27 October 2017

Last week Mr. Brown took Nut Brown and Rose Pink up to Michigan to work at the Winter Clothing Distribution and I stayed home with Bobo and Rosebud.  We drove up to see my sister in Tallahassee, and went to the beach, and did a bunch of fun things together.  I really enjoyed the time off. :)  Mr. Brown and the older kids had a really good time back in Michigan, seeing old friends and working hard at one of our favorite projects.

A charity called "Feed the Children" set up a project downtown called "Orlando Cares For Puerto Rico", where they provided food and packing materials and volunteers packed individual meals to be sent to Puerto Rico.  It went on for weeks, and we went down several times to help them work towards their goal of 4.4 million meals.  The Sunday after Mr. Brown returned from Michigan turned out to be the last day, and so we decided to go work one more two-hour shift.  Well, we ended up staying five hours, until they called it at 9 pm.  They announced that we'd made our goal, but based on the numbers they'd been giving out previously, Mr. Brown and I think they were probably rounding up... but they would only have been short a few thousand, so close enough!

When we first arrived, we were assigned to a table with two guys who'd been there already for three hours.  They thought that we would be too slow, but we showed them in about five minutes that they were too slow for us!  After they left, we had a couple other people offer to jump in at our table, including a lady with family in Puerto Rico who had come to do what she could to help.  It was a pretty rocking night- lots of hard work and laughter and dancing and hundreds of meals packed.  One of the volunteers who was working on collecting the packed boxes told us that our table was the most productive of the night.  The Puerto Rican lady had not expected to work so hard - she commented a couple times at the beginning how fast we were - but I told her we knew there were hungry people waiting on this food and the more we packed, the better.  We had a really good time working together and felt like we got to share the love of God with our coworkers as well as with Puerto Rico.


The other coworker, who was named Emily, asked me randomly out of the blue if our kids were homeschooled.  I said, "Yes, how could you tell?" and she said, "Because they're so happy."