Shoes continued...

Emma and I ended up helping about 25 sunday school kids learn about shoes. Emma painted some really awesome canvas (stripes to keep it simple) that was cut into shoes. When I showed her the video with the jiggers and the foot cleaning she asked a million questions and made me replay it about 5 times. Emma was a great helper and I think this may have turned out to impact her more than I had expected! Now her bedtime prayers include being thankful for all of her shoes:-)

Sole Hope

This week has been busy mostly with stuff from my glorious commitment to Sole Hope. Tonight Emma and I are flying to South Florida to visit family and to take all of the sunday school classes at his church through the process of making the uppers of our shoes. Sunday night we will do it with the youth group and monday we will do it with my mothers classes in the attached grade school.
Between that and all of the amazing interest folks have shown in hosting their own shoe cutting parties and Emma getting sick - its been a tough week to decide where we should give service. Then I thought why don't I have emma help me...So this week she will be painting canvas that will be made into shoes and also helping to pass out fabric and supplies to all of the 100+ kids! I am also planning on showing her the video that was Sole Hopes inspiration so that she understands a little more. For months I have been trying to explain why I have been working on this project and she likes to say "some kids don't have any shoes on their shoe shelf." But, I am excited to show her the video too.

First Day of Service!!!

Today Emma and I had our volunteer orientation at Brother Wolf and then stayed for a while and gave attention to some cats and dogs that seemed very happy to have some love!
All afternoon Emma has been talking about why the dogs didn't have mommies and daddies to take them home from the kennels at night. Its brought about some great dialog! It was a fun time to spend together and certainly something we will do again and again. The dogs and cats loved the attention...pretty awesome day for us too!

This week...Brother Wolf

We are going to start our year of service at Brother Wolf this week. We are going to walk dogs and give some puppy baths. Its been interesting trying to explain to Emma that the dogs don't have mommies to take care of them and need us to give them some love. I am super excited to begin this journey!

Starting Sooner!!!

So, I thought it would be good to wait until April since its national volunteer month but it turns out I'm not creative enough to come up with things to blog about without doing something.  (This is my first blog...and I'm a bit shy). So, I thought, why wait???  I can make April a goal of trying to find 10 other mom's to do this with me by then...in honor of national volunteer month...so, I will start next week!!

Just an idea...

I have recently become a stay-at-home mom...and over the last few years as my husband and I worked to make this happen and talked about all of the reasons why this is important to us...one of the big reasons for busting our butts to make this happen for me was that I want to be intentional about the things my kids (well - hopefully more than one some day) learn.
We all want this, right...but when your so busy, it's hard to make some of those really important things happen.  Anyway, I have always wanted to make sure that I did more to serve my community with my daughter, Emma. Like many awesome mom's its really important to me that my daughter learns to live a life in service to the community around her. I know I don't always do enough with all of my blessings...but somehow this idea of helping Em learn to be giving even when life is busy...with her own hands...is really important to me. And now that I am LUCKY enough to have the time to really do this regularly with my daughter, I am hoping that my ideas will help others to do these things with their kids too!
So, the purpose of this blog/project...will be to help Mom's like me where ever...lead their kids in service to their community. April is national volunteer month so we will kick off our year of service then. I am hoping that between now and then I will just get the word out a little. What I picture now...is activities like cooking for your local soup kitchen, writing letters to nursing homes, going through your toys and bringing old ones to a children's home...each week we will all do just one really awesome service project and hopefully blog about it.  Maybe even get groups of mom's together to do some of the bigger ones...
Just an idea...