ryan's eagle project

 I was so excited to have found an eagle project for Ryan a couple weeks ago -- abacuses for the school district.  Each first grader in our district  (there are about 6000 first graders) will have their own abacus for math this year. Each elementary needs about 100 abacuses, and so 100 abacuses equals an eagle project.  But when we called the person in charge, she told us that all the abacus materials had been distributed, so we were out of luck.  However, she mentioned that she would like to keep Ryan's name and number in case anything happened or if she was able to secure more funding and more materials.  So we left it at that.  Then just Saturday afternoon she called Ryan and asked if he still needed a project, because she just had two hundred of the abacus materials returned unfinished by someone who was unable to do the project.  Could he take one hundred and have them done by the end of the week (because school is starting)? We jumped on the opportunity and threw things into high gear!  Ryan hurried to print out his paperwork, get things filled out, and collect all the necessary signatures.  We picked up the materials late Saturday night, and we were ready to begin on Monday.  Monday evening we worked on them for FHE.  This is a picture of Ryan putting the skewers into a plastic sleeve.  This was the one assembly part that worried me most -- I didn't want anyone to put a stick into an eye!  (Thankfully all went well.)

 Next came the beading -- 10 pony beads on each of 10 skewers.

 Then you put the top of the skewers into another plastic sleeve and secure them with hot glue and yellow duct tape.

 This is me cutting the duct tape to fit the abacuses. The duct tape had to be cut and then notched in two places with a knife.

 On Wednesday, he had a bunch of friends come over to help.  The kids worked for about 3 hours and we got a lot accomplished, but we still had tons to do.

 On Thursday, Heidi and Ethan came over and helped glue and put binder clips on the edges.  They spent a couple hours working hard and we got even more accomplished!  That night, Ryan, Mark & I spent a couple more hours putting the last of the binder clips on the abacuses and fixing anything that got messed up along the way.  By Friday morning (today) Ryan was able to deliver 100 abacuses to Layton Elementary!  Wahoo!!