Kindness catch up: care packs, scarves, soap, and our mailman

In case you’re following along with Toddler Approved’s Kindness Challenge, here is their Week 3 project.  I have 8 days left to get to 100 acts of kindness… uh oh.  (Here are my posts from Week 1 and Week 2.)

“Wherever there is a human in need, there is an opportunity for kindness and to make a difference.”  ~ Kevin Heath

Continuing with our goal of spreading kindness, over the holidays I bought 26 items to distribute to a few homeless people in our area.  My daughter and I already hand restaurant gift cards to a homeless person when we see one.  She is adamant that the red (McDonalds) ones are for the women and the yellow (Subway) ones are for the men.

There are so many everyday accessories and toiletries we take for granted – toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, deodorant, clean socks.  She liked helping assemble the bags and insisted she do it all by herself.  I asked her to imagine how she’d feel if she didn’t have these basic items.

This is a pretty easy act of kindness to do… by donating even the smallest items to those who don’t have them, you’ll be providing someone with a greater sense of self-worth.

We handed the bags out over the next couple of months.

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Karen from Chookooloonks went to the Houston Area Women’s Center and reported back that they were in desperate need of regular, ordinary bars of bath soap.  She asked her subscribers to help her fill up her trunk with soap so she could deliver it to them.  I sent her a package of soap and added some beautiful hand-knit scarves that my mother wanted to donate to people who would appreciate and need them.  Thanks, mom! While I was on a roll, I tucked in a note to Karen thanking her for doing this and also asking for a coffee date.  (Remember my 2013 goal of doing daring things?! Yay me!)

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Another kindness we did over the holidays was bake cookies for our awesome mailman, Bruce.  In case you can’t tell by the picture, he thought they were yummy.

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As part of the National Day of Service on MLK weekend, I signed up to help the Human Rights Campaign at the Montrose Center.  They were supporting LGBT homeless and at-risk youth because LGBT youth are disproportionately affected – 40% of homeless and at-risk youth are LGBT (due mostly to family rejection).  In Houston, odds are 1 in 4 that  if you come out at home before you are 18, you will be homeless by your 18th birthday.  They needed personal care items, small winter essentials, and first aid supplies so my daughter and I stopped at the dollar store with their list of needs and then took them over to the Montrose Center with about 50 other people to sort them into backpacks.