Valentine's Day Brownies Style!

Claire and Annabel take a break from making their TV dinner



How much can you do in a 3 hour Brownie Meeting? A lot! One of the benefits of homeschooling is the opportunity to have a long meeting and really get into our projects. We can accomplish so much and the girls learn so much because they are able to have a "full experience".

My wonderfully talented culinary friend, fellow Brownie mom, ice cream/Wine Guy date, just all round dear friend, Aimee, worked with me to plan an awesome meeting. Combining the Make it Eat it Try it and the Brownie Girl Scouts Through the Years Try it and toss in a couple of extra requirements it was a full plate! The main idea was the invention of the TV dinner. The girls made spaghetti and meatballs, green beans, and cake all in their own little foil compartments. The girls had a blast making their own complete meal, although some were less than thrilled about touching raw meat to roll meatballs, but they are girls after all!

Mackenzie and Lily await meatball instructions.

Annabel was a pro at this!

Lily was less than thrilled about the raw meat, although I think she liked the finished product!

This is the best bunch of girls! They are so cooperative and have a good time with whatever we are doing.

Paige and Lindy set jewelry aside to dig in!

Mackenzie and Lily washed up and ready for cake making.

AnnMarie trying to stress out her Girl Scout leader and pretend she was going to eat cake batter!

Mary mixing it up in a mug and pouring into an individual foil cake pan. With a little help from Erin of course!

While our TV dinners were in the oven with close supervision by Mrs. Walton, we headed over to our friend Mrs. Smith's house. We had all kinds of Valentine's treats for her including some the girls had made at home and brought for her. She has really become someone special to the girls who they think of and love to do things together. This relationship has been wonderful for our troop and for Mrs. Smith as well. She looks forward to our visits and has a genuine interest in the girls and what they are doing. Although today we had an assignment for her to help us with telling a story from when she was a young girl. This will count toward our Listening to the Past Try it.

Mrs. Smith was born in 1915 and when she was the girls age she was attending a one room school house. She had pictures of her class to share with us. She is the only living person from her school class. We learned that her favorite thing to do was to go to her grandmothers house and visit. She loved to get cookies out of the cookie jar that was in the bottom of the old cupboard. She now has this cupboard in her home so we could all just imagine Mrs. Smith as a little girl getting cookies! We talked about her living on a farm and the girls had lots to share with the pets they have. Reading is Mrs. Smith's favorite past time and has been since she was a young girl. We have some big readers in our troop which she was very happy to hear about.

We said our goodbyes and were on our way home to eat our TV dinners.

Lily looks at a picture of Mrs. Smith when she was 6 years old.

Sharing stories and pictures from the past.

Showering Mrs. Smith with love!

"It's like Christmas!" she exclaimed. You can see the delight in her face.

When we returned home, AnnMarie shared her violin and a song she wrote. It was beautiful and all of her Brownie friends were very impressed.

We then worked on making a bar graph of our cookie sales! More on this in another post.

Dinner is ready!

Time to tune in to I Love Lucy! which also helped cover the entertainment portion of Through the Years.




The girls peeled back the foil and dug in!

No one made a peep as they ate and watched, the true meaning of a TV dinner.

We ended the meeting with our Valentine exchange and candy fest followed up with a quick badge presentation. All the girls worked so hard to earn all of their try its. I can't wait to see all those patches on their vests at the next meeting!