I love when I see inspiring stories amidst the depressing news of the day.

Doctor’s love, money, help families of ‘miracle babies’

By Erika Clarke. CNN



Two of my favorite words are “Thank you.” But how to these words become an attitude of appreciation? As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches, I’m eager to find a way to teach my kids the deeper feeling of gratitude. The best way I’ve found to learn it myself is through active service to others. We’ve been brainstorming what our family project will be this year and think we’ve found it.

Growing up in North Carolina, my dad was responsible for both the spiritual and temporal needs of many in our church community. Our family often spent Thanksgiving weekend raking the thousands of leaves at the homes of widows or single mothers. My mom would typically make 2 dinners, one for us and one for a family without means to provide their own dinner. The effect was unforgettable for a 9-year old. I can still see the appreciation in the faces of those we visited, as I realized I’d done something for someone else, that they could not have done for themselves.

This year, my daughter’s school created a “Helping Hands” project. Our school will help collect and wrap donations for another school in our district where 93 percent of the students receive lunch assistance. As the students in the disadvantaged school complete assignments, they earn points to go shopping in a Rewards Store. Hot-selling items include Cup-O-Noodles and packages of new underwear. Other items stocked include school supplies, basic hygiene supplies and toys. While many businesses donate supplies to the Rewards Store, due to the depressed economy, those donations have dwindled. The Helping Hands project will help re-stock the Store before the Winter Break.

We have planned a clean-out day for our toy room and my kids are excited to take some of their own money and come shopping with me for new gifts. Our school is hosting an activity before the holiday when donations can be wrapped in clear cello bags and tags added. Then, we’ll get to help deliver and stock the Rewards Store with our treats. In a year when businesses have cut back in their donations, we know that the little effort our family can make to help will mean a lot. For me, I’m hoping my kids will remember what it feels like to do something for others and that the word gratitude will mean more than before.

Did you know teachers spend an average of $1200 of their own money on classroom supplies each year? That’s $4 billion annually! That’s why OfficeMax joined with Adopt-A-Classroom to create "A Day Made Better" a national cause event founded to erase teacher-funded classrooms.

This year, A Day Made Better will take place on October 6 where 1,000 teachers will be surprised in their classrooms each with $100 worth of essential supplies from OfficeMax. That is more than one million dollars donated to help teachers! Principals at needy schools nominated the teachers for demonstrating dedication, innovation, and passion. To pay-it-forward, OfficeMax, MomitForward, TodaysMama and others have teamed up to create awareness about the issue of teacher-funded classrooms and to give you the opportunity to get involved and help a teacher in your community on behalf of the A Day Made Better.

Here’s how: Simply nominate a teacher of your choice to win this giveaway by following the entry requirements. Be sure to check out the prize and criteria!

Prize

One exceptional teacher will receive a ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR gift card to OfficeMax. This can go a long way when it comes to classroom supplies! 

This is a giveaway that is meant to be given away. What does that mean? You get to nominate a teacher by sharing why this person is exceptional and deserving of this giveaway. The best part, every story told helps raise awareness in an effort to erase teacher-funded classrooms. The winning teacher will be chosen based on the following criteria, so be sure to tell us why your teacher is most deserving:

• Dedication: does everything in his/her power to deliver the best possible education for his/her students.
• Innovation: thinks outside the box and engages his/her students through creative learning activities & programs.
• Passion: expresses a genuine passion for education and shares this enthusiasm in the classroom.
• Need: demonstrates a need for essential classroom supplies.

Entry Requirements

To enter your teacher, you are required to do two things.

1. Nominate them through a blog post or on Whrrl.

Write a post on your blog.

• You can include photos, video, etc. but please stay under 400 words or 3 minutes.
• Please include these links: http://adaymadebetter.com or @adaymadebetter.
• Email your link to info@todaysmama.com with "Office Max" in the subject line

OR

Create a story on Whrrl.com.

• Go to our custom Whrrl page at http://whrrl.com/search?q=omx, click Start A Story and upload photos and text about why your teacher is most deserving.
• Be sure to include the #omx hashtag in the text of your story.
• Post a link to your Whrrl story in the comments section.

