue with this particular girl?
Now we had a theme, we needed to gather our girls and find out who wanted to be in a dorm with whom (which they did very neatly, dividing themselves into twos and threes and fours which fitted perfectly in our jigsaw of four- and eight-bed dorms) and naming their rooms. We did end up losing one girl and her three became a two which we then put with another two, so I’ve slightly lost track of what names we ended up with but I’m pretty sure we have Ocean, Shell and Tamatoa. Then we asked the girls to give us themed names because camp names is a tradition too. I think Brown Owl has ended up as Maui and Little Owl as Moana. I’m Te Fiti (I think I suit her lava monster alter ego Te Kā a little better) and Barn Owl and Tawny Owl are Pua and Hei Hei respectively, if I remember rightly.
Four weeks before the event was REN part 2, which means final numbers, final activity plan, final risk assessment and a signed home contact form. One of the Brownie leaders from the other unit had agreed to do it but I have no idea how to do the agreement online so I left the forms for her to sign at the hall when I was up there for Trefoil on the Tuesday, she signed them on the Wednesday, I picked them up on the Thursday and I sent them to the commissioner on the Friday along with everything else. There are two or three more sections to fill in on the REN but they’re pretty irrelevant to our event. It was just updating the number of girls definitely coming, and even that is going to be subject to change. A week later, one of the girls dropped out and you never know until the day itself who else is going to be ill or have a tantrum when it’s time to get dressed (we have at least two candidates for refusing to come on the day, so we’ll see…).
The next major event was organising a parents’ meeting, which needed to be close enough to the camp that it would all be fairly fresh in their minds but give them enough time to get organised, and us too. This was partly to make sure all the parents knew all of us and knew the arrangements but it was also to hand out and get back in consent forms and health forms, find out about any other health issues we’ve been kept in the dark about, give them kit lists, let them know about the menu so we know in advance if anyone’s going to refuse to eat everything, chase them up on anything left unpaid and let them ask questions. It was a bit more chaotic than previous camp meetings I’ve been to but I think all the messages got across in both directions.
Then we had to start shopping. We’d already bought a few bits there and then during the planning meetings and we’d started collecting bits we already had in the hall, like paper and pens and craft stuff that we weren’t going to be using in the next few weeks. I’ve ordered the materials for my craft and made a “here’s one I made earlier” one to test out and show them and my other big job is the shopping. One of the reasons I said yes to Guide camp at the weekend (not my Guides!) was to watch the catering and see how much food they brought and how much they’d recommend. It’s not the first time I’ve catered for a big event but it feels bigger and more significant than the Guide camp I did in 2017 or the Ranger camp-turned-residential that I did two years ago. One thing I realised pretty quickly it wouldn’t have occurred to me to bring was milk for cereal, because I have mine dry (I like it to crunch!). How much cereal will they get through, anyway? How much bread do I need? How much pasta?
At time of publishing, I haven’t done the shopping. That’s a job for tomorrow, a last-minute job. I’m at Brownies tonight so we’ll double-check the shopping list and then, when I’m not working on Friday, I’ll go and get all the stuff so it’s as fresh as can be, except the ice cream, which I’ll get at the Lidl round the corner on Saturday morning on the way there. It’s about half an hour’s drive and it would be better to spare a tub of ice cream that much time out of the freezer, to say nothing of how long it might take to do a tour of the site and get settled in and finally get to unloading.
We also need to raid the Guide hall – for example, we need the first aid kit but we can’t take it just yet because it needs to be at the hall all week for the other units in the district. Luckily, Tawny Owl will be there on Friday night for Guides and I’ll be there for a final mentor check-in for their leader-in-training, so I’ll be there too. Barn Owl is going to come up as well and we’ll do a supermarket sweep of the place – all the pens we needed up until the last minute, all the craft stuff, all the cleaning stuff and yes, the first aid kit.
And then we’ll be up at dawn on Saturday morning, ready for the girls to descend on us for 26 hours of madness at 10am. Lessons learned from last weekend: be really strict on everyone having waterproofs and spare dry socks! Keep everything and anything you can imagine being useful in the car! Do not let them prattle until 3am!
I Am A Polar Bear 