Easter Bunny Madness!

What a week!

I had an unexpected "tour of duty" as the Coast Guard calls it, all day Tuesday in the CDC [Child Development Center]. Six teachers were out sick, they had already called in all of their volunteers, and since the MWR is over the CDC they called my boss. Luckily (or not, for me) I am CPR and First-aid certified, I also have my fingerprint clearance card due to my four years of summer camp work. I spent the majority of my day with crying toddlers, fighting preschoolers, and kids who refused to take their nap. I didn't sign up for that! I did get to play with the preschool class guinea pig- affectionately named "Piggy," well what do you expect from 4-5yr olds? Anyway, it was nice for me since my guinea pig is back home (no animals allowed in the barracks). There were some cute moments with the kids, and it was probably good I got my feet wet in that department, esp. since I am working on a DVD for their musical and may be involved in the set-up/production proccess.

Wednesday was 13hrs long, whew. I think everything I did that day (minus the monthly Morale Committee Meeting) was devoted to the Easter event on Saturday. Unwrapping every item, creating a sample Easter Basket, picking up and preparing boxes for the finished products later in the day, ensuring the already filled eggs would stay shut with a piece of tape, etc. That evening I had to set-up a production line for creating the Easter Baskets. We had about 9 student volunteers show up, with their class advisor (and his 3yr old son! Who decided throwing the eggs was more fun than helping daddy stuff them, haha.) We knocked out 144 Easter Baskets and 480 (well, the ones we could find) Easter Eggs in roughly 2hrs. I got home around 8:30pm.

Thursday we had the monthly MWR Management Team Meeting. The guy who usually takes the meeting minutes was on leave, so I was assigned the task. The last 30min of the meeting was devoted to my website SOP. I gave a general overview of how to create and place an event on the new online calendar that I created. Within the next three weeks I will be training one-on-one.

Friday we decorated the galley, window clings, inflatable bunnies & eggs, pretty ribbons, and more. Then I spent the whole afternoon with the MWR Secretary in the MWR warehouse, organizing about 75 boxes of yearly files from 2002-2008. We also had to remove all of the boxes from 2001 for shredding purposes (I'm so glad I don't have that task!).

Saturday I was at the MWR office at 6am, my supervisor and I immediately started loading up boxes of eggs/baskets to take down to the Galley. We also had to bring down the bunny costume and place it in a seperate location so the children wouldn't see him "getting dressed." We decorated the egg hunt areas, and I went back to the office to blow up the balloons. Our volunteers to help hide the eggs didn't arrive until 7:45 (they were suppose to be there at 7) so we had a frantic 15min of hiding eggs before children started to arrive for the free breakfast with the bunny. Once again I was tasked with taking event photos, which was really fun because the children with the Easter Bunny were priceless and then some of their reactions to hunting for eggs made me burst out laughing.

Here are all of the event details: