Sorry that it has been a little while since I updated this. I spent last Wednesday through Saturday on Capital Hill house sitting. The cats were rather skittish and left me alone so that was nice. The house was located literally a block and a half from the National Capital. It was pretty cool. I spent Thursday with Alisha's family. Her aunt and uncle live in Silver Spring and her parents, another aunt, and a cousin were there. It was a nice dinner and after we played some games and went for a walk. They were very generous hosts and we had a good day. On Friday I went to a Nebraska bar with two friends of Keith who were staying at our house over the weekend to watch the Nebraska - Iowa game. I was the only one there not wearing red. It was fun to be in that atmosphere even though I wasn't really cheering for Nebraska. On Sunday Anne, Alisha, and I went to All Souls Church which is a Unitarian Church located near our house. We had heard that there was a big choir there which interested Anne and Alisha but we didn't see one. It was an interesting experience but I doubt we will be returning.
As of yesterday I am back at work after my 5 day weekend. It is hard to get back into the rhythm of things after that long of a break. Things are going well and I am really starting to look forward to Christmas break. I will be leaving for Iowa the evening of the 20th which seems like a long way off now even though that is less than a month.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
WOW
I am so impressed with the response to my request for help yesterday. The list of needed gifts for my school has been cut by more than half in only 24 hours. My coworkers wondered what had happened since these gifts were all purchased in such a short time frame. I feel very blessed to know so many generous people. I promise to take pictures of my students opening their gifts and I am sure I will have a fun story or two to go along with them. Thank you all so much!
Monday, November 19, 2012
Holiday Gifts
So I have been asked to share some information with my contacts here. Only thing is I don't really know too many people in DC so I am reaching out to all of you. I think that my supervisor worded it well so I have simply copied the e-mail from him below. I know that many of you already have organizations you donate to regularly but perhaps you could share this at your places of work or cash in some of those coins floating around in your couch and sponsor one kid. Anything helps!
Hello friends, I hope this email finds you getting your weekend off to a great start!
I'm reaching out to connect two groups of people that really matter to me: my friends (and their networks!) and family, and the youth of our programs in Washington, DC. This is a long email, but please give it a full read when you can. It's all very pertinent and important information!
Our organization, Kid Power, works with kids in under-served areas of the District, providing them a variety of opportunities in an afterschool (and summer) setting. Our students have built and maintain award winning gardens, raised hundreds of dollars for victims of Hurricane Sandy, improve their academics through tutoring, and explore their passions - from yoga to handball to poetry to zumba! Simply put, they are amazing.
Unfortunately, the holidays can be a rough time for many of our kids. That's why each year we work hard to organize a gift drive which provides our youth with an opportunity to have a happy holiday. We're pushing through our list and getting a lot of incredibly thoughtful donations. But there are still a lot of middle school students' wishes that need to be filled!
Here's where you wonderful people can factor in.
If you would like to buy a gift for one of our students, or spread the word in your office, both the students and I would be eternally grateful. Each kid has put together a wish list, with items maxing out at $25. We've compiled these into Amazon wish lists by school site. If interested, please read below. For the office folk if you wouldn't mind passing along these directions, that would be great!
Directions for buying off the Kid Power "Wishlist"Phew, you've made it this far. You're doing great so far.
1) Put on your Santa hat, and visit www.amazon.com
2) On the right hand side of the site, you'll see a tab that says "Wish List." Scroll over it, and when the dropdown menu appears, click "Find a Wishlist or Registry"
3) On the right hand search field, type in "Kid Power"
4) We should be the first one on the list. You'll see our "Kid Power, Inc" logo in purple type, and three Public Lists: Cesar Chavez Prep, Prospect, Fort Davis Rec Center
5) Either click "Kid Power" or one of the schools.
6) Scroll away, enjoy some of the quirky things our kids have requested, and select whichever item you'd like to buy by clicking "add to cart."
