Friends With FOP

It’s taken me some time to update everyone on our A-W-E-S-O-M-E sale.  There were a team of people at the church all day Thursday.  Tina Stewart, Melissa’s mother (Sue), and Melissa started organizing items while Alan, Melissa’s step-father (Ted), and Melissa’s neighbor (Katie) went from location to location picking up donated items.  When I got there around 6PM there was no place on the floor to walk.  I was told that as Tina, Sue, and Melissa were trying to organize things, donations kept coming in.  By the time I got there we had our work cut out for us.  People started trickling in to help.  Tina’s husband Sean Martin helped organize the massive amount of books we had.  Kate Pray (Erin’s OT)  and our neighbor Robyn Whitehead both stopped in to help organize.  My 10:00PM we had made some head-way.  Melissa and Rob left around 12:30AM to put up the signs while I headed home to print out fliers.  I don’t think anyone got to bed before 2AM that night.

Everyone arrived at the church early Friday morning and we just started spreading things all over the grass.  We had the furniture out the side door and a nice assortment of camping gear and kids things over the front lawn.  As we started, a gentleman was shopping and then asked what we were fundraising for.  After telling him about FOP and Erin’s story, he introduced himself as Sam Roach and that we had a few hours of his time.  He asked what he could do to help.  Well, Sam is a pro at yard sales.  He had the front lawn organized and gave us tips on what/how to do things.  Not only did he help out Friday morning, but he came back several times over the weekend to lend a hand. 

There are several stories like Sam’s that happened over the weekend.  One lady has offered to donate her airline miles so our family could go back east to see Dr. Kaplan.  That would be a huge expense off our back.  Airline prices are going up and we have to get five tickets.  Then there were ladies from the church who found out about our cause and baked homemade cinnamon rolls for our bake sale.  A few people from the office staff came down to donate office supplies.  Then Melissa was notified yesterday that a member of the church has offered to pay our rental fees from the weekend.  Summarizing these acts of kindness is a bit overwhelming for me. 

Saturday rolled around and the people kept coming.  Rob’s parents came up from Olympia Friday night. So his mother, Marilyn, helped with the sale while is father, Ed, helped take care of Riley. Tina managed to open up the very last box of goodies Saturday morning.  We had so much that we couldn’t display everything.  We definitely had our mini rush hours during Saturday’s sale.  The waves came in spurts so we had time to sit and relax a bit.

Overall we had an amazing weekend sale.  We don’t have a final tally but we estimated that we made around $3,500.  I have to figure out how much of that will go to IFOPA.  The proceeds from the bake sale and the hot dog sale kind of got mixed in with the main till.  I’ll need to sit down with the receipts and figure that out.

I really want to thank everyone who had a part in making this happen.  Thank you for all who donated items.  Thank you to all who helped with the actual sale.  Thank you to all who stopped in to shop.  A big “thank you” to Cottage Lake Presbyterian Church for letting us invade their fellowship hall.  Tina and I are talking about taking the families there for Sunday service sometime in the near future.