Having fun at your own expense

This weekend was our WOW campout with scouts.  The WOW stands for Webelos Outdoor Weekend.  The district boy scout troops set up activities for the first and second year webelos to partake in.  This also is a recruiting tool for the troops by letting them set up their promotional items such as chuck boxes and camp equipment alongside each event.  Kind of a win-win situation.  Now I use this event to see how alot of my first year scouts handle leadership.  Since the youngest scouts are closest to webelos they get the opportunity to teach and demonstrate scouting to them.

Our troop signed up to do an obstacle course.  I really like setting up an obstacle course because it gets the boys interested in knots and lashings.  Once they see that they can build anything with the right amount of rope and wood it is easier to teach them how to use the rope and wood.  The district representative also told me that they would love for a troop to also have a sling shot paintball station.  I was instantly amazed by how much fun this sounded so I signed us up for that event as well.  The two events would be great together as well because if we had alot of boys at any certain time the line to the obstacle course gets long and boring.  This way they had enough time at the obstacle course and also time at the sling shot paintball station.

Now me being a diabetic as alot of diabetics we get thick skin.  We take alot of: "you can't eat that" and "what are your blood sugars."  So I did not just want some boring targets for the boys to shoot at.  I came up with an idea to have pictures of girl scouts they could shoot at.  Kind of along the lines of girls have coodies and boy scouts are cool.  A couple of leaders thought that we should not be promoting this kind of girls are bad theme.  They came up with a better plan, to get a picture of me and photocopy it into a girl scout uniform.  Then it is poking fun at me as a leader and that I am kind of girly or something.  Any ways it was fun and the webelos had fun shooting my eyes out and and other appendages. 

The leason here is that if you can't laugh at yourself and have fun then how much are you enjoying life in the first place?  We should all laugh a little more each day and stop stressing over BG's and doctors visits.  Now I am not saying you should just go freely into the world and not think about your diabetes.  Just that it needs to be as positive as possible dealing with life and diabetes.  When I was younger my mother asked me if I wanted to ever go to diabetes camp along with my other summer scout camp and high adventure trip.  The idea of this diabetes camp scared me to death.  I could only imagine that it was like a nazi war camp and the only thing you got to eat was porage and the activities were limited because they never wanted the diabetics to crash on their BG's.  Then at the end of each day we all compared numbers and laughed at the diabetics with the bad numbers.  Looking back and talking to other diabetics it sounds like it is a positive experience and that it gives alot of youth with type 1 motivation for the coming year.  Looking back, I should have been less conscientious about my diabetes care and have attended diabetes camp as a youth.  I would have learned the lessons I know now at a younger age.