It is the end of Week #8 and we are still religiously filling in our Madison Challenge Tally Sheets, comparing notes on what we have done, what we should have done and, most importantly, encouraging each other to stay the course.
This really has been a tremendously successful week for our team, The Unknowns. It started off with a real team effort to start de-cluttering the house. Ah, spring is definitely in the air. All four of us are avid readers. This has resulted in books, books, and more books filling the shelves in our house.
If the truth be told, we ran out of shelf space a while ago and the books have been spilling out and taking up residence on the floor surrounding the shelving. Not good for the books, not good for the room, not good, period!
Once we got down to business, the four of us were able to organize a whole room full of books in no time at all. Every book we touched needed to dealt with. It was like those TV shows where professionals go into a home and set up organizational piles for the homeowner , a keep pile, a donate pile and a trash pile.
What a great feeling it was to be able to fill multiple bags for donating. The adult books will be donated to Clinton-based Books For Soldiers and the children’s books to Branford-based Read To Grow.
We wish there was a line item for quality family time. This would have garnered us points in that category. What we did give ourselves was 5 points for volunteering. While this was not volunteering in the strictest sense, we were working to gather books for donation to nonprofit organizations that will make sure our books find worthy second homes!
The other very exciting event of the week was my participation in the . Our Madison team, made up of teachers, paraprofessionals, coaches and students, enjoyed sharing the Polson Gymnasium basketball court with the Wizards who are part entertainers, part basketball players and all good-humored players!
This “charity” basketball game raised money that will be equally distributed amongst all Madison schools. It was so much fun to be running down the basketball court to the cheers of the fans, both young and old!
I earned more points that I never thought were attainable in one evening alone! One Hour of Exercise, 6 points; meeting new people, 5 points; drinking 7+ glasses of water, 5 points; volunteering, 5 points; and Leaving It Better, 5 points.
Looking back on the week it is interesting to note that we would not have done anything different had we not been participating in the Madison Challenge. The Unknowns would have still worked as a team to sort through the bottleneck of books and I still would have donned my gold Mighty Madison Tigers team shirt , laced up my sneakers and played my first ever basketball game in the name of town spirit.
