4H STARR (The State Teen Action Representative Retreat)

This weekend Maddie and I attended STARR at the NYS Fairgrounds in Syracuse and had an awesome time! Maddie has been waiting a while to be old enough to go and was so excited to get going. We arrived Friday night and got settled in our bunks. Momma is not too keen on selfies...don't expect much of that!!

Then we had dinner and were placed into our "roundtable" groups. These were groups to practice leadership skills and do some team building exercises. Maddie was in the orange group. They decided to use Orange Crush as their name and Maddie helped make a poster with that on it. I said they should add "Crushing it since April 2017" because the advertising photo they were looking at for reference said "Crushing it since 1906". They thought that was funny and added it.

Then we played games for what felt like forever to me! The kids however had a blast! Then snack was offered and bed suggested with lights out at 11. However the girls, at least, were up a whole lot longer than that and many of them were rising at 5am! Phew!

Saturday we both did a long workshop and 2 short workshops. Maddie did a long workshop about mapping and geospatial science. She mapped our hometown!

Then she was off to ultimate frisbee. She said there were a lot of tall boys in that group and she had trouble convincing them she could catch and throw the frisbee too! We both ended up in the succulent planting workshop at the end of the day and planted our own little plants. They made it home! We will see if they survive....

Momma's

Maddie's--the name of her spikey plant is "Hobbit"! 

Momma took Reverse Tie Dye as the long workshop. This was really neat. We used stencils and bleach + water in a spray bottle to take the color out of shirts. 

The Deathly Hollows

Here are some of the other shirts! 

I foresee many of these shirts in my future! Then I took a class about aquaponics which is gardening with a fish pond! The fish pond water provides nutrients for the plants which is filtered by the plants and sent back as clean water to the fish! You can eat the fish and the plants. It was really very neat.

In between all these things we kept going back to the round table group. The kids had a blast with many different games.

building a tower with papers

human table--they did it-no chairs!

uh-oh!

crash

Fashion show--got together with a couple other kids and got dressed up

Saturday night was county photos, dinner, a motivational speaker and a dance. They kids had a blast and never once sat down.

Neusa,(Ruben's mom), Sam, Maddie, Jack, Momma with Julien and Ruben in the back

That was another late night but fun. Sunday was more round table games then off to home!

We also got to see the Chinese Lantern Show going on at the Fairgrounds right next door to us. I couldn't get any good shots at night when they were all lit up but here it is during the day.

We had so much fun and are looking forward to many more years of attending!!