2. Post these messages on Facebook and/or Twitter.

• Teachers spend avg $1200 of own $$ on school supplies annually! Help erase teacher-funded classrooms. http://bit.ly/3VUNvC PLS RT #omx
• Nominate a teacher 2 win $100 in OfficeMax classroom supplies. Enter here: www.todaysmama.com PLS RT #omx
• Join the A Day Made Betterî movement to end teacher-funded classrooms at http://bit.ly/UJ3LF #omx

More than 30 sites (including TodaysMama.com) are participating in this campaign between now and Sunday, October 4. Visit http://momitforward.com for a list of all the giveaways! You may enter a different teacher on every site, but you may only win once! Thanks so much for helping pay-it-forward to teachers in your community! Please join us on Tuesdays, September 22 and 29 from 9 to 11 pm ET for Girls Night Out (#gno) on Twitter if youíd like to meet the team behind the cause: @officemax, @adaymadebetter and @Adopt_Classroom. Hope to see you there!

Fine Print

Entries are due Sunday, October 4 by midnight PDT. No purchase necessary to enter. Winners will be selected by me based on the entry that in my opinion meets the above criteria. OfficeMax, Adopt-A-Classroom and Mom It Forward play no part in choosing the winner of this giveaway. OfficeMax, Adopt-A-Classroom, TodaysMama.com and Mom It Forward employees are ineligible to enter. In a spirit of fairness, my personal friends and family members are also ineligible. Entries that do not follow all of the entry requirements will not be considered. The winner will be notified and have 24 hours to confirm receipt of the email. If no response is received within 24 hours, another winner will be selected. Open to participants in the U.S. 18 years and older.

Guest Post from Jyl Johnson Pattee:

I recently wrote an article on MomItForward.com about 10 tips for raising charitable, giving children and it got me thinking. One of the best ways to teach your children to be service-oriented is to model the behavior for them. With that in mind, I created the Summer of Service (SOS) Challenge. It’s easy, fun, and will make a big difference.

The SOS Challenge

Make a meaningful difference this summer by taking the Summer of Service (SOS) Challenge. Here’s how:

Commit to do one act of kindness each week based on the week’s challenge.

Leave a comment on MomItForward.com with ideas relating to the week’s challenge as well as your experience(s) performing it.

Grab the SOS button and put it on your blog or social networking site.

Enter to win each week’s giveaway.

Join #gno to connect with other MomItForward.com moms about the challenge.

The Giveaways

The fun part? Each week, a different company will be sponsoring the challenge and they come bearing gifts! You can enter to win one of the giveaway prizes every week.

Last Week’s Challenge: Make Some Music & Make a Difference

Week 1 included a Twitter Girl’s Night Out (#gno) with recording artist Diane Birch along with these music oriented ideas on how YOU can make a difference.

• Teach your children your three favorite childhood songs. Perform them for others.
• Play an instrument with your child or sign your child up for music lessons.
• Share your musical talent(s) with others—to friends or family, over the phone or skype to loved ones that live far away, to strangers: at a nursing home or to a homeless person.
• Dedicate a song on the radio, on Twitter, on Facebook, or on your blog to someone you care about.
• Share the gift of music with someone by sending them an iTunes gift card, a CD, etc.
• Find out your dad’s 10 favorite songs, download, and burn them onto a CD for him for Father’s day.
• Send a loved one a letter/message with the words to a song that sums up your feelings for him/her.
• Set a great tone in your home by playing music in the background.
• Make up stories about classical music (or other wordless songs) and tell them to your children as the music is playing.
• Dance with your children!

Go to MomItForward.com to see the SOS Challenge for this week.

By Danielle Smith

Reprinted with permission from MomItForward.com. Original post date: April 21, 2009

Less than 2 weeks ago, something terrible happened.

A mother and father took their little girl to the hospital.

Sweet Madeline Alice Spohr never came home again.

Maddie lived 17 beautiful, amazing months. In that time, she touched lives and brightened the world of everyone who met her.

News of her passing rippled across the Blog World. Friends and family of Maddie’s parents, Heather and Mike Spohr, reached out to help.

Something happened. One person shared the story of Maddie with another, and then that person passed on the light of this little girl – until hundreds of people were wringing their hands in their own homes across the country—feeling helpless, wondering what they could do to ease the pain of this family they didn’t even know.

Strangers sat at their computers late at night, reading post after post about the beauty of this little girl, about the tragedy of her loss, and sharing their need to help. Crying was the norm.

The color purple became a rally cry—Twitter Avatars changed color, Twitter backgrounds switched to purple, blog backgrounds made the jump.

Heather’s close friend became the source for information. AMomTwoBoys was where you could go for all things Maddie. You could find:

· Links to all the amazing tributes to this little girl (close to 500 of them)

· Learn about how to donate to the March of Dimes in Maddie’s honor. In less than 2 weeks, more than $31,000 has been raised. I understand 90% of that has been in increments of less than $25 or less.

