Horsemanship Merit Badge

The next badge I would like to talk about is the Horsemanship merit badge. I enjoyed that one, because it talks about how to take care of a horse and ride a horse.

Now I'm going to tell you a story about how I earned it. It started off when I was like eleven. We have a neighbor in our ward that has a horse farm. Her name is Brenda. She owned horses. Now she only earns one horse, because some of her horses have got sick and died, like her very nice black horse named Lucky. Lucky was her horse that I used to earn the badge.

One of her daughters taught me everything on how to take care of Lucky by learning basic steps on how to clean dirt out of his horseshoes. And this is one of the most hateful things to do. It was to scoop all their poop out off the horse yard. Then I got to learn how to brush his fur and mane. It wasn't very bad as scooping the poop and cleaning the dirt off his shoe. Then the best part was to learn how to saddle up a horse and make sure it's put on snugged so it wouldn't slip off. Then we took him out in the yard and then I got to ride him. Then I learned on how to say things to control the horse while riding. I clicked my lips to make him go. Then I pulled the reigns to the right to make him turn right and then left to make him turn left and then I give him a kick in the stomach to make him go faster. Then the best part was to say "Whoa!" to make him stop.
The riding was the most fun part on Horsemanship. Then I had to learn how to feed Lucky by giving him a bowl full of grass and then how to feed him a carrot or apple. All those times with Lucky were wonderful, until his death this year. It was still sad to hear about Lucky's death, but Lucky and I used to be best friends when I was working on this badge, but some of those times, I got a chance to see him by riding my bike past Brenda's house and wave to him and his horse buddies. The Horsemanship Badge was a very fun one, especially riding on Lucky. Until next time, I will tell you what the next badge was really fun. I really liked the Horsemanship Badge. I love you, Lucky, good old times.

Sports Merit Badge

Here's another merit badge I would like to tell you about. I kind of enjoyed it, it is called Sports. Most of the badge, I had to learn about first aid and how to avoid injuries and sickness. And then I have to learn about different kinds of sports and then I have to play two sports to pass it.

The two sports I played were Soccer and Bowling. Soccer was a bit of a fun. All I had to do was play soccer on a team and learn how to dribble the bowl to a goal before the other team tries to get the ball away from me. I sometimes accidentally catch the ball with my hands and I stomp off the field, feeling angry for making that mistake.

Bowling was a little fun, I done it with a group of other kids who got to go there for free. Bowling looks much harder in reality than doing it on Wii Sports.  That reminds me, my family and I like to do Wii sport tournaments on a special occasion, like maybe on summertime.

The sport I mostly played in my life was football. I played Pee Wee Football since 2003, but then I stopped playing in 2009, because I started having Kienbock's. It means that I have wrist disorder. It's just that the smallest bone inside starts dying if a bone on my arm grows much longer than it needs to, and crashes right in the wrist bone and causes the tissue to die. So it hurted really bad when I first realized I got it.  

The sports badge was really fun, when I got the chance to learn how to play best at football, which I can't play with helmet and pads. My hand specialist told me it's a restriction, because if I played football with a wrist disorder, things would get it worse. Bowling was fun especially when I toss the ball into the alley and knocks off the pins. Soccer was fun, even though it was hard to try not to get it with your hands. Until next time, I'll tell you how I passed off another badge.

Chess Merit Badge

Since I have passed off all the merit badges, I would like to tell everyone of how Boy Scouts helped me learn throughout my journey in Boy Scouts. The first badge I would like to tell everyone is the merit badge called Chess. It's just barely new and I managed to get that badge passed off before my final court of honor.


This is how I have passed it off. I played lots of games of chess with my siblings. I kept complaining about losing, because I thought I didn't have the experience to play better. But with a lot of lessons about losing every time. These lessons were about hiding, corners, sacrifices. In the hiding one, I can't hide my king most of the game, because it can get himself in check. The corner lesson was, I try not to get my king into a corner, that would get him into check easily. The sacrifice lesson was that the game is about battling, you have to sacrifice your pieces, even though you don't want them to. Another one was No Mercy. I kind of did show too much mercy on any game. One lesson was don't play with one piece, especially the king. If you play with one piece, you'd lose easily. Another lesson was to stay away from walls, because the king can be attacked. Some of these lessons just help me play better at chess. 

