Fiesta

I've been in the Young Women's presidency since January, and it has been a lot of fun! Definitely a different experience than Primary (children), as I had been so used to. The teenaged girls are great and it's been a real learning experience for me. In June we had a YW fundraiser / ward dinner. We decided on Mexican food for the dinner because it's easy, and everyone loves Mexican food (at least in AZ)! Most of the food was from Costco and pre-done, like shredded lettuce, cheese, chips, tortillas, etc. We had taco salad and burrito ingredients served buffet-style.

We didn't charge any money for the dinner, so that nobody in the ward would feel like they couldn't come. In order to earn money we had a silent auction; the girls each chose a service that they could auction off, such as babysitting, dog-walking, car-washing, etc. and we also got a lot of donations of service and physical items from members of our ward. All in all we had about 75 items up for auction. I was nervous that since it was the summertime we wouldn't have a very good turnout. As we were setting up chairs that morning we stopped at about 90 chairs thinking that would be too many. Well it was impossible to get a count of how many people were there, but there were at least 150! We ran out of food (although everybody did get "firsts"). The room was packed, and we ended up setting up a couple more tables plus several chairs along the back wall. The auction items were displayed on long tables along both sides of the room.

The night was a great success; we earned $1300 which isn't bad for a few hours' work! We had really fun brightly-colored decorations: bright various solid-colored plastic tablecloths and big tissue paper flowers everywhere, along with sombreros and Mexican blankets stapled to the walls, but none of us took a picture! After we'd cleaned everything up and were ready to go home we quickly snapped the photo above: Julie, YW President; Emily, 2nd counselor; and me, 1st counselor. Emi made sashes and roses for us to wear; wasn't that a nice touch? These ladies are fun to work with and we had a really good time that night.