Greenville,SC-Children

Fun fact from today: playing basketball next to an open kitchen will only result in broken glass. We're sorry. We'll pay for it.

But after our incredible dinner tonight, we had to work off some of what we ate. And what we've been eating all week. Aldi's workers, we saute you. And the Millville products you sell us. But tonight, it was a Publix run that gave us the fixings for some of CiCi's fantastic Chinese cooking. All 12 of us ended up in the kitchen rolling dough and frying dumplings. Half of us may have never before had a dumpling, but we were all game to help out.

There are few moments as incredible as coming together as a group — we're all different years, have different majors, and come from different backgrounds, but we worked together beautifully tonight. We chopped veggies with military-like efficiency, newbies stepped up to the plate to help fry, and CiCi was ridiculously patient and taught us how to do basically everything. Only sometimes did she demand to take over because we were too slow. But it's okay, because we love her no matter what.

We hope we worked as well together today at Pendleton Place as we did tonight at dinner. We got a lot done in a mere eight hours. Actually, we finished our awesome volunteer coordinator Brandon's to-do list. Oops. We had two offices painted a lovely shade of eggshell by the afternoon, and the guys hauled an impressive amount of furniture. We disinfected an entire playroom's worth of toys, and installed a whole bunch of blinds in Pendleton's new Family Bridges building. Tomorrow will probably be another painting day, and we're ready to re-wear our paint-splattered clothes.

Tonight, it may have taken nearly 2 hours to get dinner on the table. We may have broken coffee containers. We may have ran out of flour and ended up resorting to Bisquick (FYI, Bisquick will make your dumplings extra fluffy). But it's days like today, when we stop and marvel at how quickly we began to feel like a family, that make us proud to be part of ASB.