Greenville,SC-Children

As much as we've been loving our 10-5 shifts at Pendleton Place, sometimes routine gets boring. So today, we decided to mix it up. Unfortunately, mixing it up involved waking up an hour early. Ben's delicious homemade French toast helped ease some of our pain.

We ended up arriving at Pendleton at 9 and beating Brandon by a few minutes. At the time, no one realized just how we would have liked to have our 10-minute rest later in the day. Brandon put us to work. Some of the boys finished up their blind installation at Family Bridges, and the rest of us tackled the basement at Smith House.

Smith House is beautiful and old, but its basement is all of the old and none of the beautiful. It's pretty much a cave, actually. We're talking dirt floors, and a foundation literally carved out from the earth. Unfortunately, cave-like conditions lead to cave-like wetness, and cave-like wetness leads to nasty mold. Cleaning out the basement was a four-hour project, and resulted in a half-full dumpster and some old computer hard drives Bari and Ben got to attack with hammers.

We took a break for lunch downtown, and ended up eating delicious barbeque with Brandon and Jed. The portions were huge enough that we knew we had to walk it off, so we headed to the Falls Park, which might just be Greenville's best kept secret. We've been driving the streets of downtown Greenville for a few days now, but none of us realized we were basically driving around a beautiful waterfall.

It may only be March, but Greenville is already green. And today, when the sun was shining and the temperature was a perfect 60, felt like a beautiful day to be alive. We took an embarrassing number of selfies on the rocks by the waterfall and sunbathed like turtles. Brandon joined us with his wife and adorable baby, who was mostly confused by our doting.

After stopping for some delicious ice cream at local favorite Spill the Beans, we headed back to Pendleton to finish our day. Part of the team went to work on two more offices, and the rest of us headed to the closet. Pendleton gets a lot of clothing donations for the girls, but it helps to weed out the clothes that not even your grandmother would wear.

Reaching the halfway point of our week, it was nice to finally get out and experience part of the greater community. It's a beautiful city, and we feel lucky to be here. We can't wait to see what tomorrow will bring.