When I started my charity project in August to give teddy bears to kids at Rady Children’s Hospital for Christmas this year, I was hoping I would raise enough money including my own to buy 250 bears.  Things were going pretty well.  By the beginning of November, I had raised enough to buy almost 400 bears.  I was pretty happy and I knew the hospital would be too.

My plan was to tie donation tags on every bear and put each person’s name who donated money to help.   At that time, 400 bears seems liked a lot to tie on individual tags, but since we would be delivering them on December 18, we still had plenty of time.

Then the week before Thanksgiving, my project exploded!  KNSD TV (NBC) in San Diego came to my house to interview me for their news.   I had pre-ordered 100 bears so they could see what the bears were like.   I had a great time.  The very next day,MSN.com picked up my story and before long, I was receiving donations from all over the country.   With just a little over a week left to donate, things were adding up quickly.

Once everything was calculated, the grand total was 1800 bears. So that our entire garage wasn’t completely filled with teddy bears all at once, we ordered 1000 bears. 40 large boxes arrived on Wednesday by UPS.  I think our UPS driver was more than a little surprised when he got the order to deliver to our house.  He actually called ahead of time to make sure someone would be home which Mom and Dad appreciated.  I was excused from a school field trip on Thursday so I could start unpacking, sorting, counting, and tagging the 1000 bears that arrived.

Tying donation tags on each one went a lot faster than we had expected.  Being organized ahead of time by printing the tags, punching holes in them, cutting pieces of yarn to tie them onto the bears, and even stringing them really helped the whole process.  Of course Mom and Dad helped a lot. Otherwise, I would still be tying on tags instead of writing this blog.

We finished everything in about 6 hours.  Once all the bears were tagged, we put them in large bags, ready for delivery.

It’s a good thing we don’t have a big family because we now have very large bags and boxes of teddy bears all over our house and we still have 700 more bears to do the whole process over again next weekend.

Thank you again to everyone who donated and supported my project.  Our coordinator at Rady was amazed when we called to tell her we had a few more than our original plan of 250.  All she could say was “WOW”!

Stay tuned for my post after we deliver them.  We’re still hoping for a rental company to donate the use of a small truck for delivery.  It should be a fun job loading all of the bags and boxes in the truck but even more fun unloading them at the hospital.