Volunteer Work

When you have kids, it’s important to teach involvement with the community at an early age. I have taken the kids to volunteer a couple of times in their lives, but it’s that time where they need to be more involved than ever before. Even though we were not directly hit by the tornado, others in our town, were. So, we went to the Rogers High School over the weekend, to dedicate 2 hours of our time, to help in whatever way was needed.

I had a hard time trying to convince 3 of my kids that this is what we needed to do as a family. 1 was giving me excuses about home school work that needed to be completed THAT day. The other 2 were just lazy, and wanted to be at home on their computers. I had to almost yell at them out of frustration, because they were just being so selfish. They FINALLY got ready and we all loaded up in the car. I made sure they ate something too, because I didn’t need to hear complaining about being hungry.

We pulled in, they asked me what we would be doing exactly. I had no idea, because we were just going with willingness to do whatever was needed. They had a lot of volunteers show up, so I wasn’t even sure there would be anything to do. After a couple of minutes, they said there was a need to sort through all of the donated diapers they had placed in a large room. They were already sorted by size, but we needed to bundle them in groups of 10, and put them in large trash bags, labeled with a WM bag, what size they were. So, we got to work. Gramma and Papa Keith came too, so the 7 of us were all in the same area working. The boys would make the groups of 10, and I would rubber band them together. We worked hard for a solid 2 hours.. except Autumn & Austin got worn out and rested on the mats in the gym for a few minutes before becoming restless. We were offered a bottle of water, they brought us more bags and rubberbands, because we went through them rather quickly.

The kids only looked at the time a few times, saying “45 minutes left,” etc. but, I think they had a good time, and when we left, everyone was in a good mood. No complaining or whining.. thankfully!

This was only a small contribution to the incredible loss our community felt, but with everyone doing something, a lot can happen in a short amount of time.

Just over here trying to help my kids see beyond themselves, one day at a time.