813

"What a strange number..."

Yep.

I'm one of the Box Top assistants for my son's elementary school PTA. Aren't I Little Miss Involved, huh? This was a good program to get involved in since I have a deployment in early 2009 that would mess up my being a room Mom or a PTA officer. Maybe next year.

Actually the group of us does a lot more than just the Box Tops for Education Program ($0.10 per label). We also help with the Campbell's Soup Labels for Education (earn points, use points to buy supplies for the school), Tyson's Project A+ ($0.24 per label), and Land O Lake's Save Five for Schools ($0.05 per milk cap).

The school calls the entire program "Trash to Treasure".

Every month, on the last school day of the month, each class turns in their accumulated "Trash" and the totals are tabulated. The class with the most labels/caps earns an incentive of some sort.

Jake's class won for September, whoo hoo, with 534 items turned in.

Anyway, this week I picked up my sack of labels to clean up and organize. My task is to trim the Box Tops for Education (less excess around the label = less postage weight) and bag them in groups of 100. The sack I picked up was a gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled to the brim with labels. Whoa.

Yesterday I set Timmy at our kitchen table with Play Doh and other crafts while I sat with him and trimmed labels. You can see the untrimmed on the left, the trimmed on the right.

So I ended up with 813 labels trimmed and bagged. They range in size from 2" x 3" (like on a box of Toaster Streudel) to smaller than a fingernail (Pillsbury Crescent Rolls). My hands will be paying me back for this come wintertime -- my hand pain has been a 24-hour cold front forecast for the past 3 years.

Trimming the labels I learned about the wide variety of products that have the labels, from Huggies to Caribou Coffee granola bars.

And I have to admit, today at the grocery store I was keeping an eye out for products with the labels...

...which is a corollary benefit to this program, huh? General Mills, Pillsbury, Kimberly Clark and Betty Crocker are steering us Moms-of-kids-in-school to their products.