Helping Others ~ Making Goody Bags for Birthday Wishes

In honor of Clara’s third birthday, which we are celebrating this week we deciede to make goody bags to donate to Birthday Wishes. Birthday Wishes is an amazing organization that plans birthday parties for children that are living in homeless shelters.

We have been baking cupcakes to donate for the parties for the past 6 months and the girls are always excited to help me make them and decoreate them. They also collect goody bags which they give out at the parties. I have been wanting to have the girls make them, but haven’t had a chance until now. Since we are not haveing a friends birthday party for Clara I thought this would be a great activity to do together and we were able to spend the money we would have spent on goody bags for her friends on these goody bags.

We went to Walmart and Dollar Tree to pick up all the things we would need to fill the bags. The girls worked together to decide what would be fun to include in each bag. It was cute to hear them talking about the things they like getting.
In the end we decided to fill each goody bag with:

• Silly Straws
  
• Bouncy Balls
  
• Mini Slinkys
  
• Stickers
  
• Play Dough
  
• Spiny Balls
  
• Pencils
  
• Bubbles
  

I set everything up on our low folding table, which was the perfect height for clara to be able to take a bag and then walk around the table and pick one thing from each container to put into the bag.

The girls worked together to put all of the bags together. They were careful to check when they were finished that each bag had everything because they didn’t want anyone to miss out on anything.

Clara was so proud of her finished goody bag, she was actually able to put them all together on her own. I just helped her tie the twist tie to close it.

Together we made 25 goody bags to donate to Birthday Wishes. I can’t wait to bring Clara to drop them off.

We actually had so much fun picking out the items to go into the goody bags and putting them together that the girls said they want this to be one of our new birthday traditions. I couldn’t be prouder of them for wanting to give back to others as part of their birthday celebration.

If you would like to find out how you could help out Birthday wishes be sure to visit their website and their Facebook page.

Check out some of the other ways our family is helping others and volunteering in our community.

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Helping Others ~ Bookmark Making

Emily is participating in the Presidential Service Club at her school, which provides the students with some opportunities to participate in community service projects. So far they have made pillows and blankets for a nursing home and helped clean up litter around the school.
Most of the hours are meant to be earned on their own. I really had no idea where to start, since most volunteer oportunities are for children that are older. I was very encouraged as I was looking on the internet for projects that we could do together to earn the service hours and have found a few local organizations that we have really enjoyed working with.

One of the organizations I found to work with is The Book Faries. They are an organization which provides books to teachers and students in underprivliged areas. Emily and I were able to go to their warehouse and help sort the many boxes of book donations one Saturday afternoon. There were many teachers that came in to pick out books for their classroom libraries and it was so awesome to see them getting excited about the books they were able to take for free! It was also cute for me to see Emily finding books that we were sorting that we own or have borrowed from the library. She would say “ooh I loved this one” or “Mommy we have this one too!”

I found out that when they have free book fairs for the children at these schools to pick out a book to owen they also give each child a bookmark. I thought this would be a great project for all of us to work on together. My sister was kind enough to provide us with lots of different scrappaper, punches and stickers from her huge collection of scrappbooking supplies and we went to work.

After we finished designing the bookmarks I laminated them and the girls helped me cut them all out. I like that they are laminated becasue they feel more sturdy and will last much longer!

Even Clara got in on the fun and colored these bookmark pages that I printed for her from Stories by Storie .

I am so excited about this fun and creative way to help other kids, especially since we love reading so much and now can share that with other children!

What kinds of volunteer activities do your participate in with your younger children?

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Daisy Girl Scouts: Three Cheers For Animals Journey ~ Operation Happy Sock

My friend Sarah and I are Emily’s Daisy Girl Scout Troop leaders and we are currently working on the Three Cheers for Animals Journey.  When I found Operation Happy Sock on Pinterest I knew that this was the perfect service project for us.  A “Happy Sock” is simply a catnip toy made from a sock and they are super easy to make!  All you need is a sock, a handful of Poly-Fil and a pinch of Catnip.

I had the girls bring in some of their mismatched or old socks (I have a mountain of them that were perfect for this) to the meeting.  We had a nice sized pile of old socks that we quickly turned into fun new toys for cats.

To make a “Happy Sock” all you do is stuff a sock with the polyfil and a pinch of catnip.  Tie a knot at the ankle and you made a cute little cat some where very happy!! The girls with all 52 of their “Happy Socks” they were so excited about this project!

This was such a fun project to work on and we can’t wait to donate them to our local animal shelter! 

I purchased the supplies that we used at Walmart and they were very inexpensive.  We only used a 1 oz bag of catnip and we still have most of a huge bag of polyfil leftover. 

Color-A-Smile

This week Emily worked on coloring some pictures for Color-A-Smile.  This is a non-profit organization that collects pictures that are drawn or colored by children and then every month distributes them to Nursing Homes,
Meals on Wheels Programs, and Individuals all across the country.

If you visit the Color A Smile website you can print out coloring and drawing pages.  I love the idea of sharing the beauty of children’s art with others.

We are going to be sending our winter coloring pages in soon….I hope you will join us in helping to make people smile too!!!