Sunday, December 23, 2007

It's Almost Christmas!!

This past week went by so slow! I swear I am just like a kid when it comes to Christmas! I can't sleep on Christmas Eve, I count the days, hours, minutes until we can open presents and I have to restrain myself from peeking or shaking the gifts under the tree....

Despite all of that, I wanted to share this story with you that happened at my work...

My boss and I wanted to do something charitable for the holidays and decided to Adopt-a-Family for Christmas. I googled "adopt a family", and the first link I clicked on was the Cerebral Palsy Foundation. We were able to adopt a family of 5 with two teenage boys and one 28 month girl with Cerebral Palsy, that was sharing a one bedroom apartment and had no money for groceries let alone Christmas.

The Cerebral Palsy Foundation gave us a wish list that the parents put together. These selfless parents listed clothes and school supplies for their children and a set of movie tickets to take the whole family out. I sent out an email to everyone in our company 3 weeks before the deadline to bring the gifts. After 2 weeks had past we had only one item to give this family, a small fleece blanket. My manager and I decided to give everyone a little nudge, we made small pieces of paper, each with one item the family asked for. At the end of the second day every piece of paper was gone. On the final day of collecting items we had a huge outpouring of gifts for this small family. We had collected lots of toys, clothes, jackets, shoes, backpacks, school supplies, blankets, games, movie tickets, gift certificates, and grocery certificates, we were even able to provide the family with a fully decorated Christmas tree. The next day my manager and I delivered all of the gifts to the drop off location and our representative was over joyed and couldn't believe the amount of items that we collected for this family. It was really great seeing the look on Kai, our reps face, I can't even imagine the look on the family's faces on Christmas. We, as a company, are hoping to make this a tradition for years to come.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Okay here we are...

I know, I know, I know... I am such a crowd follower sometimes... So this morning I woke up and decided to check out a couple of my friends blogs and realized that a lot of people actually have these things, like my cousins and Alan and Jamie, so I decided to jump on the band wagon and create one for us as well... so here goes...

First off... Brian and I have been adjusting to a recent Stake boundary change so now we are in the Laguna Niguel 1st ward that meets at.....1:30PM!!! Ahh! I was really hoping for 9:30 AM because we have been meeting at 1:00 PM for the past year! Anyways... last week we got called to be the Nursery Leaders over the youngest class, all close to 18 months... Brian and I spent our first Sunday with the children that same day and boy was it an experience! The leaders didn't call it "birth control" for nothing! Needless to say it will be a very informative calling... After last weeks fiasco of trying to learn all 13+ kids names and trying to figure out what it is that we are supposed to do in there, we are trying to be optimistic about the whole thing and are looking forward to getting to know our class...we'll keep you posted...

Update on Brian- Brian just finished with all of his finals this last week and he couldn't be more relieved. He can finally take a break from school and try to enjoy the holidays... well after work anyways... He is working for ECOLAB and thankfully, he works during the day, so we have a similar work and sleeping schedule now, where as before he was working nights and I hardly ever saw him.

Update on Me- This past week I was sent for a crazy spin at work, I was in charge of planning our Holiday party that took place on Thursday, December 13. I had a ton of fun doing it! I found amazing centerpieces, we booked an amazing restaurant called Bistango, and we had an amazing menu! Everything was going AMAZING so we thought... At 12:00 PM on the day of our party, our restaurant called to confirm our party for FRIDAY! They over booked our restaurant so at the LAST minute we had to decide to move our party over to their "sister" restaurant, or change them date for the following day. We decided to move our party to a restaurant called Kimera that was around the corner from our original location, thankfully! When I got there to set up we ran into a huge problem! We had planned on having 8 huge round tables and what we ended up with was a ton of rectangle tables and booths, so we had to improvise with coordinating our huge centerpieces. All in all though we had a very successful party. Everyone that came was extremely impressed and the rest of the night went very smoothly... well for them... Brian and I ended up staying only half and hour because my parents bought tickets for The Rockettes on that very night, so we had to high tail it to the Orange County Performing Arts Center to run in seconds before the curtain closed. We had a great time at the show, we thought the synchronized dancing was pretty impressive. Unfortunately for us, when the show ended our night was still in full swing... I was getting recognized for a"Star of the Year" award (aka. Employee of the year) back at the party, so we rushed back just in time to see everyone leaving... I was really bummed but found out that they will be doing the recognition at our next company meeting because the restaurant was so loud.

I really want to keep this updated but I make no promises! Until next time....