An eagle or a penguin

When I graduated from Elementary school the principal gave a long speech about how each of us graduates should aim to be an eagle. He went on and on about how an eagle soars and uses it's wings majestically. He talked about the eyesight of an eagle and all of its incredible qualities. Then, to seal the deal he started to share with us another bird that never flies and in his mind is wasting its time and could do better. He talked about penguins. If I'm remembering correctly, and this was a while ago, he wanted each of us to know that we should not become like a penguin. Having wings and not flying. Of course, I understand what he was trying to say but something my mother said to me as we left will forever be what I got from the speech.

My mom, in all her wisdom, said, 'Penguins are amazing swimmers. They have wings for swimming.'

Just that simple sentence and I instantly knew that eagles and penguins are both majestic. They both are doing great things with what God has given them.

Why do I mention this? Well, we've spent a lot of time lately working on Clayton's eagle. I recently attended an Eagle advancement ceremony. I have no idea what the actual name of this event was but a couple boys were getting their Eagle. We watched a video at the ceremony. It went on and on and on about eagle's and their amazing abilities and how truly amazing they are. It was just amazing. Do you catch my sarcasm? I watched the vid and couldn't help but think about penguins.

Again, how does this correlate?

I guess, I'm just saying, I'm proud of Clayton and I'm proud of Eagle's, but I also think there's a ton of really wonderful ways to be wonderful.

Before I get any deeper I want to dump a few pics of Clayton's project and share what his community helped accomplish.

Clayton's goal was to collect 150 backpacks and enough school supplies to fill them. These backpacks would then be donated to low-income families in the Kenosha area.

The first few pics are of the supplies that started coming to our home. The supplies were donated by our neighborhood and members of the church. We also had a couple businesses make donations. I was completely amazed at the number of people so willing to help with this project. As I watched all of this come together it reminded me that there are MANY good people all around.

These are pics of us counting items. Each time something was dropped off we counted them and entered the data into a spreadsheet that Kjel created so we could keep track of what we had and what we still needed.

I loved the counting and tracking. I begged Clayton to delegate some of it to me. He of course was willing.

This is most of the stuff piled into our home. Initially, each morning I would walk down the stairs and just feel so much happiness for the donations from the community. At this point, when my living room looked like this all I could do was shield my face as I walked down the stairs. I just didn't want to see the amount of work we had ahead of us.

We moved all the items to the church so the Scouts and Young Women could help to stuff the backpacks. It took three trips in our van (with all but three seats removed) to get everything to the church. I didn't do much lifting because of the tenant I'm carrying. Clayton and Anthony hauled all of this. I was proud when I saw Clayton really dig in and lift some boxes that were much heavier than he normally would have attempted.

After we unloaded everything into the building. The next step was to sort the items and place them at the tables. We were blessed to have three people from the ward jump in and help that morning. I actually cried when they texted the night before and asked if they could come and help sort. My body and might were at a breaking point and just knowing that we'd have three more hands on deck eased my stress. What would have taken Clayton and his minions (our family) 4 or 5 hours only took us 2 hours. Having outsiders with us kept the group morale up and we were able to stay focused without me resorting to cuss words and empty threats.

Here are some of the helpers the night of the stuffing event. In a matter of one hour and 15 minutes the group took 248 empty backpacks and filled them with the necessary supplies for the start of the school year.

This is what all the backpacks in our garage looked like. The younger boys ended up the next morning building a fort out of the backpacks. I should have gotten a picture of it.

Saturday morning was delivery day. The boys loaded all the packs into our vehicles and we drove them to a homeless shelter in our area.

This is the view of the backpacks loaded up in our van. The seats you're looking at are the driver and passenger seats. 

 Here's the view from the back of the van.

 And they wouldn't all fit in our van so Kjel loaded some up in his trunk.

When we arrived at the homeless shelter we unloaded all the packs into their facility. Here are the backpacks sorted by grade. They start at 4K and go up through High School.

We spent the next few hours passing the backpacks out to families. Clayton was exhausted by the end of the morning. It's not so much that the job was difficult. It was more that he'd had a long week of moving and counting and sorting and checking and well.... everything else.

There are many wonderful moments that I'll remember from this project. One that I hope to never forget though is what happened on Monday. Monday morning we loaded all the extra supplies into our van and dropped them off at the homeless facility. Clayton and I made the trek and the boxes that we were dropping off were filled to the brim. There was really nothing that I could carry, or way for me to help. I had warned Clayton on the way that he was going to have to dig deep and find some strength inside of him to unload.

I should not have been worried. We pulled up to the shelter and a few men and women who were standing outside instantly asked if they could help. This group of people were wonderful. They helped Clayton with every single box and all the while were kind and pleasant. I think homeless people get a really bad reputation. As I spent time on Saturday working with these men and women and then again on Monday I grew a deeper love for God's children.

I think God loves all His children equally; the eagles and the penguins.