Happy New Year!
Deena and I have been a little quiet lately. Deena has been busy with doctor’s visits and traveling to Texas to see a specialist regarding her son’s cancer treatment (which I believe was a positive trip!). My excuse is, well, just an excuse. I’d like to use the “holiday stress” card, if I may. We have FOUR Christmases in my household and although we only hosted one this year, there’s a lot of present-buying, organizing, dividing, labeling, returning, buying some more, wrapping, wrapping, and wrapping. So the thought of doing any sort of blog-writing was in the WAY back of my mind.
But, I resolve in 2012 to spend more time on our ERTH site. I think our ideas and intentions are headed in the right direction, we just need to put more effort into it. So count on more from us this year!
Speaking of intentions, a friend of mine changed the word “resolution” to “intention” this year, and I really like it! There’s so much pressure behind the word resolution, it sounds so definitive and almost punishable if you don’t do it. Why be so hard on ourselves? But “intention” sounds much gentler. If the good intention is there, that’s the first step to making a change. So what do you intend to do or change in 2012?
I’m expecting the gym to be packed this week. I think everyone at some point in their lives, probably several times in their lives, resolve to exercise more, get healthier or lose weight at the beginning of the year. So yeah, I’m intending to do that too, eat healthier, take care of myself, run more, yadda, yadda, yadda. But I wanted to come up with something different for me.
As you may recall, I introduced Random Acts of Kindness to my kids this season via their Advent calendar. Some things went well, others not so much, didn’t have quite the impact I was expecting. But the one thing we did that made a huge impact on my 8 year old? Helping the Salvation Army with their Holiday Toy Coalition. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go, but my 8 year old really got it this year and actually left the warehouse saying he had fun and that it made him feel good to help put together boxes for other less-fortunate kids. You can imagine I was just beaming from ear to ear and totally basking in my proud mommy moment.
But it made me realize, I don’t do enough of that type of charity myself, not just around the holidays but all year long. So for 2012, I intend to not only do more random acts of kindness, but to just volunteer more. I do my fair share at my kids’ schools, but I want to go outside my comfort zone a bit and find something where I can give back. I don’t know what that thing is yet, but I intend to find out and act on it.
In closing, on this first day of 2012, I’ll leave you with some pictures taken during our holiday Random Acts of Christmas Kindness.
My youngest about to deliver a bag of supplies to the local homeless shelter:
My oldest taping microwave popcorn to our local Redbox machine:
All the bags we helped prepare for the Salvation Army Holiday Toy Coalition (and this was only about a quarter of the room): 
And finally, this has nothing to do with Random Acts of Kindness, but I had to share. This is my dog helping Santa with the kids’ gifts this year:
[…] year, we’ve jumped on the bandwagon and written about New Year’s resolutions (2011 resolutions, 2012 resolutions). I know it’s what everyone does each year but I never go back and write about how […]