Doing Stuff

I have been absent for a while because I have been so busy doing 'stuff'. Ray says to me that I have had a year. Not so! I only did what had to be done. When it had to be done. Never before!

This last two months have shot by! We got through Court on May 16 and then I left on my Road Trip two days later. I was gone on that for nearly 3 weeks. From there I moved onto cleaning, organizing, and decluttering the house for a week. From there I moved to planning the girls' room, ordering, painting, painting, etc! Finally it was done. Then I had company visiting each week for the last three weeks.

Now we are into a season of the boys going to summer day camps for the month of July. Busy, busy!



I began our packing. I have a long list and have begun to conquer it. A trip to the pharmacy and a $100 later I have a little medical kit. Nix, scabies cream, antifungal creams, Immodium, Dimetapp, No Jet Lag, antibiotic ointments, eyedrops, ear drops. You name it, I got it! I HOPE I am covered!! LOL!!



I have one suitcase full of odds and ends and that is about it! I will not even think of packing for me and Ray until the last minute. It is all the 'stuff' that I have to be sure I have that takes time!

I have begun packing the donations. I went to a town near us the other day and had a blast filling a shopping cart to the top with school supplies! This dollar store is amazing in that everything is $1 and there are so many quality things and great brand names! I was able to buy decent 24 packs of crayons, flash cards, 10 packs of pencils, glue and so on. All for a $1! I must have gotten at least $400 worth of stuff. When I came home I took all the plastic wrappers off everything and very carefully packed it into one of our smaller suitcases. I jammed everything in there and then carefully balanced it on the scale. Forty pounds! Room to spare.




So I may end up juggling things around and putting some of the lighter things in a bigger suitcase and fill up the gaps with heavier things. Have to take advantage of every pound available to me! And boy, was it heavy! My dear husband told me this sounded like it was going to be worse travelling to Africa than it was travelling to Europe 16 years ago. Yup, he's right!! *laugh*


That trip was before I learned to travel light. By the time we came home the poor guy had arms like an ape!! He lugged these great big suitcases around before we had wheels on bags!!

Granola Bar Suitcase

I have packed this one suitcase with granola bars and baby sleepers. A store was selling sleepers for $2.50 per!! I will be going back for more. The granola bars are so when we visit the children at the Liga School we can give one to each child. There are 244 kids in that school. And many days they don't get anything to eat at all at home!

Then of course, we want to have a supply of granola bars to hand out to children on the street. Each box carries 32 bars, so we are looking at 8 boxes for the school, and then however many more for the street children. I can probably get 14 boxes in this one suitcase. It will be so worth it! I just wish I could take 20 suitcases! It is so wonderful to be able to go on this trip. I wish we could do more.

I was very happy to pop into our local quality toyshop this week and have the store owner tell me he wants to be involved in our donations trip to Africa. He asked me how many pounds a suitcase can be. I told him 50 lbs. So I am very excited!! He also asked the ages of the children that we would be helping in this school. They are grades 1-3. I can't wait to see what he is donating!

Our local paper heard about our trip and the editor talked to me. She said she will be calling me to do a story and a follow-up later. I have told her that we really don't want this article to be about us (having six boys making us an interesting story apparently! *grin*), but that we want to take advantage of the press exposure in the hopes of gathering donations to take with us. We shall see.

People are often not willing to send things to something far away. Or unfortunately people often think, "I can't afford to give much. I might as well not send any." But what they don't realize is that if everyone reading this blog donated simply $10 - that would buy SO MUCH food, or vitamins, over the counter pain relievers, antibiotic ointments, anti fungal creams etc!

So please do consider giving. Even if it is only $1. Each dollars adds to another. And it will all make a difference to children across the world!