You don't have to be big.

It was a dark and stormy night....

Not actually stormy. But really dark!

It seemed like a great idea to do service raking an elderly gentleman's leaves in November. The weather is usually crisp and pleasant, and the leaves are usually about done falling. The kids are usually ready to get outside and so something active. Bingo!

I just forgot about Daylight Savings Time...or, the lack thereof. So when we showed up at 7pm to rake leaves, it was pitch dark outside. It was also unseasonably cold, a whoppin' 30*F. Yeah, it never gets that cold here in November.

But we're not wimps. Oh, no. We put on our headlamps and went out to save the world from messy yards! I think Mr. Stan (our benefactor) was a little confused about why we wanted to come rake leaves in the dark instead of a nice Saturday morning. We didn't really have a good answer to that one... :)

I'll say, these kids are fabulous leaf rakers. They raked all those leaves in about 45 minutes.

After we were done, we sang a Christmas carol to Mr. Stan, then went and had hot chocolate. We decided it would be fun to get to know Mr. Stan better, and voted to go back after the new year to listen to stories. It sounds like he has some interesting ones!

On the way home, all the kids were full of excitement about our service, and getting to go back and listen to stories next time! I realized that it didn't matter that there were only a few kids. We have a good group of kids that support each other, and we can do a lot of neat things that bigger groups can't do. People ask me pretty frequently if we still do activities with our old ward so our kids can have a bigger group to do things with. When we were called to the branch, we made the decision to move 100%. We weren't going to have one foot in the branch and one foot back in our old ward. Do I feel like my kids have missed out on experiences or opportunities? Nope.

So hooray for my fabulous little group of Activity Days kids. I can't wait to go back and listen to stories, too.