The giving spirit comes from the heart....

Many people have asked me about our giving project. Some of you were exposed to it through the gifts we gave or the projects we conquered. So as promised, here is a post on it.

Our Advent box became a "giving box" this year. I was inspired by Jamie Schultz last year. After seeing that post by her I knew I wanted to conquer it in our house in 2011. Jamie is always blowing my mind with the inspiration she gives out to fellow photographers, mom's, etc... (a link to her 2011 version)... As she mentions it did take a bit of "homework" to make this successful for us. Aiden seemed to add his own bit of interpretation to it as he thinks that Santa helps Elfy (our elf on the shelf) fill the actual box... hmmmm.... we're going with this at this point since it's part of the holiday magic he's imagining on his own.

A couple of the things we did this year...

Aiden was asked to go through his bookshelf and pick 3 books to give to his former Pre-K classroom and his former Kindergarten classroom. I was very pleased weith the time and though he put into his choices. He ended up finding 5 books for each classroom.


Write a letter to your teacher telling her what you enjoy most.



We re-purposed our old crayons into new crayon gifts... First we unwrapped then sorted....

then filled the letter molds... bake, cool, pop out of the molds, repeat, package, give....


Aiden had the opportunity to go to the book signing and reading of an amazing new Christmas gift of a local Author and a local illustrator. "THE MAGICAL CHRISTMAS HORSE" .

Aiden donated one signed copy to his school and one signed copy to the local town library. Here he is in-front of the inspiration horses waiting to get his books signed by the author and illustrator.

and then presenting it to his teacher. They read it to his class and then he brought it up to the librarian for donation.


We made bird feeders for the wild birds. http://moffattgirls.blogspot.com/2011/02/toiletpaper-roll-bird-feeders.html


We donated formula to the school diaper drive.

Aiden wrote a letter and drew a picture to "Uncle Tommy" in Texas that we don't get to see over the holidays.
Aiden donated change from his piggy bank to the ArtsAlive coin sabotage mission going on at his school.


We gave eggs to some very special teacher's and his bus driver...


We had many others.

* Please do a Random Act of Kindness (RAK) today.
* Make someone smile today (this also included a smile sticker for each person in his class).
* Call one of your grandparents just to say you love them.
* Leave a box of cookies for UPS, USPS delivery, FedEX (all of which take such good care of throughout the year delivering all of your orders!)
* Write a letter to a soldier thanking them for their time away from their own family to protect our family.

.... and the list continues. We all enjoyed our experience doing this project and will definitely be doing this again in 2012.

To view my complete portfolio http://www.lenscapes-photo.com/index2