It feels good to give

As I have mentioned in the previous post, we decided to collect items for the Ronald McDonald House in lieu of gifts for Brady’s 3rd birthday party.

 

How did we come to this decision?

1. The girls have more toys then we can fit in this huge house.

 

2. She invited about 25 kids to her party and no kid needs that many gifts. We also knew our family would still be giving gifts so she would still have the joy of a small amount of gifts.

 

3. The Ronald McDonald House (RMH) is in the process of building a new house here in Pensacola. Their current house is 9 rooms, the new house due to finish in 2 months, will be 26 rooms. They will not be increasing their paid staff. They need our help and we believe this charity is awesome and worthy of it.

 

4. Lastly, life lessons are learned all through life. We believed Brady was ready to process/understand what we were doing.

 

Since Brady is still young we had to make sure we talked about the situation several times so she would understand. We have been to several birthday parties lately, and when people showed up with bags in  hand, we wanted to make sure she knew that it would be for the RMH. We drive by the construction site for the new 26 room house about once a week so we would start causal conversations about how families would stay at that house (which she calls the “Old McDonald House”) because there are sick kids that have to stay at the doctors. She would always be intrigued and ask more questions, like “The kids are sick, and they can’t stay with their mommies and daddies?” etc.



But to really help make the concept tangible, a few days before her birthday party we went on a tour of current RMH. Brady loved the playroom because they had a dollhouse just like hers. We also got to look through scrapbooks to see ‘real faces’.



I personally loved the hamburger chairs!



But the thing that stuck with me the most was how much money they bring in each month from the soda can pop tops. Our local chapter gets around $1000 a month!!!! I always heard that it takes so many to even earn a dollar that it isn’t worth your time. But, I have collected every pop top since that day, you can even collect ones off of canned goods! Here is the pile the local house collected from the contest among the local schools.



Brady wanted to go back and play in the toy room but that was the perfect teachable moment.

 

So Brady had a great turn on her birthday and collected a lot of items:



You can’t see it well in the picture but there is also 4 gift cards valued $10-$30 each. She also received two more batches after the picture was taken!

 

So this last Saturday we loaded up everything into bags to drop off at RMH as a family.



Brady was very proud to be bringing all the items to the house. She was not shy at all to the volunteer and happily explained everything to her and answered all the questions. We are very proud for her sense of giving at such a young age!