Garrett's 9th Birthday Service Project - FINALLY completed!

Last month Garrett entered the world of pre-teendome; at least according to the textbooks! 9-12 is the official range of pre-teens, but I can hardly think of him as a pre-teen yet, he is all little boy!

We finally got around to doing his birthday service project. We've had all the supplies, but we just haven't been able to find the time! Yesterday we finally MADE the time. We had some home schooling friends over and we made it the day's activity.

I had been reading his bear scout manual and noticed how they are having the boys take more responsibility for their activities, so I tried to do the same with this one. He loved it!

He decided what he wanted to do, helped get all the supplies, and even went to a neighbor and asked him if he would donate some wooden cut outs that he makes to put in the bags for the kids to color!Then all the kids got started on decorating the brown baggies that they were going to fill. We had enough supplies for 30 bags, so between the 5 kids, that should have been about 6 each. Owen was so dedicated to doing his JUST RIGHT that he only finished one!

He made scenes on the front and back of this bag and was thrilled with himself.

Then came the fun part of assembling the bags!

A drink, some crackers, a puzzle, a wooden cut out, and 4 pieces of candy (the markers will come later) Thirty times around the table filling bags.

And finally they were all filled! He originally wanted to give them to the kids in a homeless shelter, but the nearest one I know of is 45 minutes away, so I asked him to find somewhere closer to home. His second choice is to donate them to the hospital, and he is going to call around today to see what he can find out. After we finished up the service project, the kids got to paint their own wooden cut outs that they had been given.

It was a fun project for us all!

**UPDATE**It took a lot of phone calls on his part, but Garrett finally found someone who would take his donation. But his mind is often an labyrinth where information gets lost, and he forgot all the details as to how to get to the correct office. So when we went to the United Way building to drop them off, we ended up at the Centro Hispano office instead. Luckily, they were eager to accept them and even took his picture to add to their website!

I jokingly told him that now he could say that he was a multicultural philanthropist!