Acts of Kindness

Today we talked about acts of kindness and how important they are and the various ways that we can be kind and ways we can experience kindness. The day began with a trip to the grocery store (a rare occurence in our household) and it was a stressful trip - Sirah was miserable and had to be carried most of the time, and of course i forgot my sling. The other two were asking every 30 seconds if they could have this or that and I had a long list to get through. We went to the cheap warehouse type store and so by the time I got to the checkout I had to put Sirah down to load the belt with groceries and then to pack - she was MISERABLE and there was nothing I could do. Thankfully a kind woman came over and offered to help - she held Sirah for me while I finished loading the groceries into the cart and talked to the other two. Then we sat on a bench and I nursed Sirah while I talked to the kids about how kind that woman had been to us. As we were driving in the parking lot we saw a woman with two small children dop a case of soda pop cans all over the parking lot. A young man stopped and looked at her, turned around to keep going and then headed back to help her. It made me smile and we used that teachable moment to talk about acts of kindness again.

Later this evening we brought a meal, complete with salad and brownies, over to our friend who just had a baby. We talked about how we were being kind to this family and how that was for us to do. As the kids were sad to see brownies leaving the house (I did let them each have one) we talked about how they thought the boys in that family would feel getting brownies and then they were excited to share. Then we cleaned up around our house to get ready for our homeschool group coming over tommorrow.

I love days like this. When we can take the events of the day and turn them into meaningful lessons. Working with the "teachable moments" is one of my favorite aspects of homeschooling.

Peace,
Tenn