Posted on November 5th, 2022.

I have to say this- HOLY COW!!! Our project with Trinity Hospice for Kids has taken on a life of its own and we are running after it trying to keep up. There is a story told about two-year-old kids and their energy level. Apparently, there was a study done where an Olympic athlete was tasked with keeping up with a two-year-old for an entire day. Before the end of the day, the athlete was exhausted, and the two-year-old was still going strong. Well, we aren’t quite two years old yet BUT, we sure have the characteristics of the age!

Here’s the story: a while back, I wrote a blog post about how we got started with Trinity Hospice for Kids. Now, we are developing more projects for the kids. No small task as one project calls for quilting- and after agreeing to do this, realized I know NOTHING about quilting! Talk about feeling out of control! How does this become a reality? Yikes!

Hidden in the corners of the community are secret groups of ladies who do this magic thing called quilting. They make fabulous designs that the average to fairly-experienced sewer (sew-er, not sewer) would never attempt in their right mind. Reaching out to them has been a challenge, but the idea is to have them help design and make “game quilts” that can help break the barriers between the sick children and their intimidated or scared visitors. Top side would have checkers/chess, tic-tac-toe, connect-4, and one more game. The reverse side would have a board game like Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, etc. It’s a great way to relieve boredom and create a friendly atmosphere for those visiting and not knowing what to say or how to act in a “scary” environment.

The next project was taken on by the young art students at Art Camp at Waterfront Studios, San Pedro. They created line drawings of animals and flowers, etc. for a coloring book. Several local schools collected all their broken crayons from the last year and brought them to be re-cycled into NEW crayons, molded into fun shapes like hearts, shells, dinosaurs, stars, and more. The new crayons are packaged to look like candies in a candy box.

All of this takes time; however these children don’t have the luxury of a lot of time. Our current time frame, as we run full speed with scissors in our hands, is to deliver the quilts, crayons and coloring books by hand, from Santa himself, on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. We are blessed to have 3 volunteers to be Santa, and possibly a 4thwho would be Spanish speaking.

There are approximately 70 children on the hospice service currently. They are mostly at home, coming to the hospital for treatment as needed. So, 70 hospice garments, 70 quilts, 70 coloring book and crayon sets, visits by Santa, fund raising to pay for all of this, and that is the TIP of the iceberg. There are more projects and events that I can’t even bring up yet because we already have so much going on, we can’t keep up. And I don’t want to lose our amazing Angels who already do so much! They are a gift from Heaven!

WE could use a few more adult 2-year-olds to help with all these projects. Hey, if you can peel the paper off a crayon, or break it into pieces, THAT is a job we have available. How about helping to package? Do you quilt? Can you cut with scissors? Do you sew, by hand or machine? We need YOUR HELP!!!