Day 1

This morning, I arrived at the New Milford Senior Center a few minutes before 8:30, which was the time that I said I would arrive. Alexis arrived at just about the same time, and we walked in together. After speaking with Lynn shortly in her office, we headed over to the kitchen. She began by explaining the proper food safety measures that we had to take, and then handed gloves and a hairnet to each of us.  Our first task was to prepare a few of the side dishes for lunch, which included Mandarin oranges and Chow mein noodles, both of which we placed in small cups for distribution. Meanwhile, Lynn was struggling to figure out why her food thermometers were reading -200 degrees Fahrenheit for some of the hot dishes, but she eventually got one of them to display the correct readings. Then, as the seniors played their daily game of Bingo, Lynn showed us the book shelves, and told us that she'd love if we would organize them, so we put all of the books in alphabetical order by the last names of the authors. We also cleaned up the bulletin board by getting rid of any outdated flyers and hanging up a new one. Before we knew it, lunchtime came around. I was assigned the task of ladling the soup into styrofoam cups. Then, we formed an assembly line and put the entree, vegetables, and rice on trays for distribution. Following lunch, we took out the birthday cake from the fridge for one of the seniors, Rosemarie. We put candles on it and sang happy birthday, and Rosemarie was ecstatic, especially when told that her son had delivered the cake for her this morning! After a kiss from her husband, she blew out the candles and the cake was distributed for everyone to enjoy. The last thing we had to do was wash all of the dishes in three sinks: the first was for soaping, the next was for rinsing, and the third was for rinsing in bleach. After we dried all of the dishes, Lynn told us that we could go home. We made our way through the main room, where a Tai-chi class was in session, and headed home for the day. Time went very quickly while we were there, and I enjoyed helping out. Can't wait to see what we'll be doing tomorrow!