I haven’t disappeared, but I had a busy weekend.

With the help of a phalanx of volunteers, I ran the homeschool co-op's annual children's clothing swap this weekend.  It's a nice service for any parish that has lots of growing families.  Here's how we do it:

• People have two days to drop stuff off at the church — used kids' clothes mostly, but also maternity clothes, baby stuff, unopened formula and diaper packages.  Shoes too, and coats.   No damage, no stains — only good condition things.  
• Then volunteers come in and spend a few hours sorting the clothes by size and folding them and displaying them on tables.  
• People can come in and look over the clothing when they drop things off, while the folding is going on; or they can come before and after Mass on Saturday and Sunday.   Anyone can take anything they want, for their kids or grandkids or friends' kids or even for their favorite charity, for free.
• After the last Mass on Sunday, more volunteers bag whatever's left and tote it to charities.  Little kids' stuff and maternity clothes go to a local crisis pregnancy center.  Most of the rest goes to whatever charity happens to be open and accepting mixed donations on Sunday afternoons, usually Goodwill.  This year someone offered to keep things overnight so she could take them to a different local charity, which was fine with me.

I scored 6 boxes of clothes for my kids and myself (yay maternity swap), including snow pants and rain boots and some really great sweaters.  After a few years of this, I know which labels of clothes are going to last, and I take lots of those, always thinking several years ahead.  Oh, AND I GOT A WHOLE BOX OF CLOTH DIAPERS.   I can't believe someone else didn't take them first.  (There were two boxes, and one went right away, but the other box was still there at the end.)

I'm not sure which part of the service is more important to the families in the parish — the free clothes, or the incentive to clean out their closets every year.  Maybe this year, with the economy how it is, it really was the free clothes.  Normally about two-thirds of the total haul goes to charity; this year it was more like one-third.  On the other hand, this year I stressed "please don't donate damaged stuff" much more firmly in the pre-swap bulletin announcements, and perhaps the overall quality of the goods was higher.  We didn't throw nearly as much stuff away because it was too damaged to donate.