530 pieces and 171,408 reasons

Good morning! Well, yesterday was about two major feats. The first began earlier in the weekend. You see, along with committing ourselves to the neuroblastoma walk there was another item that we committed ourselves to over the weekend. This was Sydney's science project on the solar system. Thankfully, Sydney drew the earth as her planet of responsibility. This meant that we had to construct a 3d model of the earth and a poster of fun earth facts. By the end, Sydney was left a little loony. Here is a picture of her talking to inanimate objects.

Knowing that everyone would probably paint a Styrofoam ball, Lynley set out to be different. She charged Sydney and I with constructing a 3d puzzle of the earth. Thankfully she was thoughtful and it only required us putting together 530 pieces. Now I am making this sound harder than it actually was. You might even be surprised to find out that Sydney identified each piece to be added to the puzzle and put just about every single piece together. You see each piece was numbered on the back from 1 to 530. This made it much easier but it is also what made the puzzle such a great exercise for Sydney. We divided all of the pieces into groups of 50. So we had a pile which included pieces numbered 1-50, 51-100, 101-150, etc. She then sorted all of those pieces, put them in order, and snapped them together. It was then my job to take the strips of puzzle pieces and create the 3D masterpiece. After many cave ins and rebuilds we finally delivered the earth to school yesterday morning. It was the hit of the class and something I am very glad that Sydney and I got to spend a large portion of the weekend working together on.

Yesterday was a very special day for another reason as well. After dropping off the kiddos and making my delivery of the earth (extremely carefully) I had the opportunity to drive to Plano for a photo op. Now this was no ordinary photo op. It is not very often that you get to pick up a check for $171,408 on behalf of the Children's Neuroblastoma Cancer Foundation. I don't want to say too much because it has not been officially announced but I thought it may put a bounce in the steps of a few other parents out there. It was a good day for neuroblastoma.

It was full of purpose.