January 21st

Nathan:


For my day I mixed it up a little. I was sitting at home getting ready to leave for work when I looked at my cabinets and thought I really would like to finish sanding and staining them. It's a project I've started and am finding it hard to have time to work on them. It would have been nice to play hookie from work and continue on with my sanding project. But then I started thinking about other things around the house that Mel and I have found hard to keep up. For the last 5 years since we moved to KC, Mel has been a stay at home mom and recently she started working a full time job. Which means the kids and I need to pick up the pace on helping around the house more in order to keep it up. Sad to say we have done a very poor job of that. So it hit me that today my act of kindness needed to be to show Mel that I am committed to helping out. So that's what I did. I did the dishes, folded laundry, re organized our closet and did some detail cleaning in our bedroom. I also wanted to give the Mel the night off and went to the store picked up a movie Mel's been wanting to see and prepared some dinner for the family. When Mel got home, to her surprise everything was taken care of so she was able to take a bath, eat a very average meal, read a little out of her book, and watch a movie. Although the night turned out to be a success I learned a very important lesson and hopefully the kids and I can continue to show kindness to Mel and understand the sacrifice she is making by going to work full time and that we all need to consistently do our part in helping around the house more.

While folding the laundry and playing hookie from work (don't tell my boss) I watched a movie that I rented for the whole family to watch. Thankfully to Mel's wisdom she said it would be best to watch the film before allowing the kids to watch to make sure it was all right. I'm glad I did because though the movie had a good message it had some adult situations that might have been inappropriate for our kids to experience and the ending was completely devastating. The movie that I watched was "Pay it forward". It's a story about a kid (Trevor) who is given a homework assignment at the beginning of his 7th grade school year. The story starts out with a reporter who gets his car totalled and man walks up to him and hands him the keys to his Jaguar and says it's yours. The reporter can't believe it and then starts investigating why someone would do something like this. The homework assignment was to think of something that could change the world and then put it into action. As you later find out the teacher Mr. Simone didn't actually believe that the homework assignment would cause the students to actually change the world but what he was trying to do was allow the students to actually believe they could make a difference. But Trevor was different and he took this assignment literally. While riding his bike home from school one day he went by an area that homeless people live and he invites a homeless guy to stay at his house. You see Trevor's idea was to do 3 big things to help 3 different people and the only thing that he wanted in return for helping someone was that they "Pay it forward" and do 3 big things to help 3 different people. The idea was that it would catch on and continue to multiply. As the movie goes on Trevor only sees that his acts of kindness fail when in reality although some do fail one actually works and "Pay it forward" changes the lives of many. When the reporter finally tracks down the source of "Pay it forward" he is shocked that an eleven year old boy is the creator and Trevor had no idea that his plan had actually worked.

In reality, we will never know how far our acts of kindness (big or small) will go or whether we can change peoples lives or the world with them. But I think it's important that we understand that it can and that we continue to show kindness to others even though we may not see the benefits of our kindness. One day we will know.