Day of Caring

This last Saturday we participated in the United Way Day of Caring.  I used to work for the United Way in Memphis before we had kids so it was nice to participate with them again.  UW is a great organization that helps a lot of people through various projects and fundraising throughout the year.  The Day of Caring is an event where they find out what local charities or individuals are in need of service and they organize volunteers to get the projects done.  This year they did clean-up projects at the homes of several widows, cleaned up the Price Walkway and the Helper Walkway, worked at The Boys & Girls club, landscaped at Active Re-Entry, projects at the Food Bank, and Quilting for the Children's Justice Center, among other things.

The event started at 7:30 a.m. with doughnuts and juice at the Fresh Market grocery store parking lot.  Then we got assigned to one of the many projects they had planned for the day.  The kids and I were assigned to help clean up the Helper Parkway.  It's a walking path that goes for a little over a mile along the river in Helper.  It's a little older path and had quite a lot of weeds and bushes growing over the trail.  We weeded for 3 hours and then decided to call it quits.  I couldn't believe how hard the kids worked without hardly any complaining! Tyson was in charge of photographing the event and he went around to each of the work sites taking pictures so we don't actually have any pictures of him, but he did work very hard, I promise!

We found a bird's nest so Lexi found a good spot for it up in one of the trees.

Drake worked hard to help bag up lots of weeds with his new yellow work gloves!

We had two of the college basketball players on our work crew.  It was fun to get to know them and the kids are excited to watch them play basketball this season. 

It was a little chilly when we first started working so the kids stayed bundled up, but it warmed up pretty fast once we got really working! 

After we had done our three hours of weeding we went home and rested and cleaned up a bit and then went to the BBQ lunch at the park.  Then we all went home and took naps.....we were exhausted!  But it felt great to do our part in helping out our community.