I needed a good day after spending our first day of Winter Break “helping” the youngers declutter, organize, and tidy their rooms–the least rewarding chore on the perpetual to-do list.
So my only goal for today was it be better than the day before, but the stars (and kids) aligned to make it one of my favorites. We started with the fourth Advent service, which is still a cozy online service for us. Then I started our mandatory Family Walk (usually known as Mama’s Forced March of Misery) by making our delivery of cookies and cards to all our neighbors first on our list. Kyla took one side of the street and the youngers the other as they ran between doorsteps and Dwayne and I with the packets for each neighbor, energized by their giving. Then we continued walking until we made it downtown, first to the Hawaiian BBQ food truck and then our local gift store for a yummy, yummy Kringle–an efficient way of regaining any calories we might have burned off.
We have a new downtown park with a fun lookout, where we ate our lunch and enough dessert to last until Christmas.
We all had been dismayed by the amount of garbage on our road down to town, so we gathered all the plastic bags we could find littered around, and as a family, picked up as much trash as we could hold….which only got us halfway back up the hill home. Just when we knew we’d have to give up the rest and just make it back home, a car pulled over just ahead of us. It was the man who was in charge neighborhood clean ups, but who hadn’t been able to arrange the usual litter pick ups with the county during COVID. But he was so happy to take all our garbage in his trunk and give us the three paper bags he had with him so we could continue the clean up! It felt amazing to have two good deeds do a head-on collision at the perfect time. We made it home, with our arms laden with more trash. The kids felt amazing about this Adventure, with a new pastry to crave and feeling great about making our town a better place. And I felt good about letting them have screen time the rest of the day.
The End
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