Fundraisers

As any parent will know, your children are always watching you and picking up things from your behavior (for better or for worse).  Because of this, you always need to be on your toes to ensure that your children are picking up the right values.  Sometimes you get lucky though and can show these values through your normal actions.  This happened a few weeks ago when we attended back-to-back fundraisers, with my daughters learning the values of helping support others.

As you probably know from my previous post on Live Action Roleplaying (LARPing), even when it leads to me doing something that I do not particularly want to do, I always support my friends.  As long as it is legal, if invited, I will show up to support a friend or their organization.  This week was great because two of my friends invited me to two separate fundraisers.  Surprisingly, both of my daughters had a stake in these too, as they would later find out.

The first event was a spaghetti dinner hosted by Calvary Rock Church at Landmark Cafe in Sierra Vista.  My boss’ Executive Assistant attends the church and invited my girls and I to the event.  And since Elaina loves spaghetti and meatballs, she was pretty excited to go; needless to say, Gabriella was less than enthusiastic.

After paying and sitting down, we got in line for the buffet.  Gabriella said “Yuck!” at the spaghetti, then the salad, but piled up on breadsticks.  She then proceeded to nibble at them for an hour while playing at the table.

Elaina, on the other hand, just lapped up her meal (without any spaghetti sauce, because they did not have meatballs).

Pretty sure it was her seeing the dessert table that made her wolf down her food.

After finishing their food (spaghetti for Elaina and several breadsticks for Gabriella), the girls moseyed on over to the dessert table for their reward.

Of course, the girls loved their desserts, and thus remembered the fundraiser fondly.

I appreciated Theresa (two pictures above with red hair and glasses) for inviting us to her church’s fundraiser.  Always great to support a local cause and even better to support one of your friends.

The second fundraiser of the week was at Julie & Sammy’s 33 Flavors ice cream parlor and it was to support Colonel Johnston Elementary School.  We were invited by our friends in their Parent Teacher Organization, and since this is where Elaina attends Kindergarten, you could be sure that we were going to attend.  The girls especially enjoyed this event because they got to eat dessert before dinner.  Even if they got a little messy doing it.

The point of this post is that you can be a good parent, role model, friend, and local citizen at the same time.  We do not attend Calvary Rock Church, but Theresa does, so we were more than happy to support an organization that she is a part of and that is a positive impact in our community.  And since we got ice cream while supporting Elaina’s school at a local business, it was a triple win.  It takes a little more effort than our weekly drop-offs at Goodwill, but it seemed like it made my girls and our friends very happy.

Thanks for checking in on us.

Cheers!