Fundraising Extravanganza!

For those of you who don't know me, I am usually late. To everything except work. This is because I have unrealistic expectations of how long things take, and what can reasonably be accomplished in a defined amount of time. This is especially true since we bought our house (I will do a post one day of our house and the work we have done to it).   Conversations in our house usually go like this, "Okay, Daniel it is only 8:00, and we don't have to be at church until 9:30 today, so let's do the laundry, go grocery shopping, read for our class, and paint the exterior of our house." Okay, I exaggerate, but only a little.
    I call this being incredibly optimistic, and that I have great faith in the things my husband and I can accomplish as a team - this is a good thing! But it would appear two weekends ago, I was way too optimistic.
    As part of our fundraising, we are making meals for families (for more info, click the "How to Help" tab at the top of our other blog page). Normally, we planned to cook meals for families one week out of the month. When we have a few families requesting similar meals, it makes cooking easier and the profit margin larger.
   Hearing about our fundraising, my co-worker and friend Roilyn wanted to help.  She recommended we sell the food to our co-workers. Only problem with that was we had just done a few meals the weekend before, and school was almost out. I made the crazy decision to add another weekend of cooking this month, the same weekend that we would be busy all day Friday, Saturday, and half of Sunday.  I didn't think we would get too many orders, so I wasn't too worried.
   Thanks to Roilyn's amazing meal-selling skill, she sold over $600 worth of meals. I was so excited, and couldn't wait to tell Daniel. Daniel, the more reasonable one, was less enthusiastic. After adding up everything, we needed to make 100 servings of things (at that point, each meal came with a salad, and when you bought 3 meals you got a side, and when you bought 5 meals you got a dessert), and 25 different dishes. By Monday.
   So we went shopping at our normal 2 grocery stores, and Smart and Final. The first pic above is our kitchen right after we went shopping, the next our dining room table once we unpacked all of the food. 
It was about 2pm on Sunday we got started, and we didn't have our small group until 7pm that night at our house, so we got cooking!
(The next photo is Daniel using our wonderful biscuit cutters (Thanks, Grandma Judy!) for our biscuit recipe from the Schollers.) 

Not surprising, we did not finish by 7pm. Not even close. We actually finished at 5AM on Monday morning. Yup. And then got up at 6:30 to load up the meals in the car. Luckily, Daniel and I love cooking together, plus it is good practice for us to get no sleep before we become parents.

We documented the outcome (note-we are not food photographers, but I got GREAT feedback on the food, so don't judge us by the pictures).

In the end, it was quite a successful fundraiser, making over $400 dollars towards the adoption. Thanks to Roilyn, the Reeds, and my Rogers Family for ordering meals!

Read more at http://weleftourheartsindrc.blogspot.com/