From here, most people should be able to figure it out, but since my parents are on this list.....7) When you add it to your cart, it will show a quantity of "one" for the item. It works like a wedding registry, so if you buy a gift that multiple kids have requested, it will just knock down the total. Feel free, of course, to buy more if you're in the spirit.
8) When checking out, which you do in your cart, it should allow you to select Kid Power's address. If not, for some reason, here is our shipping address (we get the presents, wrap them and then deliver to site the next week):
Kid Power, Inc.
755 8th St. NW
Washington, DC 20001
And our phone # is 202-383-4543
Please order gifts by 11/30 so we can get them to our kids on time!
9) Lastly, if you could email me to let me know whether or not you're interested, it would really help in figuring out how many more people I should contact to try and finish the list. Also, if you'd like an donation form for tax reasons, let me know.
10) Pat yourself on the back, that was quite a long set of directions. Wait for your Thank You card and stories of joy that I'll share with you!
Thank you so SO much for your time reading this ridiculously long email. I hope that you can help out our youth this holiday season. And if not, no worries, maybe you can convince someone else to! I am extremely grateful for your thoughtfulness!
Best,
Patrick
Hello friends, I hope this email finds you getting your weekend off to a great start!
I'm reaching out to connect two groups of people that really matter to me: my friends (and their networks!) and family, and the youth of our programs in Washington, DC. This is a long email, but please give it a full read when you can. It's all very pertinent and important information!
Our organization, Kid Power, works with kids in under-served areas of the District, providing them a variety of opportunities in an afterschool (and summer) setting. Our students have built and maintain award winning gardens, raised hundreds of dollars for victims of Hurricane Sandy, improve their academics through tutoring, and explore their passions - from yoga to handball to poetry to zumba! Simply put, they are amazing.
Unfortunately, the holidays can be a rough time for many of our kids. That's why each year we work hard to organize a gift drive which provides our youth with an opportunity to have a happy holiday. We're pushing through our list and getting a lot of incredibly thoughtful donations. But there are still a lot of middle school students' wishes that need to be filled!
Here's where you wonderful people can factor in.
If you would like to buy a gift for one of our students, or spread the word in your office, both the students and I would be eternally grateful. Each kid has put together a wish list, with items maxing out at $25. We've compiled these into Amazon wish lists by school site. If interested, please read below. For the office folk if you wouldn't mind passing along these directions, that would be great!
Directions for buying off the Kid Power "Wishlist"Phew, you've made it this far. You're doing great so far.
1) Put on your Santa hat, and visit www.amazon.com
2) On the right hand side of the site, you'll see a tab that says "Wish List." Scroll over it, and when the dropdown menu appears, click "Find a Wishlist or Registry"
3) On the right hand search field, type in "Kid Power"
4) We should be the first one on the list. You'll see our "Kid Power, Inc" logo in purple type, and three Public Lists: Cesar Chavez Prep, Prospect, Fort Davis Rec Center
5) Either click "Kid Power" or one of the schools.
6) Scroll away, enjoy some of the quirky things our kids have requested, and select whichever item you'd like to buy by clicking "add to cart."
From here, most people should be able to figure it out, but since my parents are on this list.....7) When you add it to your cart, it will show a quantity of "one" for the item. It works like a wedding registry, so if you buy a gift that multiple kids have requested, it will just knock down the total. Feel free, of course, to buy more if you're in the spirit.
8) When checking out, which you do in your cart, it should allow you to select Kid Power's address. If not, for some reason, here is our shipping address (we get the presents, wrap them and then deliver to site the next week):
Kid Power, Inc.
755 8th St. NW
Washington, DC 20001
And our phone # is 202-383-4543
Please order gifts by 11/30 so we can get them to our kids on time!
9) Lastly, if you could email me to let me know whether or not you're interested, it would really help in figuring out how many more people I should contact to try and finish the list. Also, if you'd like an donation form for tax reasons, let me know.
10) Pat yourself on the back, that was quite a long set of directions. Wait for your Thank You card and stories of joy that I'll share with you!
