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Daisy Troop

February 2004

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The hardest part about starting up and hosting a biweekly Daisy troop for some of the kindergarten girls, it turns out, isn't the paperwork or the training sessions up in Windsor or even having to make sure the house is tidied up on those Thursdays. Turns out the toughest part was getting Ellie to understand that she is just another one of the Daisies in the group during that hour or so, not the princess of the house. A couple of meltdowns over petty issues (no, you don't get to make the wish every week; no, you can't turn on Nickelodeon right now) had been followed up with serious discussions about the risk she was running, that Mom wouldn't be able to do the Daisy thing anymore if Ellie couldn't get along, and then there might be no Daisy troop.

She seemed to be getting it, so Jen can be forgiven for forgetting the trouble and accidentally using Ellie as an example to illustrate one of the Daisy tenets, fairness. When she passed out paper cups of lemonade to the others and poured Ellie's into her favorite, fancy, purple, Belle glass, she asked the others if they saw anything unfair. They spotted the problem immediately, and the troop had a brief conversation about fairness, after which Jen sought to finish the demonstration by replacing Ellie's fancy glass with just another paper cup.

A gesture which produced the rumblings of that old familiar whine... and a sour face turning red.

Jen looked up, a bit panicked, at her troop co-leader, Sabina: "I've made a huge mistake."