Who doesn't love a care package?

I know that I loved getting care packages in college: it made me feel connected to home which sometimes felt very far away and I was only in the neighboring state, not half a world away. So today I spent a couple of hours helping put together care packages for a local organization, Toys-for-Troops to send a little love and support from home to those who are serving our country overseas.



A little bit of everything went into each care package: t-shirt, socks, playing cards, letters from little kids, DVDs, beef jerky, candy, toothpaste, soap, granola bars, snack mix, homemade cookies, hand sanitizer, bandages, and silly putty to name a few. We wrapped the big stuff and the smaller stuff went in as is. Here are some of the DVDs that I wrapped...there were at least 150 DVDs so I grabbed a quick photo of a few while I was wrapping.



Here is part of the line of boxes that we filled. They are the military flat rate boxes and they look small but you can jam a lot of stuff in them!



Honestly, the biggest challenge of the days was trying to avoid the news cameras that were there to collect footage. I turned down two requests to be interviewed on camera...um, no thanks! There is a reason why I am the person who takes the pictures...so I can avoid being in the pictures! I did agree to answer a couple of questions for the man from The News-Gazette as I have a soft spot for print journalism from my time working at The Daily News when I was in college. I was not the most coherent so thankfully I don't think I will end up in the article.

If you want to help this organization, it isn't too late. If you go the the website, you can still submit a donation to help cover postage.