Thank you so SO much for your time reading this ridiculously long email. I hope that you can help out our youth this holiday season. And if not, no worries, maybe you can convince someone else to! I am extremely grateful for your thoughtfulness!
Best,
Patrick
Thursday, November 15, 2012
This week has once again flown by in a flurry of activity. I had Monday off for the holiday so I was able to get some stuff at the house done like cleaning my room and putting away laundry. On Tuesday my after school program invited parents to come and harvest from our gardens. It is starting to get cold so we needed to pick everything to prepare for the winter. After Thanksgiving we will be planting some cover crops to keep our soil nutrients through the winter. Getting ready for the parents to come was a big project because we also had cookies and cider and had the students share some poems with their parents. It all went really well and was a lot of fun. The kids had some awesome poems. It is getting harder and harder to keep kids engaged during our program because it gets dark so early now we can't go to the park all the time like we had been doing. Yesterday was pretty straight forward and the students were pretty well behaved. Today we have Zumba at site which I am excited about. There are about 4 kids who really like it and are a lot of fun to watch. I can't wait until I am out of this walking cast so that I can participate in it.
Cara's supervisor was looking for someone to house-sit for her during Thanksgiving break and I have volunteered. She needs someone there because she has cats which need to be fed. I am not crazy about the cats but it will be nice to have a bit of a break from the house. Tomorrow Cara and I are going to go by her house to see what needs to be done while she is gone. I guess I'll know more about what I am getting myself into then.
Cara's supervisor was looking for someone to house-sit for her during Thanksgiving break and I have volunteered. She needs someone there because she has cats which need to be fed. I am not crazy about the cats but it will be nice to have a bit of a break from the house. Tomorrow Cara and I are going to go by her house to see what needs to be done while she is gone. I guess I'll know more about what I am getting myself into then.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
the National Zoo
So today we all decided to check out the zoo. It was a warm and sunny fall day so it was great walking around outside. We saw the most of the animals, but some were inside. We had fun but were very hungry by the time we left. We went down to U street and picked up some thai food we had ordered online with a livingsocial discount. It seemed to take forever to get there and back to our house so that we could finally eat. Now we are watching The Lion King since we had been talking about it and other disney films.
And here is a picture of our Halloween costumes. We went as "Thrift Store Shoppers"
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Just more of the same old, same old here. I decided to try cooking with my students yesterday during after school. It went surprisingly well and considering they were using knives and cooking over a hotplate it could have gone horribly wrong. We made Kale and White Bean Soup. It took a lot longer than I had planned so I ended up staying late to finish cooking the soup and then put it in the fridge. Today I will get there early so that I can heat it up and the students can have the soup as their snack. I hope they like it because we have a lot of it and I don't want to have to carry it all home.
Speaking of work I have been feeling a lot like Santa today. During the holidays Kid Power has a party at each site and they give a gift to each of our students because a lot of them are from economically struggling families. I have been putting together amazon wish lists for students at the various schools based on their expressed interests. This is going to be a very stressful month ahead at work since we are going to be working to get people to donate these gifts as well as planning parties at the schools where we will hand them out. I am sure it will be very rewarding in the end. I am also one of the two people responsible for getting wrapping paper and bows donated so that we can give the students wrapped presents. I am really looking forward to our wrapping party. We are going to have cookies and hot chocolate and play a lot of Christmas music while we all form an assembly line to get hundreds of gifts wrapped. It will be a little Santa's Workshop!
I know that a lot of you reading this already have organizations you donate to but if you are interested in donating gifts to our after school students you can find the list of requested gifts on amazon.com. When you get there on the top right of the screen there will be a tab that says Wish List. On that drop list click on find a wish list or registry and then type in Kid Power. We have a number of wish lists (one for each of our sites). My school is Cesar Chavez Prep if you want to purchase gifts for my students. We need these to be purchased by the end of November so that there is time for them to be shipped to us and wrapped before the holiday party. I promise to take many picture of the party and students opening their gifts which I will post on here.
