Thank you to our veterans for sacrificing themselves to protect our freedoms.  For all that you sacrificed, we celebrate and honor you.

We salute you.

God bless America.

The other day, a friend on Facebook shared in her status update how she would be spending the month of November.  For the next 30 days, she and her family would demonstrate acts of giving, which had been inspired by the book 29 Gifts by Cami Walker.

In her memoir, Ms. Walker shares how simple acts of giving helped heal her body, mind and spirit.  With the popularity of her book, she founded 29-Day Giving Challenge, a website which encourages others to do the same.

Admiring my friend’s quest and yet moved by everyone’s compassion for one other on the 29-Day Giving Challenge website, I decided to spend the month of November doing the same.  With simple random acts of kindness (RAK) over the next 30 days, I would be teaching my two girls how to do their part to make the world a better place.   With our small gestures of giving, we would let other know we care.  Even the simplest of gestures can mean the world to a friend or a fellow human being.

If you would like to join us in our 30 Days of Giving Challenge, here are some ideas to help get you started.

• Participate in Operation Christmas Child by either filling a box or donating money.
• Donate canned goods to a food drive.
• Donate toiletry items to a homeless shelter.
• Donate items to Goodwill or Salvation Army.
• Donate items to an animal rescue shelter.
• At Starbucks/Dunkin Donuts drive thru, treat the person behind you to a cup of coffee.
• Pass along your unwanted coupons to a friend.
• Leave unwanted coupons on the shelves at the supermarket.
• Give your supermarket receipt coupons to the next person in line at the checkout.
• Recycle old running shoes your local store. (The Running Center in Tampa collects old shoes.)
• Send an e-card, card or a care package to our troops overseas.
• Donate $1 to Miracle Children’s Network at the checkout.
• Recycle old cell phones.
• Purchase a Scholastic Gift Certificate in the book order form for your child’s teacher.
• Donate old books/magazines/videos/CDs to the library.
• Drop some coins in the tip jar at any food service place.
• Send a love note in your children’s and spouse’s lunch box.
• Purchase a car wash for the person in line behind you.
• Pay for a toll for the driver behind you on the parkway.
• Call an old friend to catch up to give the gift of time.
• Take a friend to lunch.
• Take some baked goods to a neighbor.
• Babysit for a friend so she/he can enjoy a pedicure or a date night with her/his spouse.
• Volunteer at your child’s school.
• Print out some of your favorite photos and share then with a friend.
• Visit a retirement home.
• Give blood (if you physically can).
• Drop a friend’s business card in a drawing to win free lunch at a local restaurant.
• Serve a meal at a soup kitchen.
• Let another driver merge into traffic in front of you.
• Let the shopper in line behind you check out before you. (An idea from Nicole)

More than a simple list of RAK, I will be taking our 30 Days of Giving Challenge one step further with my girls to make our month of giving a bit more meaningful and colorful.  Since my girls and I love crafts as much as random acts of kindness, we will create a Thanksgiving craft to display their accomplishments and a cornucopia (the symbol of a bountiful harvest) seems to be the best representation for our bountiful supply of gifts!

For our cornucopia craft, the girls will cut out a cornucopia shape printed on a sheet of brown construction paper.  (We’ll use this one from DLTK as a template.)  Then, using the smaller templates, they’ll cut and color the leaves, fruits and vegetables to fill their cornucopias.  After completing a random act of kindness, we’ll record what each girl gave on one of the shapes and paste it to their cornucopias.  By the end of November, their horn should be plenty full.  Then, as a reward for their kindness, I’ll laminate their cornucopias so they can use them as placemats and cherish their gifts of giving every day.

Now, that I’ve crawled out from under my never ending pile of laundry, I can write about our camping trip.  Of course we had a fabulous time!

This was our second camping trip to Hillsborough Rive State Park, which I feel is the perfect campground for families.  Our friends and we reserved campsites in the second loop which circles the playground.  Our children played all day on the playground while we sat around and drank beer always staying in our line of sight.  The restrooms are also located in the middle of the loop, which is very convenient too.

The moderately sized campsites offer a decent amount of shade provided by large pine and oak trees.  With our camping limited supplies, my family and I don’t require a lot of room.

Hillsborough River State Park always offers a number of hiking trails, with the Florida Trail being the longest at approximately 3.6 miles.  Saturday morning, I woke up with an obsession to run one of the trails at the park, but I really don’t know what possessed me to run the Florida trail by myself without my camera or mace.  Along the path, the trail narrowed and I found the uneven terrain very challenging since I am used to running on flat paved surfaces.  With several steep inclines, lots of overgrown weeds and trees roots, this trail definitely seemed to be the trail less traveled.  The Florida Trail followed the river with an occasional rickety bridge to run across and some trees bent over the trail required a limbo move while I ran.  The scenery was gorgeous, however, I couldn’t really enjoy the view because I was too busy watching my step as I stumbled over tree roots.

As I ran along the overgrown trail, I cleared the path for the next hiker or runner by running through spider webs.  At one point, I completely lost my footing and wiped out.  I fell to the ground and rolled.  Fortunately, I suffered minor scrapes.  I bounced back up, shook it off and kept running.

