Service Project

This morning I went for a walk. While I was walking down my street, I found myself thinking, it would sure be embarrassing if I had toilet paper hanging out the back of my pants. Why? Who knows? But as I turned the corner, I notice a house that had been severely toilet papered. I was so disgusted by this senseless high school prank. I was thinking back to when I had to clean up TP mess from someone who TP'd a friends house and to the time when a kid I went to high school with dropped the transmission in his dad's Taurus while sitting at the end of our driveway, waiting to TP my house. So I hustled back home as fast as I could go and told my family we were going to do a "service project". I explained what had happened and told them we were going to help pick it up. So we grabbed jackets and garbage bags and headed down there. The people who lived there were already out picking up, but seemed glad to have help (since their high school aged kids were still in the house sleeping - never in my household), but I digressed. My kids were eager to get out and get the TP picked up, much to my surprise! They hustled and picked up 4 garbage bags full of TP and plastic forks. The adults in the group kept mentioning what a waste of money this was. The man whose house it was mentioned that they had a birthday party tomorrow and they should just keep and wash the forks for the party. Glad I am not going to that party. Really, they were all thrown away. The work was done really quickly and my kids seemed so proud of all they had accomplished, especially helping other people. Here I thought I was going to teach a lesson and as we got in the car Grace said to me, "Mom, it was really nice to help those people. They would have had a lot of work to do if we would not have helped." Smart kid. I told them all (even Jadyn really got into it) how proud I was of them for going to help people they did not know and for not expecting anything in return. Just the nice feeling of helping someone. What a great morning!