Welcome Back!

Greetings friends! I have returned to blogging! I fell out of the habit of blogging and before you know it, 9 months go by and I haven't written anything. One could think that nothing was happening, but that definitely wasn't true!

So what has been going on? Well, 2016 was a good year. We kept going with our donations and worked hard to make sure that we reach as many police/fire departments. We worked with DCF again to organize another Baby Shower for the Worcester area offices in October. The event was great and we collected so many baby items. It is really impressive how generous people are. We're not doing the event this year, but we are in the early stages of planning a larger, regional event for the spring of 2018. It's going to take a lot of effort and partnerships, but I think it is something that we can definitely do successfully.

On the event side, our 13th Anniversary Celebration was one of our best ones ever. I mixed the event up a bit and added a comedy performance and wine tasting. They were huge hits. Our comedian, Candace Sallale, did an amazing job. She brought a lot of people with her to the event and she was hilarious. A special thank you to Candace for making our event such a success. We also partnered with my favorite liquor store, Julio's, in Westborough. They worked with one of their wine suppliers and did a complimentary wine tasting at the event, which everyone loved. I am excited for this year's event and will be starting work on it soon. I was already talking with our designer Marie, about new images for the Anniversary event and the Date Auction.

For the Date Auction, I did something new and hired a woman who runs her own PR company. I felt that I needed help in reaching out to new contacts, particularly in terms of recruiting participants. She did a very good job and was able to bring in a new crop of talent to participate as eligible bachelors/ettes. We had the Patriots Cheerleaders at the event, they were lovely as usual and our hosts, Melissa & Ramiro from 96.9 did a terrific job hosting the event. I'm thinking about ways to mix the event up a bit this year, in order to keep it fresh. It's hard to imagine that it will be our 11th Date Auction and our 14th Anniversary Celebration coming up!

Yesterday, I was in Melrose and Lowell doing donations of stuffed animals, books and coloring books. Here's a photo from our Lowell donation. We've been donating to Lowell for over 10 years!

Well, there's lots more to share, but I need to move on to catching up on some emails. I still struggle with keeping up with the amount of donation requests we get from people wanting to donate stuffed animals. It's obviously great that people want to help us and I don't mean to get delayed some times in responding, but it does get hard to keep up.

I'm happy to be back blogging! Until next time friends...