The Season of Giving.

Yesterday the kids and I spent our day off doing things for others.  I wish I could say that this was a magical experience that will linger in the lives of my kiddos forever- but lets be real :)

 At first my daughter had no interest in doing  "good deeds" because she didn't see the benefit for herself.  Sad I know....  But after a little encouragement and lists of ideas she jumped on board and was excited to go out and about with our plan and checklist of good deeds.

 It was a good day and the kids had fun doing things and being sneaky - but we still had our fair share of "Do we get one too? Can we have one of the cookies?  Can we buy something too?"  So I guess that means we have to keep working at it until it becomes a little more natural to do things for others without having a benefit for ourselves.

So here are a couple of our deeds for the day.....

#1 - We went to the mall and put quarters in all of the bubble gum machines for kids to find - Paige thought this was great!  It was funny to see how many people came up to us and kept trying to give the quarters back to us while we were filling the machines because we must have "forgotten it."  it was hard for them to wrap their fingers around the fact that we did it on purpose. We had planned to hide and watch some kids find the quarters, but it was early and the mall was pretty empty still.

 #2 -  We spent a lot of time on the 7th floor of Sandford Hospital while Grandma was having chemo treatments.  A lot of this time was spent doing puzzles that we found in the family room.  So we decided to go through some of our old puzzles at home and take the ones that still had all of the pieces to the 7th floor family room.  We also wrote a note to the nurses and doctors thanking them for taking such good care of grandma while she stayed with them, and brought them cookies too.  Hopefully other kids can enjoy our puzzles while they visit people on the 7th floor - and hopefully we never have to visit those nurses and doctors again :)

#3 - We left a bottle of laundry soap and a bag of quarters at a laundry mat for someone to find!

#4 - We shopped, wrote letters, and packed our "Operation Christmas Child Boxes."  This was part of a larger fundraiser that our church is participating in, but the kids had fun shopping for a kid their own age.  Paige loves the fact that these boxes will be traveling to another country-  Maybe even Atlanta (as Paige said).   We registered our boxes and will eventually get an email telling us where our boxes ended up in the world.  

#5 - Last but not least we put a note and cookies in the mailbox for the mailman!  We are very lucky to have John as our mailman he goes out of his way to make our life easier and always mails my letters when I don't have enough postage - He just leaves me a little sticky note letting me know I didn't have enough :)

 We have some more ideas up our sleeve for the next couple weeks so stay tuned :)