Thanks and Giving

It turns out that having two kids under 4, a successful career, wonderful family and friends near by makes the opportunity to blog hard; almost an unsurmountable obstacles. It occurs to me to take some pictures and I make a mental note to jot something down about the moment, and then just like sands through the hourglass, these are the days of lives.

November is time of year that we all should take the time to be thankful. Some folks post a daily thanks on Facebook or Twitter, add a hashtag and admittedly, that's sort of nice. I like seeing them, but some how I am not diligent enough to pull off such commitment for 30 days. At home with the girls we have a little tree that once a week we ask the girls what they are thankful for and we write it on a leaf and add it to a tree. On the coffee table in the living room we have pulled all the Thanksgiving children's books out and we've been reading them off and on.

However, our goals as mentioned in my epic last post is to give and minimize our stuff. So we have been working on that. For our church service project we put together a few boxes for Operation Christmas Child. We had the girls pick out items at Target. They colored pictures. I also had been hoarding shoeboxes, so I sent those to church too. We packed up 2 boxes designated for girls ages 2-4 and 1 for a boy age 2-4.

We gleaned the playroom with the girls again and took the items to Metropolitan Ministries. We arrived on the day that Met Ministries was breaking the world's record on the most food ever collected. News fans were present and volunteers were gathered around a giant thermometer. The excited was palpable and Tampa Bay beat the record. It was amazing!

Our last contribution over the last few weeks was with the help of the boy scouts in our neighborhood that are collecting food for the hungry. They dropped off a bag at the door asking for canned food. We simply put in a few cans that we had on hand. It couldn't have been easier.

When I was taking pictures and conceiving of this blog entry, I wondered about potential boastfulness of blogging about our family giving. It occurs to me that I am proud to be working on serving others. To be more conscience of the needs of others and the abundance of advantage that I have. I am proud that we are hoping to teach our girls by example. And I do believe if you are able you should care for others in the world in whatever way you can. If you share about your service to others, perhaps someone will feel moved to do that same. Thus to accusations of boastfulness, I say NEH! Join us in trying out best to help those in need.