RMH Meal

It's been a busy few days! On Wednesday this week, we served a meal at the Ronald McDonald House in Rochester in honor of Jaron's one year birthday. 

The night before, G and I made six batches of gingersnaps to bring to the NICU staff and also share with the Ronald McDonald House staff. 

This is the second time we baked a massive amount of gingersnaps, and I'm happy to report that it went even better the second time. Seems like we are getting our system down! I measure everything out and G stirs. I roll cookies into balls and he mans the oven. 

Wednesday morning before we left, we prepped apples to make homemade applesauce. We got to Rochester around noon and I immediately started making homemade bread. In the end, I made 10 loaves of bread. We made 10 batches of goulash soup, a gigantic roaster of applesauce, lettuce salad with tomatoes from our garden, and frozen chocolate chip cookies. G wanted to have everything be homemade, but I told him there was not enough time to make homemade cookies and homemade bread, so he would have to choose. It was an easy decision to choose bread over cookies. 

Thankfully, we had some help in the kitchen. Every time a family serves, there is a host volunteer. Ours was Jill and she was amazing. Derek is a staff member at RMH specifically working with nutrition and kitchen stuff, so he stuck around to help us as well (prior to RMH he worked as a chef).

Once I got the bread rising, we took a break to visit our NICU nurses and doctors. The visit took longer than expected, so some of my bread was overproved. You can see those flat loaves in the picture below. 

Thankfully I had the idea to put some of the rising bread in the fridge to slow down proving. That worked really well and the final four loaves of bread were a lot more shapely. 😅

Jaron hung out in the baby carrier for a while, spent some time in a rocking saucer (he loved that!), and got held by a lot of the staff. He had a great afternoon. So great, he skipped his nap. 

Whole we served the meal, another volunteer entertained him. I fed him supper and the volunteer took him back. She eventually got him to sleep at 7:45pm! 😳 Normally bedtime is 6:45. 

So, no pictures of Jaron from the day. We almost didn't get a picture of us either. The host usually takes a picture of the family serving the meal, but it was so busy, everyone forgot. We took a picture after cleanup by our sign. 🤷‍♀️ 

We served 55 people and had about half the food we prepared leftover. So, note to self, next year make half! Leftovers got boxed up and put in kitchens for people to eat as leftovers in future days. We were able to take some home too and send some home with volunteers. 

All in all, it was a very fun experience and brought us so much joy to be able to give back to the organization that helped us so much just last year. We plan to make this an annual tradition around the time of Jaron's birthday. 😊