Avoiding "the Gimmies" in 2011: 30 Days of Thankfulness-Day 1

New year, new Thankfulness tree:)
If you are joining us for the first time, you may want to read my post on Avoiding "the Gimmies", which explains more about our motivation for the Thankfulness tree.

I'm trying to combine our month of thankfulness with a 30 Days of Intentional Acts of Kindness with your kids challenge from Jenae over at
I Can Teach My Child. I'm trying to come up with ideas that cost little to no money, and that has been a challenge as I've pondered what intentional acts of kindness we can do each day. Our acts may consist of lots of note writing/picture sending or phone calls to brighten up someone's day, but the point is to be MORE INTENTIONAL in showing kindness, so that is our goal:)
I'm going to TRY to post EVERY day...but if you've been reading this blog for more than two seconds, you know that our chaos and life of our family of seven, in general, can be an obstacle to blog posting, so my posts will most likely be short and simple.

Today our Intentional Act was something I've been meaning to do for awhile now. The children make loads of drawings and I always feel bad getting rid of them, but realize that we can't save them all. So I addressed some envelopes for some lovely folks who need a little sunshine to brighten their days and wrote a note on each drawing to let them know that we prayed for them today. Unfortunately, they did not make it to the mail today, so I've stumbled already on Day 1...surprise, surprise:) We'll be mailing our first "kindness" tomorrow!

Over the next 30 days, I'll also try to share with you just SOME of the things for which the Shoe Seven is thankful.

Here is what we added to our tree today:

Hope-"Jesus dying on the cross for our sins" (Amen, sister. Amen!)

Hank-"A mom who cooks."

Mattie-"Friends and family"

Silas-"Being nice"

Zeke-"Pancakes" (It's what we were having for breakfast this morning when we wrote on our leaves:)

Me-"My husband and five children" (And all of the above, of course:)


I would love to know if you are doing your own "Thankfulness tree" or 30 Days of Intentional Kindness with your kids, so leave a comment and join in the fun!