· She even sent you to the websites that had the links for buttons to help the family—neither Heather or Mike are working right now and clearly, expenses are overwhelming.

And that love for Heather, Mike and Maddie continues to spread.

If you want to join a March of Dimes team and walk for Maddie in your home town, SarcasticMom has you covered. There are more than 50 teams nationwide set up in her honor. You can even buy a T-shirt, designed by Heather Durdill.

If you want to know who took the ‘purple’ to heart – SarcasticMom tackled that too. From purple toenails, to hairbows, to t-shirts—Maddie was honored everywhere. The day of her Memorial Service, April 14th, purple balloons were released. As I strolled around the Midwest, I was tempted to ask everyone I saw that day if the purple they were wearing was for Maddie.

And because friends often know just what someone needs—the entire front page of Blog Nosh Magazine has dedicated their entire front page to Maddie and another special group has created bracelets that symbolize the beauty of Maddie—while helping to raise money to offset expenses for her family.

I bought one. I should have it soon.

I will wear it everyday.

Not because I knew Heather. Not because I ever met Maddie.

But because I care. Because I can’t imagine the pain. Because I would want to know that people won’t forget the angel I lost.

If you want to know how you can still help, never fear, there are moms ‘momming-it-forward’ as we speak – and they have the answers.

If you would like to get right to the heart of Maddie – visit her Daddy, Mike and Mommy, Heather.

Pictures are from Maddie’s mom, Heather’s website.

By Ethan Fletcher

It was supposed to be a short-term project.

To earn his Eagle Scout badge, Lafayette resident Justin Batcheller decided to send care packages to local soldiers deployed in war zones. Two years later, his project has morphed into Operation Lamorinda Soldier, a nonprofit for which he is the executive director.

“I’m able to interact with these soldiers who are doing something that I could never do. There’s no way I could go over to Iraq or Afghanistan and risk my life day after day after day,” says the 17-year-old Campolindo High senior and member of Troop 204. “This lets me understand just how real it is.”

Postal and military red tape meant that Batcheller could spend up to two hours at the post office for each overseas shipment, sending more than 500 packages. That doesn’t include gathering the supplies, including new socks for soldiers, toys for Iraqi children, and sweatshirts and shorts for Iraqi postsurgery trauma victims.

Still, the effort has been worth it, says Batcheller, who has developed a deep respect for the soldiers he has helped. Soldiers such as Campolindo grad Ben Grover, an Army Ranger who served as a captain in an infantry division in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Lt. Commander Dr. Jeffrey McClellen, who worked at a trauma unit near Fallujah.

Community response to Batcheller’s program has been enthusiastic, even in an area known for Lafayette’s war memorial of white crosses. “Whether they say this war is wrong or right, everyone seems to be able to get behind the idea of helping out these soldiers,” he says. Most would agree that he has provided an invaluable service.

“I think the biggest thing for me personally, and my own mental sanity with all the stuff that was going on, was the connection with people from back home,” says Capt. Grover. “It keeps you grounded, keeps you going strong.”

Published: Diablo, December 2008

Author Bio: Ethan Fletcher is the assistant editor of Diablo magazine.

Since this was a Christmas when our married children and their little ones would not be arriving at our house until after Christmas, we decided to take our single children Josh, Talmadge, Eli and Charity on a service expedition to Mexico. The expedition was organized by Ascend Alliance and the wonderful Garbett Family who have been working with the Mexican people for about eight years. They have seven children and have been providing scholarships for many gifted kids who can’t afford to go to high school without their help.

Our Christmas gift to our four single kids was the expedition, but we did have Christmas stockings the morning we left stuffed with work gloves, hand sanitizer, Imodium and some gummy bears for the road! We left our house on December 21, in a wild flurry, having lost (30 minutes before departure) and found Charity’s passport. I had absent-mindedly put it in the garbage along with a pile of Christmas card envelopes. Only slightly soggy and in good condition, I found it about half way down in the trash compactor.

After that adventure, the real adventure began complete with sitting on the tarmac on our transfer plane in Las Vegas for an hour because there was a black-out at the Mexico City airport. This caused us to miss the last bus at 2:30 a.m. to the village of Puebla, the site of our first project. A cute little old Mexican “guardian angel” rescued us and found a suburban driver who transported us to the village in time for our service project. It had been planned by the local high school scholarship students (an annual requirement for all those who receive the Garbett scholarships).

