Simple Necessities

Our church started a food pantry back in January, and they have been distributing food once a month, as well as for emergency situations. Although we live in a county with one of the highest average incomes in the US, there are also a lot of people just barely scraping by. Our food pantry is definitely filling a need, and we all love to bring food in for it. Pretty much whenever we are out shopping, we try to spend about $10 and see how much we can get. We've found some amazing loss leaders, especially at Wegmans. Twice they have had bottles of laundry detergent for $1.99 a bottle! That is an amazing price, and we've bought 12 or 15 of them at a time for the food pantry.

Anyhow, we have wanted to serve in other ways, so when there was a meeting, I volunteered to help sort food for the shelves. The pantry is getting lots of donations from various local stores. Sorting and organizing is one of my loves--you just can't tell from my own house, LOL. I love to organize other people's stuff! So today Nathan, Luke, and I went over to the church in the afternoon to get oriented so we can just help whenever we have time and they have a need. It was a lot of fun! Bob was on leave today, which is happening more often than not lately, since he is trying to burn his "use or lose" leave before going on terminal leave and retiring. This meant I could take both older boys, which rarely happens! The plan is that every so often I'll go work for awhile, taking 1 of the boys along to help, and for me just to spend time with the boys one on one.

The pantry had gotten some boxes of stuff donated from Target, lots of toiletries, medicines, and vitamens/supplements. I was really excited to see some of this stuff--some basic important things like infant tylenol and children's allergy medicine, and also stuff like anti-smoking lozenges. I would think stopping smoking would be such a great step for someone in hard times, but what a difficult thing to try to do with no help! There were a ton of multivitamens, which I would also think would be such an important resource for someone without much money. It's definitely great if they can stay healthy! I had no idea stores gave this sort of thing to food pantries, and all we had to do was sort them and check the expiration dates on the cartons!

There were also some . . . less basic things, LOL. Like the eyelash curler. I am sure when someone has lost a job and is struggling, the first thing they think is, "Oh no! I don't have an eyelash curler!" Also, there were 2 "Mangroomers". For those not in the know and who are too lazy to click the link, these are "do-it-yourself electric back shavers". We were cracking up at those ones! Funny to see that there, along with the flour, spaghetti noodles, cereal, and canned goods! Well, just because someone has fallen on hard times doesn't mean their personal back grooming should have to fall by the wayside. There was also a refill bottle of butane(!). It said on the bottle that it was to refill your creme brulee torch. So if you are needy and are in the D.C. metro area, we can hook you up so that your creme brulee torch never has to go out! At least we can all stay civilized, even in hard times.