The last few weeks I have participated in an event sponsored by Drop In and Decorate which donates cookies to homeless shelters, senior citizen centers, battered women's shelters, among many other types of agencies. The agency I chose is SafePlace of Olympia which houses victims and their children from sexual abuse and domestic violence. Having been a survivor myself from domestic violence, I can understand what they go through on a day to day basis and how scary it is to wonder if you are doing right, are you going to get out, and that makes a person just a bundle of nerves ready to pop.
My daughters and I made 65 sugar cookies and decorated them to have delivered in time for Mother's Day however, we ran into a miscommunication snag with our contact at SafePlace and part of the miscommunication was on my part as well. We went to deliver the cookies on Friday May 8 and no one was there to accept them. I had thought we were to deliver on Friday but they are closed on Friday. So, I went home and found an email and we rescheduled. I am happy to say that today May 14, we delivered another 65 cookies (we made fresh ones, I didn't want to deliver stale non-fresh cookies) and it was such a satisfying experience to know that this little thing will brighten someone's day and let them know that we are thinking about them and understand what they go through. It was an awesome learning experience for my daughters, and for myself too. We are definitely going to do more events in the future. Not only did they learn something about community, my daughters and I also got great quality time with each other doing something that we all love.
Check out the pictures: (Note: if you are not fond of lots of pictures on a blog post, please turn back now, there were quite a few, we had to document the good time we had, right? riiiiighhhhhtttt...)
First, we had to roll out and cut the cookies.. here are my daughters (Nicole is the older one, and Vanessa is the younger one) rolling out their dough to get ready for cookie cutters.
Of course next, they had to cut them out. We chose to make butterflies and flowers. Butterflies signify the wings these women will acquire when they are free of their abuse, and flowers signify how healthy and beautiful they will bloom without domestic violence in the lives.
Nicole helped me by cutting out the labels for the cookies, she did an awesome job!
Here is a bunch of pictures of us frosting the cookies, after I put a base coat on the cookies while the kids were sleeping so it would be dry the next day for decorating. They had such a good time decorating, it was so much easier with squeeze bottles, and a lot less messy! The squeeze bottles are just regular ketchup and mustard bottles with the openings made a tad bigger by me, and each 2 pack of bottles was $1 at the dollar store. Definitely will use them for Christmas cookies. I used Wilton gel colors for the vibrant colors of the frostings. The frosting is just a basic buttercream tinted each color. So much fun!
And the fruits of their labors... even though it didn't take long at all once they got into it.
And, if you are still with me after this so very long post (sorry about that) how about donating to a great place for women and children who need and deserve the help to make their lives better.
Click here to donate to SafePlace so they can keep on helping women and children escape sexual abuse and domestic violence.
It would be appreciated if anyone would please stumble this post, or send it to everyone you know. Maybe if this touched you, you will give back and get a hold of Lydia at Drop In and Decorate and find out what you can do to bring this non-profit organization to your area. Let's try to make this nationwide!