I also passed it off by doing a tournament with the family. I kept losing at each game, but it helped me learn from those mistakes. My eight-year-old brother, Sport is kind of good at chess, because he learned much better than I did. The last time I played chess when I was his age with Mom. I always kept letting Mom win, because I thought it would be fair if girls won, because their cute. In fact, with me losing at chess, it kept making my head hurt so much that I couldn't stand about sacrificing each piece. But even though I kept losing at chess, it still helps me learn how to play better. Like at Bingham High School, during lunch time. I played a game of chess with some of my friends. With the last game before lunchtime was over, I won against one of my friends. That really did help me become better with all the lessons from my Mom. Then I passed it off and got the merit badge. Later on, I will tell all of you how I passed off the other merit badges, just like I told you about the Chess badge.

Famous

This is me on CNN! To read about my Court of Honor, scroll down to the next post. Thanks for visiting my blog! Please leave me a comment.

132 Merit Badges

I would like to say that all my life in Boy Scouts has been so much fun and lots of hard work! It really helped me learn a bit better how I could accomplish my goals. With all these badges I have on my sash I just have like 132 on here. And every one needed a counselor and lots of them needed interviews and special lessons and helpers. The only reason I earned them all was because of help from all my neighbors and friends! So the first thing I want to say is a big THANK YOU!

Now I would like to tell all of you about the badges I liked and disliked. The first badge I liked the most was Cycling, because riding a bike on the Miller’s Sports Park Track was exciting because there were professionals and people on the bleachers. A guy named Rodger Miller was my cycling partner. (His dad was Larry H. Miller, owner of the Utah Jazz.) Rodger made sure I didn’t quit or get dehydrated. I rode 51 miles that day!

I kind of enjoyed the new Chess badge, because it helped me learn a lot of ways on how to become better at chess. I usually just lose, but Friday at school, I beat one of my friends with some of my new skills. Then it was, Scuba Diving, because it was so exciting to be underwater without drowning, but to save yourself from drowning, you breathe through a regulator. I got to dive at the Crater. It’s so much fun to scuba dive, I want to go again.

The next badge was Scouting Heritage, because it told me how exciting scouts would be especially learning about the person who started scouts named Baden-Powell.
Then, Camping, because it was exciting to sleep in a tent at any place like sometimes we campout at my Grandma’s house, or in our backyard or in the mountains. I like learning lots of things at camp.

Next, Robotics, because it had a lot of learning about how using a robot can be very important on difficult locations while working, like in space, the ocean, a volcano, or a crumbled building. Building my own robot was fun. I put black tape on the floor in our entry way and people were surprised to see that my robot could follow the path all by itself.

The next one was Climbing, because I did most of it at the climbing gym in Sandy called Momentum, and it was kind of scary, but fun. Gym Rat and Alex and Princess and Crafty went with us. Gym Rat started to slip off the wall when a rock turned, but Alex saved him which is kind of funny because she is a skinny little girl and Gym Rat is a big strong muscle guy.

The next badge I liked was Animal Science, because I really enjoyed learning about different kinds of farm animals like my grandpa’s sheep. Then the next one was Wilderness Survival, because it helped me learn how I could survive in a wilderness if I ever got lost or far away from a group. It was fun sleeping outside in a shelter I made all by myself. I don’t like lightning though.

Next was Personal Fitness, because it helped me know about how to stay fit and that it’s important to have a physical exam. The next one was Horsemanship, because I learned a lot about horses from my neighbor. I even remembered that I liked riding on her special black horse named Lucky. I had a lot of fun with Lucky.

And then the last badge I liked was the grape soda cap…I’m just teasing. The owner of the UP house actually gave it to me right when the family and I went to see the UP house in Herriman. Seeing the Up house was a lot of fun. The inside was almost exactly like from the movie.

Anyway, there are some badges that I didn’t like when I did them, like Backpacking, because I had to walk three fifteen-milers and one thirty-miler in hard environments like Hayden’s Peak. I didn’t really like Orienteering, because it was so hard to try to use a compass while trying to get the degrees right to get the degrees and paces. Another badge I disliked was Surveying. It was kind of like Orienteering, but sometimes you have to measure the distance and degrees there. Math isn’t my favorite subject and I don’t like having to get everything just right.


