Happy Birthday Gabriel & a Book Drive Success

On Wednesday night we met at the LDS North Stake House for our book cleaning, labeling & categorizing event. The night went wonderfully! We had between 35 and 45 people who came to help. We took all 3 hours to complete all the books. We served Gabie’s cake after singing a very emotional Happy Birthday song. I couldn’t even get out more that the first Ha… David was just as bad as me. The cake was delicious we made a vanilla pound cake with layers of Raspberry Ganache. We made our own fondant and modeling chocolate and buttercream frosting to decorate it with.

At the end of the night we finished and tallied up our total number of books. I guessed over 2500 but really had no clue where we would end up. The end total was 2,750!!! We put together boxes for the hospitals already expecting books. 200 books for Portneuf Medical, 50 books for Bingham Memorial and they will hopefully be taking more, 300 book for Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center, 100 books for Preston Hospital & 100 books for Logan Hospital. The total delivered was 750! So yes we still have 2000 books to place. I will be in contact with American Fork Hospital, Utah Valley Regional Medical Center and Primary Children's Medical Center. I’m hoping to send the rest of our books to those hospitals. I will of course contact more hospitals if I need to.

Pictures from the Cleaning, Labeling & Categorizing Event:

Cleaning, Labeling & Categorizing VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

On Thursday we went to Portneuf Medical at 1:30 and delivered the books to them. While there we were interviewed by KPVI News Channel 6 and by The Idaho State Journal. We went to Blackfoot next to deliver books to Bingham Memorial. The day went by quickly and it was a great day. David and I were so happy to be doing this project on Gabriel’s birthday. At 9pm we watched the interview on fox and then again at 10 on NBC. We were so excited, I cried when it first came on because the first thing they showed were pictures of my sweet boy. Then we were the top story for the night. We were so excited and so proud to have our Gabriel on local news on his 3rd Birthday. We are so pleased to be able to honor Gabe this way and now even more people know about it.

Bingham Memorial Delivery

Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center Delivery by Gary & Colleen Saville..

HOLY BOOKS!!!

OK so I’m not complaining at all but we’ve got 2,409 books now. A really good friend of mine just had 200 new books donated by Portneuf District Library. I have so many more books than I ever expected. I’m so excited to be able to deliver books to so many children all over. It’s so exciting to have so much support.

TOMMOROW NIGHT DON’T FORGET OUR CLEANING, LABELING & CATEGORIZING EVENT.

6:00PM – 9:00PM

AT THE LDS NORTH STAKE HOUSE JUST NORTH OF CHUBBUCK ROAD ON HILINE RD.

WE WILL BE SERVING BIRTHDAY CAKE AND HOPEFULLY GETTING ALL THE BOOKS READY TO DELIVER.

IF YOU CAN, PLEASE BRING BLACK SHARPIES AND CLOROX OR LYSOL WIPES.

THANK YOU!

2000!!!

Today at church a lady brought me 5 new books. After I told her thank you and she sat down I realized those 5 books just completed out goal. Yay!!!! Now any more books we get are just above and beyond our goal and I'm so excited for all the great participation. Now Portnuef Medical only wants 200 books, Bingham Memorial wants only 50 and Eastern Idaho Medical Center wants 300. So we may need some help brining the other 1,450 books to Utah. I'm just not sure how many I can fit in my van. I'm still waiting to hear from my friend who said she'd contact a board member from American Fork Hospital and Utah Valley Medical Center about how many books they may want. I've also emailed the staff member over service projects at PCMC and am waiting to hear back from her. I may contact Riverton Hospital too since they have a PCMC wing. So hopefully all comes together this week. And I may contact Shiners as well. I'm thrilled with all the help we've received.

  THANK YOU!!

Almost There

So last week Katie and Madison told there classes all about the book drive. They told them about Gabriel and how we lost him and why we do the book drive. They are very brave and strong girls that I’m very proud of. Jenna told her class about it all today and she said she cried. What wonderful girls I have.

Katie decided to make a donation box to take to school and Madison told her class about the box that’d be outside of Katie’s classroom. Today they took the box and after school it was full of books. We counted 60 books that can be used. When getting books from elementary children there are always books that are not quite nice enough to use. But the generosity is still the same and we are still very thankful for those students who are so excited and eager to help in our book drive. Madison said one girl in her class had two grocery bags and her and her sisters backpacks full. Madison was sure to give this little girl a big hug and tell her thank you.

