Scouting for Food

Our family helped with Scouting for Food today! We had a lot of fun. But first, here's some background.

Scouting for Food takes place the first two weekends of November every year. The first Saturday, Scouts deliver notices to neighborhood residents, telling them about the food drive. The next weekend, the Scouts pick up food from porches and deliver it to the local food pantry. It's one of the most fun service projects - jumping in and out of cars, running up and down driveways, and often riding in the back of some leader's pick-up truck :) Often, our troop will split duties - Cubs will do it one week, Scouts the next.

Now, Lige is a member of the ASL troop (whose number is long and I can't ever remember), which meets combined with his old troop (Troop 47) for most activities. Next week is ASL temple day in Philadelphia, so it made sense to have the ASL kids do flyer distribution this week and the other kids do pick-up next week.

Only it was a tough week for our troop - there was a stake youth activity, someone was taking the SAT....so, like a lot of things when you're in a really spread-out and small group, it ended up just being Lige and his dad. This opened the door of opportunity to some of the younger Merrills, who always thought SFF sounded fun, but never got to participate. In fact, ALL of the younger Merrills got to participate :)

Since the big kids had to leave at 9 for the stake youth activity, we started at 7am. It rained all night, and at 6:30, it was pitch black and rainy still. We were nervous. But by 7, the rain had stopped and it was starting to get light enough to go out without scaring neighbors :) By 7:20, when Sam, Martha, Jane and I actually made it out the door for reals (Why doesn't Jane have shoes on yet? Sam - you need a sweater! I know it was hot yesterday, but it's cold now! Where are the flyers? etc....) it was a beautiful clear morning. Hooray for delay!

The big kids took the hilly areas toward the front of our neighborhood. The littles and I had 200 flyers and 4 long, flat streets to cover. I put Jane in the car, Sam on one side of the street, Martha on the other, and had them run down the street putting a flyer on each door (the flyers were giant post-it notes. Best thing ever.) I jumped out and opened fences and such as needed. I'd like to point out that Martha is only 3, and she did a fabulous job. By 8:45 we'd done 3/4 of our assignment (guessing from how many fliers we had left) but morale was sinking, so we went back to the house to send off the big kids and get some Halloween candy. As soon as the big kids were gone, Sam and Martha were ready to go again (to my great surprise!) Since we now had Lillian on our team, we decided to see if we could knock out some of the streets that the big kids hadn't been able to get yet. We took a bucket of Halloween candy with us. Marriner had switched cars with us, and since his car had no car seats, I let the kids ride au natural (I mean, not REALLY au natural...just car seat natural!) We were driving about 5 mph the whole time, so I didn't feel like it was terribly negligent of me :) Sam and Martha (ok, and Lillian too) enjoyed chances to ride in the (usually forbidden) front seat. You know, for the 100 yards at a time that we rode between streets! Ha!

So, equipped with our party car and a gorgeous day, we ran up and down streets for another 2 hours. This time Lillian took one side of the street and Sam and Martha teamed up on the other. If Lillian got done first (almost always) she'd loop back and work her way up the street. We always made our life easier by starting at the top and working downhill :) And when we finished a street, we ate Halloween candy while we drove to the next street. It was a great setup.

Probably the funniest part of the day to me was Martha freaking out over a cat on the porch. The most mellow cat I've ever seen in my life was probably pretty confused about why some little girl would scream like that at the sight of it! Now that I think of it, the owner of the cat was probably somewhat confused about why a 3yr old girl was screaming on her porch at 8am...

We finished at 11:00 on the dot - the kids had a well-deserved sense of pride at how fast they went. We finished every street in our neighborhood - 800 houses total. Sam, Martha and Lillian probably did half of them. We came home and looked up how far they'd run. Just going down the streets was 3.1 miles. Add in the up and down sidewalks and steps, and I'm sure Lillian topped 5 miles. But I really just feel so proud of little Martha, who ran her first 5K, including a LOT of stairs. She completed it in only 4 hours, with plentiful stops for riding in a car and eating Halloween candy. Why don't we all do 5K's that way??

My only regret of the day is that we sort of trashed Marriner's usually clean car. Jane entertained herself in the car by pulling giant post-it note flyers off and scattering them around. Martha at some point dumped out a box of pink nerds on the back seat to make it easier to share with Jane. Sam and Lillian climbed over the seats with their wet and dirty shoes liberally...but hey, when Marriner sees the carnage, he'll be reminded of his amazing kids and their great act of service to the community. So he'll think it's cute...right? Besides, I think the girls left him some nerds.