Pajama Party With A Cause

My husband and son left town this weekend so my daughter asked if we could have a girl's night.  I thought it was the perfect opportunity to have a pajama party and collect pajamas for the Pajama Program.

Pajama Program donates new pajamas and books to children in need including foster children, orphans and at risk youth.  They have a campaign going currently to provide "One Million Good Nights" to children in need.  They are working to collect one million pajamas and one million books to children by the end of 2015.  Bedtime and reading time are two of my favorite parts of being a mom and I think that every child deserves some peace and happiness at bedtime.  If I can help even a little bit with that, I'm all in.

In addition to the party I posted on Facebook to my family and friends that we were having a pajama & book drive and asked if anyone else wanted to help.  Before the party even started we had over 20 pair of pjs!  Amazon Prime and Target make it so easy to ship free so it's easy for people to help, even if just one book or one pair of pajamas to help make a difference in the life of a child.

We invited some of her friends over and asked them to bring new pjs or books with them.  Here they are with all of their donations.

I kept the decorations and food cheap as I wanted to spend my budget on pajamas and books.  I stapled up some dollar tablecloths to my windows and strung up some garland from my baby's nursery.

 

 

I wrote their names on the cups so we didn't go through more than necessary.

They strung fruit loop necklaces while we waited for everyone to arrive.

 

 

I threw out the idea of "pancakes & pjs" but she insisted on pizza so I ordered pizza and served fresh fruit & veggies.  Simple and done. For dessert they decorated pillow shaped sugar cookies.  I just used a knife to cut out pillow shapes.

I stitched up two pancake bean bags in the morning and we had a relay race with pancakes, bathrobes and teddy bears.  Then we played "hot pancake" with one of the bean bags.

 

 

 

Last I handed out glow necklaces and sent them to dance in the basement to the Frozen soundtrack.  They were in girl heaven. 

We sent them each home with donut skewers.

It was a fun night for a great cause and I'm excited that my kids are old enough now to get involved in serving others and seeing the results of their labors. 

At the end of the night, including things that were shipped this week, we ended up with over 50 books and 36 pair of pajamas.  We have more coming our way and are still collecting for another couple of weeks before we take them all to our local Pajama Program chapter.

I'll let you know what the final tally is in a couple of weeks!