Give a Day, Get a Day

Disney is doing a special promotion where if you volunteer a day of service, then they'll give you a free ticket to one of their parks. Naturally, we signed up. We just completed our volunteer opportunity this Saturday. We went down to Fallbrook, which is about an hour from our house, to help a Lutheran church/school clean up their property.
It was a pretty good turn out. The parking lot was filled with people volunteering their time. It was such a good turn out, that the organizers didn't know if they would have enough work to keep everyone busy.

We got there right around 9 am and the sun was still hiding behind a thick cloud layer, making it a bit chilly. I wasn't thinking, so poor Rainer didn't have a jacket to put on. Robert took off his and gave it to Rainer to wear.
While we were waiting for the organizers to finalize everything so we could start, Mason and Robert had a rough and tumble session.

Had we been thinking, we would have had Robert bring his window cleaning supplies so that he could do their windows. He probably could have done the entire property in an hour, but unfortunately, that wasn't specifically mentioned in the list of things we would do and when we got there they didn't have a squeegee that he could use. So, the windows were done with Windex and a cloth. Amanda, Rainer and I headed up to the church and fellowship hall to start on the windows. Mason didn't want to help clean, so he and Robert headed over to where others were clearing brush to put in the wood chipper.

(here's Mason taking a small pile to the wood chipper, but he also took big logs and branches.)

By the time Amanda, Rainer and I were done with the inside windows, Robert and Mason came to help us with the outside windows.
Once the windows were done, we put away the tables and chairs in the fellowship hall and got ready to mop the floor.

Amanda

and Mason were very excited to do the mopping,

and even Rainer wasn't going to be left out of the fun.

While the floor was drying, we headed down to the pastor's house to do some weeding and whatnot. When we were done with that, we helped to cover the ground where we had weeded with the wood chips that were made that day.

(if you look closely between the trees, you'll see one of the piles of wood chips that were made that day)

One of Mason's favorite things that he did that day was to use the wheelbarrow to bring the wood chips up to where they were needed. The wheelbarrow full of wood chips was too heavy for Amanda to move, so she would take the empty wheelbarrow down to the pile and Mason would bring it up.

Our time commitment ended at 1 pm, but we stayed to help finish up the projects that were almost done. By the time we left, it was close to 2 pm, making it a very full and exhausting day. The kids had fun helping and it was a very enjoyable day. When we got home, we all kind of crashed and spent the rest of the day relaxing. The kids say that we had two Saturdays in a row because we cleaned our house and did laundry on Friday so that we could devote our time to this the next day. But it was well worth it.