Service Spies

When I posted on FB about this blog, a friend led me to this site, which I followed to several other sites, and eventually to one called The Birthday Project.  All of which gave me ideas for our service project for this week . . .
They were calling it "Random Acts of Kindness", which mostly everyone gets, but alot of ours were more just anonymous.  On Monday of this week, we had a Family Home Evening lesson (curious about what that is?  Read more here and here.) about kindness - one, because of this impending project and two, because my boys needed a little reminding about how to treat their brothers. ;)  But I realized in planning that discussion with my kids, that kindness is more a way of being, a way of acting and a way of treating people.  So "random acts of kindness" would come from being who we are, or who we should be, all the time.  So hence, while this project was inspired by people blogging about their random acts of kindness, we decided we would actually call it our "Anonymous Acts to Make People Smile" or AAMPS.  I hope it catches on. :)

So here's what we did and why with all this sneaking around, my boys dubbed themselves the "Service Spies" :

*Hid pennies around the playground (heads up, of course) for kids to find as they played.

*Taped microwave popcorn to 6 different Redbox locations with a notes that said "Enjoy your movie!" or "Have some popcorn with your movie and enjoy this random act of kindness!" or Cody's "Relax and enjoy your movie!"

 

*Left a packages of diapers and wipes inside the changing tables in the mall bathrooms.

 

*Left quarters on 8 different vending machines at the hospital. (This was the boys' favorite and where being a "service spy" really came into play as they tried not to let anyone see us.)

We also stopped to get food for meals for two families and gift certificates for the local grocery store to go with it (which we organized in bags and left on their porch later that night).  While we were there, we bought one of the pre-packaged bags that you can donate right then and there to the food bank.

We had LOTS of other ideas that we didn't get to do, but we had so much fun, I'm sure we'll do this again some time.  The end of the day was supposed to culminate as we handed out Otter-Pops at the park to all the hot, sweaty kids, but turns out they take longer to freeze than we thought, so we'll just have to save that for another day.  We did have fun cooling off at the splash pad though!  A great end to a great day!