Wind up the Light

The Operation Christmas Child stash has not been growing nearly as quickly as I would like.

I put this down to a combination of several things: lack of time and brainpower (study and baby preparation has been somewhat all-consuming of late!), and lack of funds (we are just starting to get properly on our feet after moving into a unit a few months back).

Dynamo, or wind-up LED torches. They fit in the palm of your hand. To recharge them you pull the grey handle.

We did pick up these fabulous little additions a month or so back though. It is quite amusing really...Boyo works at a supermarket, and noticed these cool little wind up torches attached to some Toilet Duck bowl cleaners. In other words, the torches were a freebie if you bought the loo thingy. Now, we don't use loo thingys. We have good old baking soda with essential oil and that seems to do the trick nicely. In recent years, we've moved away from using chemicals at home, so generally they are limited to instances of extreme desperation. Such as stain removal (have yet to find something really, really organic/natural that does a great job), or the kitchen sink blockage this week (I still can't believe we actually went and bought Drain-O...but it was desperate - several lots of boiling water, vinegar, and baking soda plus plunging had not done the job).

So the issue was that I really wanted these cool torches to go in the Christmas Child boxes, but didn't by any means want to have any loo stuff. My parents-in-law gave us a really nice Dynamo emergency torch a few years back, which even has a radio and we've found it so useful to have around - it is also reassuring knowing that we don't have to locate batteries or radio in a civil emergency as we don't tend to have either just lying around. Since then, I have thought many times how useful a wind-up torch would be in the Christmas Child boxes (they ask you not to send anything that uses batteries as they just end up as landfill). I'd never found any that were either a reasonable size or a reasonable price. Until now. So in the end, we compromised. I got the torches, and the Toilet Duck is going to my in-law's church...they have a fair few toilets that they apparently already use these cleaners for, so at least I am not contributing to any extra chemical use. Grin.

Another amusing aspect of the whole story is that we liked the torches so much, that we got 3 for ourselves...one for me, one for Boyo and one for in the car. Oh, plus one for my dad because he is a bit of a torch fanatic. They are getting a good workout too.

Amy