Kindness Catch-Up

Things are pretty wonky around our house right now and I just don’t have a lot of words to write.  I am slammed with life and work and if you’ve placed an order I promise I’m working just as fast as I can.

We started our Kindness Advent on December 1st and have been moving right along.  This is easily one of my favorite and most intentional times of the year.  Kindness does not have to be big and grand and expensive…it can be small and simple and free, but either way it’s always intentional.  This time of year reminds me and our family that kindness comes with intentionality.

So here’s what we’ve been up to.

December 1st: Buy toys for the Christmas store at church where people in the community who are struggling this time of year can get presents for their kiddos.  We really encouraged the kids to pick things they would love to receive themselves and they did awesome.  Amon might have asked 1000 times when he got to open the Mickey Mouse tool set he picked out to no avail.

December 2nd:  Share Sonic happy hour.  My phone was dead when we went to Sonic, but Harper decorated a cute little note with a Christmas tree and we taped it and a $5 gift card to the ordering board.  Easy easy.

December 3rd:  Paint wood slices and leave them at the park and on the sidewalks.  We added this one last year and it has become a fast favorite.  2 cousins happened to be over that day so we had some extra painting help.  We all walked down the street to enjoy our local Christmas parade and left these along the way too.  The kids absolutely loved this one.

December 4th:  Buy double packs of bar soap for the prison ministry at church.  Regular every day toiletry items cost much more than they should to inmates and the prison ministry at church is trying to help out this Christmas.  When checking out at Walgreens me and the cashier had the sweetest conversation about prison and people in prison.  She has some loved ones who are incarcerated and she shared some really valuable words with me.  Truth be known I wanted to reach across that counter and bear hug her.

December 5th:  Load trinket machines up with quarters.  The kids always love this one and are totally okay walking away empty handed.  This year we had too few machines and quarters leftover so we went ahead and turned some of them, left the trinket or candy under the silvery, metal flap and loaded the machine up again.

December 6th:  Treat and warm drink for our Salvation Army bell ringer.  When the kids got in the car after school the first thing Hudson said was, “Mom I brought a dollar to put in the bucket.”  I absolutely love that the kids love doing this.  I love the intentionality of this time because it’s one of the busiest, bustling times of the year.  There’s a Starbucks in our Kroger grocery store so we slipped past our sweet bell ringer and the kids picked out yummy treats…cake pops to be exact.  We noticed he was already drinking a coffee so we opted for a $5 gift card instead of an actual drink so he could get whatever he liked when he was ready.  We gave him the goodies, dropped in our monies, wished him a Merry Christmas and he was just the sweetest.  As we walked away Hudson said, “That felt good.”

Tomorrow is ornament delivery and everyone has their recipients picked out and ornament ready to go.

If you would like to follow along daily with our advent I’m sharing about it over on Instagram.

Happy Tuesday night!