Yeah, I know...I haven't posted in over three weeks again. I feel like I just make my way day by day from one event to the next without a lot of down time. In the midst of the chaos of house guests and a road trip and OCC responsibilities I see God blessing in new ways every day.
Sometimes I worry that I'm losing my focus on Operation Christmas Child. I mean, what I really want to do these days is buy clothes for boy babies, look at pictures of my grandson (and soon pics of my grandsons-to-be, and steal as many kisses to Sam's sweet-smelling baby head as I can.
Still, the date for our 10th annual packing party looms ever closer--only 44 days away now! Last night I tallied the prep work we need to accomplish before that day. My count showed 150 cartons with 48 packs of crayons in each one to be separated and bagged, 250 more reams of paper to count, fold, and bag, several hundred tote bags to roll and rubber band and boxes of fillers to sort.
Then, when we get all that done we're going to add pens, pencils, toothbrushes, and bags of crayons to the previously bagged paper to make school packs. We're trying this for the first time this year as an experiment with no idea whether it will make things easier at the packing party or just mess up the flow of the assembly line. Meanwhile, what we DO know is that it's going to be a LOT more prep work than we've ever done before.
Praise God, though, because today we had another packing party work day. It was the best-attended one of the summer with more than 60 people coming throughout the day. They bagged 55,296 individual crayons and counted and folded 50,000 sheets of paper.
AND one of our volunteers brought a donation from a local knitting/crocheting group. Look at this great collection of handmade stuffed animals, hats, fingerless gloves, and crocheted flippy flyers. How cool are these!
Whew! I feel a lot better about our progress than I did 24 hours ago.
It will be interesting to see how many paper/school supply kits we can assemble in two more work days. We really need to get them all completed before the week of the packing party because we have to devote those days to assembling the 30,000 boxes.
Oh, another answer to prayer--we got confirmation that a local public school will bring a busload of high school students on 9/11 to help us assemble boxes for three hours--what an amazing blessing! Now I need to figure out some ways to make that tedious task more fun. Anyone have any ideas?
Forty-five more days until we stand on the other side.
High Schoolers, turn music on randomly or maybe just up loud and tell them that's a dance break. Then, not announced in advance, give the two silliest a candy bar or something. It will be a nice quick break and they'll compete as the day goes for silliest dancer (and that should prevent some inappropriate dancing).
ReplyDelete