For Jared's Eagle we were working on a pretty tight deadline. For any project that you want to submit for approval you have to write up a proposal. You have to have a signature from the person you are doing the service for and you have to have a plan AND THEN you get that approved. It can be a pretty risky endeavor if you aren't wise in your selection because there are lots of hours of prep work to be done before you even get approval to do it. Jared did all the prep work and met with the committee chair and got his project approved 7 days before we had made a commitment to do the project. The school was already doing a clean up day so we could have access to the inside of the building while they were outside. It wouldn't have been the end of the world if the approval hadn't come in in time, but it sure helped that it did. Jared got his invitations made and took them to scouts Tuesday night and then prayed people would actually show up on Saturday to help. That night when he made the announcement in Mutual there were lots of murmuring snarky whispers of "he's doing is eagle already?" Yes boys, you don't have to wait until you are 18 do crank it out at the last minute. You can have it done when you are 14. In fact there will be about 9 boys done with their eagle by the end of this summer who are 14. Times are a changing and the time for not being "all in" won't cut it anymore. The world is filled with too much turmoil and strife to not be 100 percent committed. I've got a small window of time to raise my boys to be like the 13th article of faith "We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul- We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things."
Anyway, we had 25 bookshelves to assemble for the Montessori classrooms and it was painfully slow going in the beginning. There were anywhere between 2-4 people working per bookshelf depending on skill level. The first one you put together always takes the longest because you usually mess up a few times. After the 1st hour I think we had 5 put together and I was secretly having a little panic attack. We only had 2 hours left to get 20 more bookshelves put together and this was not looking mathematically possible. Luckily more people showed up and with the learning curve over the assembly time sped way up. We also had some friendly competition going on between girl and boy teams. We had a 1st and second place winner. It was pretty hilarious.
At 11:30 the teacher that was behind this project and had let us in the building wanted us to start cleaning up because she wanted to go home. By this point there were 2 bookshelves left in boxes and she was more than pleased with how much we accomplished and told us to just leave the 2 unfinished. Do you know how hard it is to walk away from being that close to finishing? I rounded up the little kids and had them start hauling out all the styrofoam to some volunteer parent's trucks. We thought that since they were having a clean up day they would have had some way to dispose of all the trash, but they hadn't thought about it and we didn't check. There was so much recycling and trash from 25 boxes. The boxes are still sitting in the classroom broken down, but not taken anywhere because they weren't sure what to do. While the cleaning up was happening someone else who has ocd worse than me decided to crank the last 2 bookshelves out because they weren't about to walk away when we were so close. We were so good at assembling them by this point that they took about 8 min each. The thing that did kill me though was that the teacher didn't have access to the custodial closet so we couldn't vacuum up all the little foam pieces that were everywhere. That completely goes against the boy scout code to leave a mess like that but there was nothing I could do about it. The teacher was just so moved and astounded that we got all the work done she didn't care about anything else.
The picture of Jared next to the completed bookshelves cracks me up. He was like "what are we doing? what do you want me to do?" Dude, just stand next to the bookshelves and let me take your picture! Classic!
That night was the court of honor and Jared conducted. He also became an official life scout. He got to pin his Mom and I got to make him give me a hug. After all that hard work I did to help him, he darn well better give me a stinkin hug in public for everyone to witness! lol Now he just has to finish up 1 more eagle required merit badge and a couple others and wait 6 months to receive his Eagle. Well... he also has to write up this project and go before the board to present it for approval, but other than that we are done. Now we need to get on Duty to God because we haven't focused on that like we should. One son down, one to go :0)
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