Vitamins, Veggies, Soy, Rice

As I attempt to give some updates on what we've been doing since the beginning of school, the timeline will probably jump all over the place. If time is flying anyway, why not encourage it to fly backwards a little?

Yes, time flies. And within the last three-and-a-half months, three fourths of our children had a birthday. For two months at the end of every year we are bombarded with three birthdays and three holidays. Don't get me wrong, these are all wonderful reasons to celebrate, but it's a little hard on our schedule. So in the interest of ensuring our children have a sane mother, we have small family celebrations for each of the children on (or near) their special day, followed by a combined kids' party after most of the chaos has passed.

This year we decided to celebrate at Feed My Starving Children (FMSC). While the two middles were skeptical (they'd been too young to participate in prior FMSC events), it ended up being a wonderful experience. I'll admit that I was skeptical when Sean first mentioned it as well. Thoughts like "Is there a party room? Where will we serve the cake? How will I keep the ice cream cold? What about singing happy birthday? Will they feel special enough? celebrated?" went through my mind.

The truth is, our kids need a me-focused day like they need a hole in the head. Don't misunderstand me, we cherish our children and think they're the most awesome kids in the entire world (which probably results in enough me-focused days the rest of the year), but because we love them we want them to grow up to be loving, serving, gracious, merciful ambassadors for Jesus and this was a great way to give them an opportunity to do that at a young age. Once I wrapped my head around this, I stopped worrying about the cake and ice cream and got excited about celebrating the number of children we would feed around the world.

Each of the birthday kids got special aprons to wear and we all got those fancy hair nets.

After taking it all in

Wes chose to scoop soy into the Manna Packs.

I think he had a lot of fun once he got the hang of it: vitamins, veggies, SOY, rice

Elise found a station with mostly girls and opted to scoop with the long handled veggie spoon.

Jack navigated his way to his favorite station: the packing. He is an expert at counting the bags

and packing the boxes.

Sean manned the sealer (an adults only job because of the high temp machine)

while lots of other friends and family filled the stations, holding empty Manna Pack bags, weighing the contents to be sure FMSC is operating efficiently,

and working together to feed starving children around the world.

When our two hours was up, we gathered together again for a sample of the life-saving food that this organization ships all over the world and to find out what our contribution had been. 

The result? We packed 80 boxes and, in two short hours, fed 47 kids for an entire year. What a great reason to celebrate!

Now because it was a birthday party, I couldn't just send the kids on their way empty-handed so, as a way to say thanks for helping and celebrating with us, I wanted to put together some party favor bags. So where did I look for ideas? Pinterest, of course.

I have a love hate relationship with Pinterest (though, I'll admit it's mostly love). On it you can find a myriad of ideas and how-to tips for painting stripes on your bathroom walls or throwing together science experiments for your kids when you're stuck at lucky enough to have them at home on a school day cancelled for cold. But it also encourages the ugly habit of comparison.

Her pantry is so organized. Why haven't I spent an arm and a leg at The Container Store and an entire weekend organizing mine?

She only ever uses natural cleaning products. What is this bleach doing in my house?

The pillows on her couch change every season? Pottery Barn here I come!

She serves her family clean organic gourmet 30-minute meals every night? Okay, double the grocery budget and send me to bon appetite!

And then I remember that I am not defined by the neatness of my pantry, the cleaning products on my shelf, the pillows on my couch (thank goodness because the children have spent 8 years jumping on them! Wait, maybe I am defined by those - I'm sensing some kind of metaphor here) or the average (sometimes processed) meals my family eats. I am defined by Jesus living in me and my desire to serve Him by serving the family He has blessed me with and equipped me to love and serve.

And now we'll move on to why I love Pinterest. It's so full of GREAT ideas. Except when it came time to find ideas for party favors for a charitable birthday party. You can imagine my disappointment. So I put on my thinking cap and came up with the following favor bags. (Once I determined what would be in the bags Pinterest did come through for me on design and how-to).

Each bag contained a utensil pocket {because we were feeding people},

a globe pencil sharpener {because the food is sent all around the world},

a pencil {to remind the kids of the good they did that morning},

and a tube of m&m's that, when emptied of the candy, can be filled with quarters and returned to FMSC to provide 63 meals.

I threw in a few other types of candy {no cake, remember?}

and packaged them up for the kids to take home with them after our time together at FMSC.

So was it a success? At the end of the day our kids felt celebrated, we spent time serving others with friends and family, 47 kids will eat for a year and we had a lot of fun. I say yes.