Bethany made a thank you Smilebox to send to the friends who came to her birthday party on the 11th and I'm posting it here. We did something a little different this year. In the past, and for Anna and Katherine's party this year, we have asked for food shelf donations in lieu of gifts. The girls always want to invite lots of little friends to their parties and I'm all for that. I'm just not interested in THAT many new toys entering our house. We have enough stuff already. So, I told the girls that they can have a small party and invite just a few friends who can bring them gifts, or they can have a huge party and their friends will bring something for someone else, i.e. a food shelf donation. A friend from church put me onto the website CheerfulGivers.org. You can read the founder's story here: http://www.cheerfulgivers.org/about/founders-story/. (For some reason my links aren't going live so maybe you can copy this into your browser if you are interested...) They encourage school groups, businesses and families to host Birthday Bag parties where everyone attending the party brings items to put into birthday bags to be delivered to the local food shelf. Then, instead of parents searching frantically for a certain box of food to give their child on their birthday, they can choose one of the birthday bags. I was hooked on the idea instantly and Bethany got really excited about it, too. We had 19 kids at the party (including my four) and together they brought enough stuff to fill 24 bags! The White Bear Food Shelf was thrilled and so were the kids. It was a really fun and rewarding experience for everyone. Plus, we had coconut bowling and hula dancing - who can ask for more?

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