Cold Hands, Warm Heart!

With our recent move, Olivia is attending a new elementary school this year, and we have been so pleased with the kind and caring staff. Something special that they do for the car riders is teachers escort them from their cars into the school each morning; they also escort them to their parents car each afternoon.

We had been parking on the street and Genevieve and I would take Olivia to her classroom each morning, and in the afternoons we would wait for her outside of school and walk her to our car parked on the road and get in to head home. Genevieve would cry: Imagine...waking up to be put in a car, parking, walking your older sister to school in the freezing cold, getting strapped back in the cold car and finally getting home to have your breakfast. Well, with the freezing weather, we needed a new strategy because both girls were sooooo cold walking to and from school. We started going through the car rider line, and it has been so nice to stay in the nice warm car up to the very minute Olivia goes to school or gets in the car to come home. No more tears about the cold from Genevieve!

We started thinking about how cold the staff must be waiting outside to escort the kids. Each morning they are shivering but are there ready to help the kids out of their cars; and they are usually smiling or have some warm greeting. For some reason, I kept thinking about how cold their hands must be (probably because my hands often go numb in the cold), and thought about making them hand warmers. I looked up on the Web about making homemade ones and saw that they could be filled with dried corn or rice. Also, instead of making little squares, I thought about filling up small little gloves like the kids hands that they hold when they help them out of the car. My MIL, Mary Ann, told me they had stretchy cotton gloves two pairs/$1 a Walmart, so we went and bought a whole stack of different colors. I read online that brown rice held less moisture when heated than white rice, so Olivia and I mixed up 3 big bags of brown rice with a bottle of whole cloves (for that Christmas-y smell!). We scooped some into each glove and tied them off with rubber bands. Then, I set about making a tight blanket stitch across the top to hold the rice in. We made little tags that said, Cold Hands, Warm Heart (the saying came from a little wreath craft I saw in an Oriental Trading Comapny magazine) and had instructions to zap in the microwave for 30 seconds on high (30 sec = about 30 min. warmth).

After we were done, we drove through the car rider line the next couple of mornings, and Olivia handed them out to the staff. They were so delighted, and we were so glad to see them being used the next few cold mornings. We hope they know how grateful we are for their kindness.