We Finally Did it: Christmas Project Complete

Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while will recall our Family Christmas Project, and how it kind of got sidelined with the death of the kids' grandad in December.

The kids did chores and made Christmas cards to sell (among other things) and managed to make a total of $392 for Watoto's Baby Rescue Centre in Uganda.

It has taken until now to finally gather up all the funds we raised and pay a visit to Tear Fund to hand it over. We did it today!

I was super motivated to get it done this week because Grandma is arriving from the UK on Tuesday and she bought lots of our Christmas cards, so she would likely be shocked to know we hadn't given Watoto the money yet.



So today was the day; I rang Tear Fund up to let them know we would be coming in and to remind them about our project. they probably thought we had fallen off the planet!

In my visions of warm fuzzy touching scenes where the children see the fruits of their labour, and get rewarded with "Wow, you kids did all that??" I forgot about a little thing called checking where the office is. Because I thought I knew! We drive past there most weeks, our neighbour works there. Who needs to check???

Ha, well, you guessed it - they'd moved. The street signage was removed, which meant I drove past where it used to be without recognising, turned around on the very busy road, doubled back and saw... the empty office building!!

I could see this warm fuzzy moment rapidly deteriorating into major stress. Eventually I found someone who knew where they had moved to (just up the road), so I turned around again, and drove slowly, looking for the right street number... which wasn't there. So I had to turn around again - across busy traffic.

I had now driven past them three times.

Ahh, just once more for good luck?? Yep, had to reverse (did I mention busy traffic??) and still couldn't see the street number or driveway. What the heck; I parked up in the first carpark spot I could find and decided to leg it. They had to be here somewhere!

Oh, meanwhile in the background Dash was annoyingly changing radio stations and Miss Fab was wailing that her hair-tie was too big and wouldn't go in her hair properly; Scrag was also starting to whinge because - you guessed it - he hadn't had an afternoon sleep!

But this tale of woe and frustration has a happy ending. We got out, we used our legs, we found some helpful road-workers who told us Tear Fund were indeed down this long driveway past the earth moving machinery at the end of a new office block that still looked like a building site.

Glad I persevered. The Tear Fund staff were lovely; they had a special card and certificate ready for the kids. We handed over the money, gave them the card Miss Fab had made with photos of our project in it and exited stage left, with no more drama.

I rewarded us with a trip to the Mall for some icecream - a warm fuzzy moment after all.

Especially when Miss Fab said: "Mum I sure am glad we did all that work to help the poor children!"


Here's a little clip I put together which shows our Christmas Project journey...

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