Bear Hugs

Last Saturday I took my munchkins to Build a Bear at the Fashion Square Mall to help stuff bears for kids at Phoenix Children's Hospital (if you missed it, see my original post about this here). We got to meet Jacob, the 10-year-old who put this whole thing together, and he told us there would be over 100 bears stuffed that day. On top of that, his most recent fundraiser was so successful, he's raised enough money to have a second session. Saturday, October 25 at 2:30 pm they'll be stuffing over 70 more! Woo hoo! Contact Jacob if you want to help: jacobagoldfeld@resourcesforhealth.org

This is what we did. First we received a story/tag to fill out with our names.

(Sorry about the bad picture - but I'm too lazy to retype this. It's a cute story.)

Then we stood in a long line of people waiting to stuff bears:

While waiting, we rubbed the hearts that would be going into the bears, to make them warm.

(They got plenty of kisses too.)

Then we stuffed the bears:

Took them to get stitched up:

And gave them a "bath" and brushed their fur so they'd be nice and fluffy for their future owners.

Then Jacob's helpers attached the story to the bear with a ribbon.

(As an aside, we got to choose which color ribbon we wanted. See the colors, blue, orange, yellow, and red? Guess which one I chose. Go ahead guess. Red? No. The word that came out of my mouth was "yellow." I watched the girl grab the yellow ribbon and I thought to myself, "Yellow? What the?" I almost changed it to red, but then I realized I really wanted it to be yellow. Go figure.)

Chris gave his bear an extra hug and extra love for the little child who'd be holding it after him:

Then we turned in our bears to the young man behind the counter, who looked absolutely overwhelmed by all those boxes of donated teddy bears. To me, it was the best thing I saw all day:

I'll be honest, this did not feed the desire to do good that Three Cups of Tea inspired in me. I still feel like I want to do something. I want to do something that will make a difference, and that will not get done if I don't do it. Those bears would have been stuffed and delivered whether we showed up or not.

However, I'm really glad we went. I'm glad my children spent part of their Saturday doing something for someone else. I think this was a good learning experience for my kids; a good start. I hope we remember to look for ways to serve, and I hope this helps nurture a sense of compassion and responsibility in my children's hearts.

P.S. The answer to the Name That Foot post is forthcoming.

P.P.S. John McCain smoked in tonight's presidential debate! Even the commentators couldn't deny it afterward, though they did their best to downplay it. I'm very concerned about who our next president will be. When America is relatively healthy and strong, she can survive a bad president. But America is on dangerously unstable ground right now - we NEED McCain to win.