The day after Christmas, we trekked out to Aurora, IL with some of our extended family to the
Feed My Starving Children facility to pack food for children in developing nations that are literally eating dirt and rocks to stave off feelings of hunger.
• 2 hours
• 84 volunteers
• 102 boxes of food
• 22,032 meals
• 60.5 kids fed for a year
This is the second time Chris and I have been there with Aidan. We’re thinking about making it a monthly excursion; perhaps we will invite some of our friends to join us. The more hands the better of course. It is a humbling experience to think about all that we have in the United States where even the poorest do not endure the agony of absolute famine. Today, we worked with our family and about 75 other people to package food that will be shipped to children around the world–children like Murana from Haiti pictured below.
Murana, starving,
before receiving FMSC help.
Murana, 3 1/2 months after
receiving FMSC help
Tags: service-learning · volunteering
For Aidan’s Earth Scouts group, everyone had to create something that depicted how they are connected to our earth. This is what Aidan drew as a response.
Aidan’s Earth
Tags: art · earth scouts
Aidan has been venturing further into the performing arts as of late. He loves the act of creation in the moment, the act of performance–from music, to theater, to song, to dance. In the four video clips of this post, you can see a little of everything. My personal favorite is his
tap dance rendition. He seems to have some raw talent there, but I suppose I am biased. (Note that this post has multiple pages with one video per page, so be sure to click the links at the bottom to move through all four pages.)
First we have Aidan with grandma’s guitar. He is drawn to strings and enjoys strumming but resists any thing that might resemble instruction (which is typical for him). He likes to place his fingers about the frets and strum–listening for variations in tone and vibration. Here we see him demonstrating his unique method of experimentation; a rare musical performance, as he is not nearly as comfortable with this form of expression as he is with other forms.
Click the links below for more of Aidan, acting, singing, and dancing.
See Aidan the puppeteer –>
Tags: art · performance · video
