Eagled!

I have been dreading this day for a LONG time! Not that the day in itself was bad, just the anticipation of it. Daniel has been working toward his Eagle Scout award and only has a couple of requirements left on his last merit badge. So the only major push was to get the service project done. The challenge is finding a project that wouldn't be too difficult, that "we" could do, and would be something that we could arrange. It's not that we don't want to do service, it's just the feeling that you HAVE to do it...and have it be meaningful. After talking to his scout master, he was a bit discouraged because he was told to write down all of his interests, and choose one to sculpt a project around that would interest him. That is like telling Daniel to start sucking the oceans dry with a straw. Those kinds of tasks are too overwhelming. My thought was, just choose something and get it done....fast, and with as little effort as possible. (A scout is efficient and frugal right? Maybe not the way scouts intended it to be, but it works for me.)

We encouraged him to email the principal of his elementary school down the street and see if she had any needs. He set up an appointment and met with her and she gave several suggestions. After hearing the suggestions, my thought was...do something inside where its cool! One of the suggestions was to help with a project they have in the library (or I think they are called "Media Centers" these days? What's up with that?) to decommission a couple thousand books that they will use in an upcoming book sale. They needed bar code stickers removed from each book and the elementary school stamp blacked out inside the front cover, on the title page, on page 51 and inside the back cover. (I guess they are really afraid someone is going to miss that its a school book from the "media center".)

That sounded pretty easy (and cool---as in temperature because we aren't generally known as "cool" people). So he got all of his required papers prepared and approved with signatures and we scheduled the project for this morning. He had about 15 friends/quorum members/scouts come and help. Two thousand books doesn't sound like a big deal until you see them spread out on multiple tables in the "media center". It took about 3.5 hours to go through all of them. The boys were very helpful and worked hard.



Our goal was to finish by noon (we started at 9 am) but we went over that a bit. We told them if we finished by noon, I'd buy pizza which I still did (even though I'm still a scout and a scout is "frugal") I think by the time we got to the last hundred books, they were pretty tired, and the pizza was a fun ending.



It was kind of fun to see some of the books being processed that I had remembered reading in elementary school: The Boxcar Children, Encyclopedia Brown, and a series with a boy named Henry and he was some kind of detective. (I can't think of the name right now.) (Side note: I've also tried to remember the name of a book that I read about a boy that uses a donut machine and it goes crazy and makes donuts go everywhere. Anybody remember the name of that one?)

Anyway, we are done and can check this off the list! Organizing the project is the hardest part and Daniel did an excellent job. He really took it seriously and even went as far as to make everyone listen to the "Chip & Tote" rules from the Scout manual for proper handling of knives (for those that were to cut off the bar codes with razor blades). The principal came up to me and told me that he was remarkably poised and confident as he met with her and she was very impressed with Dan. We are too!

P.S. Becky said the funniest part of the morning was when Daniel went to put his scout shirt on. He hasn't had to wear it for over two years and when he put it on, it was so small he could barely fit his shoulders in. (He's not a small boy anymore!) Fortunately, I had a scout shirt in my closet and he wore that instead.