Folded Arms and Fire Safety

We have been trying to teach Eli how to fold his arms for prayers for the past two months. One day I handed him his lunch and he did this before he would eat:

 Now he "folds his arms" on demand!

At Pack Meeting Eli was walking around and getting into trouble. He had his back to the front of the room as one of the scouts started the opening prayer. As soon as Eli heard the prayer start, he whipped around to face the front and immediately folded his tiny arms.

And yes. I had my eyes open during the prayer.

I guess I'll do a Pack Meeting update because it went so well!

The theme of the month was Responsibility. Several websites recommended talking about being responsible around fires and discussing fire safety. That seemed like a good enough idea so I went with it.

After much planning and replanning, I finally decided to have them do a fire safety relay. The first race was to find a safe exit. I had four leaders standing behind the boxes marked "Exit." The leaders would alternate which one of them had a fire behind the box so there would be one safe exit and one exit with a fire behind it. The boys had to crawl through the safe exit.

The second race was to stop, drop and roll in a designated area. One boy misunderstood the directions and rolled all the way back to his team which was very amusing to watch...but might have cost his team the win.

The third race was to go to the family meeting area. I had hula hoops there and they had to hula hoop three times and then run back.

The fourth race was to call 911 at your neighbor's house.

And the fifth race was to put out the fire with water from the fire extinguisher. I didn't really want to deal with the mess of actual water so Jeff had the brilliant idea to fill balloons up with flour and call that water. Those balloons are sitting on the chair with the fire extinguisher and then there were fires in the middle that they had to hit with two balloons.

I bought firemen hats at the dollar store for them to wear when it was their turn.

It was so much fun I'm tempted to do a relay every month. You don't think they'd mind, do you?