We also added to the tally another 17 books from Highland High School in Pocatello, Thank you Rams.

I’m still awaiting a box from Texas to update our tally and I’m meeting another generous mom this weekend to get books from so I know we still have more to add but we are only 257 books away from our goal. That is so exciting!!! There may be books that are unusable once we get to our cleaning event but we are still so extremely thankful for all the donations. I’m positive we’ll reach 2000.

Blackfoot Elementary Schools

I’m sending a big thank you to Stoddard, Stalker & Wapello Elementary students. I contacted Annie Tanner from Stoddard Elementary in Blackfoot because she helped us with the book drive last year. This year she contacted the representatives for Idaho Reads! VISTA at Stalker Elementary and also Wapello Elementary. There Shelia from Stalker and Tracy from Wapello set up collections for the book drive as well. Stoddard collected 241 books, Stalker collected 174 books & Wapello collected 148 books. On Wednesday we will meet in Pocatello and take a couple pictures for the the Blackfoot local paper, that wants to do a write up about the book drive. I’ll collect their donated books from these wonderful ladies, who have helped in this great cause. I want to thank all those students and parents from these 3 Blackfoot schools for their generosity and help. This is why we make sure Bingham Memorial in Blackfoot receives books from the book drive. This is for the benefit of the communities that help. When I get pictures I’ll update them on the blog.

Shelia Evans, Me, Annie Tanner & Tracy Folsom. We met and these wonderful ladies delivered 563 books on 1/25/12. When we met I found out that Shelia is Sonja Wright’s daughter, Sonja is Colleen’s (my mother in law) 1st cousin. Crazy small world.

Cheaper Keepers & Money Donations

Today David and I went out in search of affordable books to buy with the donated money for the book drive. We had $140 to work with and our first stop was a little store called Cheaper Keepers. This store was recommended to me by the manager of the store who is in our ward. She told us that they had lots of children's books, new and used at discounted prices.  When we got there we were surprised at how many books they had, and most were new. We started adding books to our cart and quickly had 51 books in our cart. We then went to check out and she told us that since we spent more than $20 we got and extra 20% off our sale and most of the books were already 10% off. Then she surprised us with 64 more new books that were all very nice hardcover books, the store wanted to donate to our book drive. Over all we walked out of Cheaper Keepers with 112 books and only spent $90. Only 11 of those books were used. Then we went to Costco and spent the other $50 on The Hunger Games series and all 5 books in The Wrinkle in Time series. So today we’re up 123 books and it’s all thanks to 3 generous people who donated money for the book drive and the store Cheaper Keepers in American Fork.

The picture below is all the new books we came home with today. I’m getting so excited for the book drive’s final delivery and I’m so thankful for all the great support we’ve received. I also learned from my sister in law that Primary Children’s Hospital can only accept new donations, so I’m planning on reserving several of our new books for them, assuming I get enough donations to spread the books over all the hospitals I want to go to first.

I also changed our book labels a little this year and added the Donate LIFE logo. We’ve had such an awesome experience having a member of our family be an organ donor, and have loved getting to know our donor recipient family. Organ Donation is definitely something we support.

Dry Creek Ward Young Women

My good friend Jennifer Tolman is the Young Women’s President of the LDS Dry Creek Ward in Lehi, and she came to me asking if her girls could help with our book drive for a service night at mutual. Of course I told her I’d love her help. Tonight was the night they had their service activity. They asked me to come and to tell our families story and about Gabriel. I told them about how we lost our boy and then why we do this book drive. I told them how much it means to our family and how much it means to the children in the hospitals who receive these donated books.  I took 260 books down for them to clean & label. Then they also brought 95 books to donate. It was a large group of young women and they did a wonderful job. They worked quickly and thoroughly. Several of them told me thank you for sharing our families story and for letting them take part. I was impressed with these young women’s desire to serve. I love the opportunity to share our story, even though it is difficult at time. I love to show people how we have grown from our trial and how we can bless others lives from the things we have learned through this trial.

I want to tell the young women and leaders of the Dry Creek ward thank you. Thank you for your desire and willingness to help. Thank you for participating and donating in a project that means so much to our family and many many others.

    

Cleaning, Labeling & Categorizing Donated books