Volunteering at the Christmas Party

I am just using this picture until the person who has the actual picture I want has time to upload it onto her computer.

As of recently I was accepted into National Honor Society which means I now much start my expedition to obtain 6 hours of community service. I thought that was a very small requirement but I guess the less the better. Today I got about 4 and ½ hours by volunteering at AEGON for the children’s Christmas party. I volunteered at it last year because my dad works at AEGON so I guess you could say I would have done it regardless of the fact that I needed volunteer hours. My friend Susie (name has been changed to protect her identity) and her brother did it with me so that also made it a bit more fun.

I had to arrive at AEGON around 11:30 today because they served us pizza. I’m not going to lie, half the reason I did this volunteer project was for the free pizza. After that we were assigned our areas we would be working at for the day. Susie, her brother, and I worked at the Reindeer Ring Toss. We made Susie’s brother do most the work will we sat and handed out the prizes. It was pretty fun for the first half, but it got annoying when the children could not decide what prize they wanted. Most of them treated their choice as one of the biggest decisions of their lives. Despite how annoying their slowness became, after a while the party died down because most of the kids went home. During this time period Susie and I ate about 10 cookies each due to our boredom.

At one point a cute little family came through the line to play the game with their kids. They were a Chinese family and it was so cute because they were speaking Chinese to their kids and then their kids would speak English to us. It reminded me the amount of difficulty I have learning Spanish and only depressed me because I realized a 5 year old Chinese girl picked up English faster than I could pick up Spanish. I am not saying this in a racist sort of way I just want to point out my sorry attempt at learning a second language seems inferior to what this girl has done at the mere age of 5.

Thankfully, at 4 o’clock the party ended. As much fun as I had had playing with the prizes I was glad to be done. We still had to clean up but that didn’t take more than 30 minutes. Before cleaning up though, Susie and I went to go sit on Santa’s lap. It is a tradition for us (a fairly recent one) to go and sit on Santa’s lap after we are done volunteering. We have a picture of it, which I will be able to post to this blog once I get it put on the computer.