Speaking of work I have been feeling a lot like Santa today. During the holidays Kid Power has a party at each site and they give a gift to each of our students because a lot of them are from economically struggling families. I have been putting together amazon wish lists for students at the various schools based on their expressed interests. This is going to be a very stressful month ahead at work since we are going to be working to get people to donate these gifts as well as planning parties at the schools where we will hand them out. I am sure it will be very rewarding in the end. I am also one of the two people responsible for getting wrapping paper and bows donated so that we can give the students wrapped presents. I am really looking forward to our wrapping party. We are going to have cookies and hot chocolate and play a lot of Christmas music while we all form an assembly line to get hundreds of gifts wrapped. It will be a little Santa's Workshop!
I know that a lot of you reading this already have organizations you donate to but if you are interested in donating gifts to our after school students you can find the list of requested gifts on amazon.com. When you get there on the top right of the screen there will be a tab that says Wish List. On that drop list click on find a wish list or registry and then type in Kid Power. We have a number of wish lists (one for each of our sites). My school is Cesar Chavez Prep if you want to purchase gifts for my students. We need these to be purchased by the end of November so that there is time for them to be shipped to us and wrapped before the holiday party. I promise to take many picture of the party and students opening their gifts which I will post on here.
Monday, November 5, 2012
Work
So another week of work has begun and this time it will be a full week. No more days off due to weather on the horizon. I am feeling tired and sluggish but need to shake that before I get to the school this afternoon. Today we are going to be talking about reducing our energy consumption, begin talking about Thanksgiving poetry, and then work in the garden or on some art things. This is going to be a very busy two hours especially since the students spend the first half hour on homework. I am afraid that the kids are going to be going a bit nuts and we will end up spending a lot of time with me waiting on them to stop talking to one another because they didn't have school on Friday and they don't have school tomorrow. Long weekends never make for a smooth transition back to learning and the thought that they will have tomorrow off wont help. But I have been surprised before so perhaps today will be one of those. They have these days off because it is the end of a grading period and tomorrow are parent teacher conferences. I enjoy working with these kids and like my job but at times it can be exhausting and difficult.
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Halloween
On Wednesday we had a lot of trick-or-treaters stop by. It didn't take us long to run out of candy. I suppose we could have run back to Target for more candy but none of us had much money to spend on candy in the first place. Work this week was a bit crazy because of the canceled schools and on Thursday my students had an early out. I am looking forward to things returning to normal. The weather here is a lot colder since Sandy passed through. (Our house has turned on the heat) Corey has been kind enough to loan me his space heater as well. My room seems really drafty and cold since I have two north facing windows. I have spent today working on getting some paperwork done (loan differment and americorp stuff) and watching Netflix. Some of the house went down to the Mall to see some museums but I felt like I needed to get on that stuff and it just didn't sound like fun to wander in the cold. I realize that what I am calling cold (low 50's) most of you reading this would consider a nice crisp day. Well here in DC it went from low 80's to the low 50's in a span of about 2 or 3 days so I am still adjusting. Over all Sandy didn't do too much in the DC area. There were some areas that had power outtages but I think those have all been taken care of and other than smaller or dead limbs trees are in tact for the most part.
My foot has been doing well. I wear the boot (walking cast) during the day and take it off at night. My legs look like the belong to two different people from the knee down which is kind of freaky. My right leg has been getting stronger while my left leg, because of the boot, has been getting weaker. I feel like by the time I get out of this boot when I try to run I will just go in circles. Well I think that there may be another round of board game playing occuring soon so I have to run.
My foot has been doing well. I wear the boot (walking cast) during the day and take it off at night. My legs look like the belong to two different people from the knee down which is kind of freaky. My right leg has been getting stronger while my left leg, because of the boot, has been getting weaker. I feel like by the time I get out of this boot when I try to run I will just go in circles. Well I think that there may be another round of board game playing occuring soon so I have to run.