Knives: The Bloody Activity

This is the second in a two post series about what went wrong at Girl Scout camp this year. Here’s the first harrowing story if you missed it.

Both my seven-year-old (Feisty Girl) and nine-year-old (Sweet Angel) participated in this year’s Girl Scouts camping weekend. When I say participated, I mean that Feisty Girl’s troop was too lame to stay overnight and Sweet Angel’s troop almost lost her in the woods in the middle of the night. Moving on though because I vented about that in part one already.

Feisty Girl’s troop did get to take part in the daytime activities though. This year’s theme was The Last of the Mohicans. To be as authentic as possible, the camp director thought it would be good for the girls to learn about various aspects of Native American life. I was all for that until I read the schedule of activities and came across the one entitled KNIVES. Seriously? They couldn’t at least have called it Carving or Woodworking? Images of Freddy Krueger flashed in my mind only to be promptly replaced with images of little girls bleeding everywhere.

Unfortunately, one of those images came true and Freddy was nowhere to be seen.

Ironically, the focus of the activity was knife safety. The older Girl Scouts (the teenagers) were responsible for demonstrating how to safely handle a pocket knife. I don’t recall Native Americans having pocket knives, but the historical inaccuracy was the least of my worries. The teenagers did okay and I even began to breathe a little easier until they came around and passed out a knife to each second grader in our troop. Gulp.

The Girl Scouts (they were actually only Brownies!) were then told to practice carving with a bar of soap for twenty minutes. Those were the longest twenty minutes of the day. (Well, those and the twenty minutes on the lake, but I’ll write about that fiasco in part three.)

Feisty Girl did well, but I was on her every second!

“Honey, watch your fingers!”

“Honey, carve away from your body!”

“Honey, pay attention to what you’re doing!”

It was a serious nag-a-thon, but she managed to finish the activity without drawing blood. Other girls, not so much.

All within the same five minutes, strangely, three girls sliced their fingers open. One of these girls was right in front of me. She was being “assisted” by my daughter’s troop leader when she cut her finger and the blood began dripping down her arm. While I understand that accidents happen, especially when you give a bunch of seven-year-olds knives, this leader wasn’t helping. She even called over one of the teenagers to help because she admitted she was too stressed watching over the little girl. Nice.

Each girl left that activity with a small card that said they earned their “License to Carve.” Yeah, I don’t think so. I threw Feisty Girl’s “License to Bleed” in the trash.

When I got to the next activity, I learned from another mom that multiple girls in her troop also cut their fingers at the “KNIVES” station.

Let’s just hope that next year’s theme isn’t The Fourth of July and the girls aren’t expected to earn a “License to Handle Explosives.”