ECI Meeting-Yesterday's Excitement

Last evening, I tried something new. I wanted to get out and do something in the community, but I did not know what. My wife suggested that I go to a meeting of the local Early Childhood Initiative. This is a group whose purpose is getting the word out about how important it is for parents to spend time with their children. Especially in that 0-5 age range. It is so important in fact, that experts use the statistics for this age group to predict where their life will end up.

Our local initiative we think is somewhat unique to our town. Ortonville is one of the few towns in Minnesota that has an ECI. This initiative also organizes things such as, tot time (time in the winter for the little ones to go to the school gym and run around. This helps with "cabin fever", especially for our three boys). So, I decided to attend the next meeting.

I was not able to make the first half hour but that was only to go over what organic options there are in the area, as far as I could tell. At the end of the meeting, I collected a copy of the organic farms in our area. That will be good for getting farm eggs and other produce. We already knew of one. This will show us what our choices are!

When I arrived, the ladies who were present invited me up to the table and seemed happy that I had shown up. The topics of conversation were not anything earth-shattering but I enjoyed myself. One of the up-coming events for our group will be the second annual "Big Toys". This will be a collection of such heavy equipment as, farm tractors and semi tractor trailers, car haulers, street sweepers, etc. My three boys will love to go and see all the things that they only get to see as they fly by on the highway. Come to think of it, I will enjoy seeing all of it too!

The other topics included a park wrap up. This is to celebrate all the five and unders in our town who went with their parents to all of the parks in Ortonville, MN. We have only been to about half of the parks and so we will have to get going, there are prizes for the children who visit all seven parks. There will be games for this party and some time for unorganized play.

That was my excitement for yesterday. I will have to keep you up to date on how this goes for me. This is a new thing for me to get involved in events or organizations.