All day we cleaned the community park, sweeping and painting and enjoying the Saturday community cultural events which included a mass that ended with fireworks at the church, two weddings and a basketball game between the Mexican kids and the gringos (Mexicans won). The best part of the day was going to a sweet lady’s home who had several children, most who begged or sold things on the street so that one of her sons could go to high school in Mexico City through the Garbett’s scholarship (the family is required to provide ten percent of the tuition). To show her gratitude, this valiant mother, no taller than four feet six inches, invited thirty-two of us which included the three other American families who were helping with the project, as well as all the twelve scholarship students and some of their parents to her humble two-room concrete and adobe home for dinner. Her home had been all set up with tables and chairs (who knows where they had come from?) and hundreds of homemade tortillas as well as a large hamburger patty sized delicacy made of cactus and dried shrimp with a red sauce over it. She and her family and neighbors had worked diligently all day to provide a lovely meal for us. Apologetically, she said she was so sorry that it wasn’t what we were used to. We did our best to eat as much as we could and look as though we loved it!

Christmas Eve was spectacular with actors for a live nativity proceeding to one of the hundreds of Catholic churches in the area just as we got off the buses in Chiapas near the site of our next project. We were treated to a lovely “Posada” dinner by the family of the local organizer of the expedition and we laughed hysterically during the fun of breaking several piñatas. At midnight we were outside and listened to what sounded like the world literally exploding with fireworks. It was a Christmas Eve and following Christmas Day that we’ll never forget! We fell in love with the sights and sounds of Mexico.

The day after Christmas we were all excited to do our next project, which was all about cleaning and painting a room which would become a medical clinic in a remote village up in the clouds (about 9,000 feet) called Chojelo! On our way up the narrow dirt road on about a 45 degree incline in a van with a very brave native driver, we passed by the two local missionaries we had sat by on at our Christmas Eve dinner! They followed us on foot to the village and helped us as we cleaned out a large room in one of the buildings in the run-down community center that could be used for a health clinic. The villagers were far away from any health care and the State had told them that if they could get a room ready, they would send in a medical team twice a week. We swept floors, cleaned and disinfected walls and then painted the outside yellow and the inside white. The guys also used the tools and plywood they had brought to enclose the top of the walls which were open to birds and animals. Some repaired broken windows and even went back down to the nearest village for a soldering iron to fix the falling-apart metal door.

In the next room three women built a fire on the cement floor and boiled a huge pot of water in which they cooked a hunk of some kind of very tough meat and a vegetable something like cabbage leaves. These women were amazing and our soup, prepared on only very special occasions, was delicious!

While we were waiting for the guys to come back from town with more supplies, we took a walk-about in the village. Charity, our youngest daughter, gave candy to the local kids who were either delighted or terrified to see big white people approaching them. One of our local helpers as we prepared the clinic was a young mother named Lucia. With a two-year-old slung on her back, she offered to show us the church as well as her home. Delighted with the offer, we trekked down the hill and through the corn fields and found a perfectly lovely little church on a steep hillside. How they got all the cement there to build that, we have no idea, but it was wonderful to behold!

Then she took us to her home, another twenty minute walk away on steep mountain paths. With her little two-year-old peacefully sleeping in his sling, she proudly showed us her kitchen with little chicks running all over, a little play spot on the dirt floor for her baby and a small hammock where he could sleep while she ground the corn. The grinder was her only kitchen utensil! Her husband had built the three structures on their property himself. The closet in their “living room” consisted of clothes, folded in half over a clothes line strung from wall to wall. We saw the pride in her face as she showed us her home and let us know that she did not take the spectacular view for granted! The air was clean and clear and the spectrum of the scenery from their house was truly a feast for the eyes!

As I looked at that woman’s face full of peace and wonder and pride, surrounded by family and neighbors that she loved, a lovely garden and food she produced with the labor of her own hands, I couldn’t help but think of so many Americans completely frazzled by the Christmas rush and the Christmas “stuff” and wondered if the contentment on Lucia’s face in her “third world” could make her “better off” than many of us. What a privilege it was to experience with her, the true meaning of Christmas!

As I re-entered my real world the next day and the intricate complications in our comparatively luxurious home and faced the challenge of feeding and finding places for 28 people to sleep for five days, I was overwhelmed with the love and joy I felt in having most of our family home for a few days to celebrate the holidays and special family events together. I was also thinking of those dear people we had encountered on our fabulous expedition and of my favorite word: REMEMBER!

Linda Eyre
Valuesparenting.com
P.S. For more information about going on an extraordinary service expedition with your own family go to Ascendalliance.org

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