The One-Hour-a-Week Giving Project: Part One 

• On day 14 of a 14 day holiday break, we had a family-come-to-Jesus moment. I had an ungrateful son on my hands. His emotions got ahead of him and he was convinced that this was the worst day of this life; he had to do things that he didn’t want to do but that he had to do…and for an entire day. I reminded him that unfortunately, this was the beginning of the rest of his life; doing things that we don’t always want to do.
• I feel like as as chatty-Mom, I engage in a lot of conversations with the kids that I am not sure “stick”. Many of you have been there: “You are some of the luckiest kids in the world”, “We have been blessed with a wonderful life”, “We should be so grateful….” and the list goes on.
• My goal for 2012 was to find some family “giving” opportunities that are repeatable and that engage an 8, 7 and 5 year old. I wanted this to be a family affair and not Mom calling her friend Angi who runs a non-profit — as that would have clearly looked like Mom wanted to hang out with a friend; I had to think beyond my gut!
• So I started making phone calls and I had to make a lot of them. Ironically when you call  folks and tell them you have an 8,7 and 5 year old that would like to do some volunteering they think you are on crack. I had several people basically hang up after telling me I was weird and that they had nothing.
• The kids and I talked a lot about what we CAN do and what they WANT to do.  They like “making stuff”.
• We agreed that one hour a week was fair and that there may be weeks that we can’t dedicate one hour — and then we can make up for that another week. The math was simple and understandable by all. There are 5 of us. If we all dedicate 1 hour a week that is 5 hours a week and 20 hours a month.
• We had a few ideas, I made a lot of calls, and we made one exploratory visit and we found a great fit!
• We are dropping off small 3-load servings of homemade laundry detergent and homemade coloring coloring pages and sharp new crayons to the Catholic Charities food bank bi-weekly.  More juicy details to come….