Cub Scout Crossover

Well, Saturday evening we had a picnic at a local park for where we held our crossover ceremony. I have to tell you, those trees that you can see in the background of this photo were just awesome. They are fairly widely spaced through the park but they are so huge that you could walk to entire park area without going into the sun if you wanted to. Of course, that also made my pictures just a little dark.... Sorry. But they were just beautiful trees!Madison had fun following other kids climbing around the knobbly (is that a word?) bases of the trees. This one has a hollow space running underneath it and even when she fell down between the roots around the base (knocking her knee and her ribs) she immediately climbed back up again!
I know, it's not a great picture, but once again you can see the kids trying to climb the trees. Although hard to distinguish, Madison is the purple outfit down and to left of everyone else :) Here is our Bear den receiving their various participation segments, belt loops, arrow points and awards for the past month. Kellen is on the far right, but his face is really hard to see in this one with the way the sun is falling right on his face in the midst of all this shade...
Finally, it was time for crossover. Each of our scouts walked across the bridge to get the neckerchief and slide for the next rank up from wherever they were at. Kellen got to move from Bear to Webelo. He'll remain a Webelo for the next two years before moving into Boy Scouts. There are some things that become different now that he's a Webelo, though. For instance, it's not called a 'den' now, it's called a 'patrol' and the boys get to pick what their patrol will be called based on what patch they choose to represent themselves. Being a bunch of 8-9 yr old boys, they chose the glow-in-the-dark alien patch. Yep. We're the Alien Patrol.
After the crossover, our Boy Scout Troop retired an American Flag and all of our Cub Scouts had the privilege of watching that ceremony. It was rather cool to see the respect with which these young men handled the Flag as they participated in the ceremony that evening.
Then we had our dessert auction. I wasn't able to get a picture of the cake that Steve made because the battery on the camera died while we were there. I would've had more pictures of the whole evening, but I was trying to conserve my battery power for the high points :) Sometimes even that didn't work out the way that I wanted because my pictures of the retiring of the flag didn't come out very nicely at all. Anyway, my spaghetti and meatball cupcakes went for $17.50 and Steve's rendition of a pinewood derby track went for a whopping $30! Steve's parents drove down for the picnic with my three nieces and they even bought a cookie pizza from the dessert auction. Since they were turning right around to drive home, though, they cut it and shared it with everyone there before they left. It made for a wonderful evening with Kellen's pack, and we were so glad that Bob and Judy were able to come down to share it with us!