Passing off the merit badges with all of you was a lot of fun! The last two merit badges I passed off were Inventing and Chess. Now that I have passed all of those merit badges off, I will remember each one and it will help me in my grownup life. I will always be a Boy Scout no matter how old I am.

http://www.fox13now.com/news/kstu-eagle-scout-south-jordan-scout-has-earned-all-132-merit-badges-20110918,0,5562855.storyhttp://www.ksl.com/?sid=17211431&nid=1010

Holiday Traditions

I haven't told you that I love holidays. My sister, Baby Doll likes holidays too. Everyone in the family likes holidays. For each holiday, we have our own traditions.

 

First of all, we have a tradition on Halloween, well right before Halloween, we usually go through our Halloween boxes and try to look for some lights that work like Christmas lights and decorate our yard and use most of our yard into an amazing corn-maze. Another tradition is that right after the kids went trick-or-treating and came home from it, they all dump their goody bags into a big pan and we all get to take ten pieces of candy at a time before finishing up the others for next time.

The next holiday, we have lots of Thanksgiving traditions. Right in the morning of Thanksgiving day, we always wake up in the morning, turn on our TV and watch the Thanksgiving Parade that has been taking in New York. Another tradition is, right at lunch we have a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, by making toast, popcorn, jelly beans, and pretzels. I was the first that started the tradition right in 2006. The role to this thanksgiving lunch is that we send one person upstairs to take a shower while making the thanksgiving and right when the person comes down, he or she acts like Peppermint Patty from the movie exactly the way she says. And then right after we watched that, we watched another Thanksgiving movie from the Charlie Brown series, we watched the Mayflower Voyagers. It's a good learning movie for everyone to know about why Thanksgiving is very important.

   
 And the last holiday that we like, is the most important one for us...Christmas. We have lots of traditions on Christmas. Right on the day after Thanksgiving, we usually go down in Sanpete County, down to Ephraim Canyon and go into the wilderness to go get ourselves a very nice Christmas tree for the holidays. And another thing that we usually did in Sanpete County is that we visit our grandmothers who live in the county. And we go to a fun thing in Mt. Pleasant at night called a Candlelight Festival. All they do is that there is fun and games and you even get to meet Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus. And we have other traditions like somewhere in December before the day of December 25, is that we go to other fun places in the holidays like we go to Spanish Fork and see the Festival of Lights. The Festival of Lights is a really fun place to go see, they have lots of good Christmas lights that you might have not seen before, but it's a fun place. And one place we like to go to during Christmastime is going to Temple Square in Salt Lake City. You can see how beautiful the Salt Lake Temple is, even during a holiday. And sometimes in Salt Lake City, if we ever afford it, we usually went to the Planetarium to watch Santa Vs. the Snowman 3D.
When we are at home, we like to invite our relatives over to our house to have our own Cousin Christmas party. That's when we spend time playing with each other and waiting for Santa Claus to come to our house during our party. Every year, Mom and Dad usually asked me and Gamer to put up the Christmas lights on our house to appreciate our neighbors. And on those days right before Christmas Day comes, we like to stay at home and watch all the Christmas movies that we have, like my Mom's tradition, we like to watch the Muppet Christmas Carol, because she likes Michael Caine. Lots of other things we like to do is read a lot of Christmas stories from our Christmas book basket like Curly's favorite called The Polar Express. And right on Christmas Eve, we try to get everything ready for the next day, like get our Christmas shopping done and then we read the scriptures about the birth of Jesus. And for us, we all open one present before we all go to bed. Right on Christmas Day, we wake up in the morning wait by  upstairs to see if the coast is clear to head down and see all the amazing presents that Santa have given us. For all of us opening presents, we always let one person open a present at a time. That's how we figure out who got a present so that everyone would like to see of what you got. Right after we open all our presents, we all play with our gifts throughout the whole day. Then the next week, we'd start having a New Year.

Now that you all have heard about our Holiday traditions, you might want to try our traditions because they are all fun and exciting on each of these three holidays. I can't wait for those holidays to come.