Then, I heard some rustling behind me and out of the corner my eye, I spotted a long bushy tail.  After reading flyers posted around the park with warnings about coyotes, I became nervous that I was being followed by one.  After being spotted, the fluffy tail creature hopped into a tree.  Now, I worried that whatever creature I saw would pounce on me and drag my bloody carcass through the woods never to be found again.  Thankfully, that never happened and I lived to tell my tail trail run tale.  (Later, I learned from my friend John that I probably encountered a Red Fox.)  But I had to laugh about all these silly events during my run which made me think of my running partner, Tiffany, who detests nature and running through it on our Starkey Trail runs with the Striders.  I felt a bit like that as I ran along the Florida trail on my own.  I had nature all over me!

5 Miles

54:12

Ave Pace 10:50

Later that morning, everyone went canoeing.

Our friends headed south down the river but we went north in the wrong direction.  Our little detour led us to some small rapids which we may have missed if we followed the crowd or if a Park Ranger caught us.

The scenery along the Hillsborough River is much like the scenery along any Florida river with large canopies of large Cypress trees and Cypress knees popping up along the river banks.  We saw a few large hollowed Cypress trees in the middle of the river which reminded us of something from a fantasy novel.

There were also these beautiful overgrown lavender wildflowers that I had never seen before and they attracted a variety of butterflies.

Of course, during our canoe trip, we spotted the usual Florida inhabitants such as turtles, gators and several herons.

Eventually, we caught up to our friends.

One set of friends had white knuckles as it was her first canoe trip and rumor has it that they flipped their canoe.  Their faces have been blacked out to protect their identity.

Like, I said in my Mr. E’s Beautiful Blue’s post, this year’s camping trip was something out of a bad slapstick comedy film.  Later that evening, one friend stumbled into a fire pit.  We believe her fateful fall may have been caused by her blood alcohol level and the Benadryl another camper slipped her to help with her allergies.  Before she plummeted face first into the fire pit, another friend caught her, but not before she singed some of her hair.  Thankfully, she was fine and didn’t suffer any burns, but it was still scary.  This photo was taken before the fateful fall into the fire.  Again, the faces have been blacked out to protect the identity of the fallen and her drug pusher.

With all the ups and downs (literally), we had a great time.  We’re already planning our next camping trip with mace and minus the Benadryl.

Much like the movie Road Trip, our camping trip had some very funny bizarre silly memorable moments, but I’ll tell you more about our camping trip in another post.  In a nutshell, the company and the weather made for another fun time in the forest and I even squeezed in a 5 mile trail run.

Goddamn right it’s a beautiful day.

We’re heading into a dark, dark forest once again for our Second Annual Moms on the Go Camping Trip.  Being a fair-weather camper, I couldn’t be more happier about the forecast this weekend with highs near 80, lows in the 50s and not a drop of rain expected.  You couldn’t ask for better than that!  And of course, it’s perfect running weather too!

S’more when I return from the dark, dark forest!

My daughter definitely inherited my love for party planning and with her obsession over Harry Potter, she planned a whole party around the theme of the books and the movies.

Her magical grand design included a Hogwarts dining hall with a table for each house (Ravenclaw, Gryffindor, Hufflepuff and Slytherin), a sorting hat, a potions lesson by our resident witch (me) and a Quidditch match, of course.

When sharing her master plan, she told us that she wanted to decorate the entire house to resemble Hogwarts.  Upon entering the house, the guests were to walk through Diagon Alley to find their necessary supplies and then report to Hogwarts.

As much fun as that all sounded, I couldn’t stomach the idea of 1) decorating my ENTIRE house the day after Halloween, 2) spending all the money required to decorate our entire house and 3) having about 40 children in my house.  So, I convinced Allana to scale down the party a bit and offered to rent our community’s clubhouse, which is available at a very modest price.  

Between races and other commitments, October is always a busy month for us, therefore, I tried to keep everything as simple and basic as possible, but still honor Allana’s request.  For the invitations, I downloaded the Lumos font from MuggleNet.com and modified text in the Hogwarts acceptance letter from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.   

HOGWARTS SCHOOL of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY 

We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

In honour of

 Allana’s 8th Birthday

Sunday, November 1, 2OO9

2:OO P.M.

Our Clubhouse

777 Our Street Drive

We await your owl by no later than October 26.

Yours sincerely, 

Minerva McGonagall

Deputy Headmistress

On the front of the invitation, I added the Hogwarts seal for authenticity.  Allana loved it and even commented on how “it looked so real”.

For the party decorations, I found everything I needed with one trip to the local dollar store.  We set up four tables (one for each house) and covered the tables with black vinyl tablecloths.  At each place setting, we set a purple plate, a purple napkin and a plastic purple spider goblet for each child, which would be theirs to keep after the party.  Each goblet held a goodie bag filled with an assortment of Jelly Belly Jelly Beans to represent Bertie Bott’s Jelly Beans.  Then, I covered another table with a purple tablecloth for the presents and hung spooky paper chandeliers from the ceiling to finish the Hogwarts dining hall look and feel.

Of course each Hogwarts student needs a wand, so I found a cheap frugal wand craft on-line that consisited of pencils, pipe cleaners and star wire. 

Our little wizards could make assemble their wands while waiting for other guests to arrive. Allana insisted that each child be sorted as they arrived.  I dug up two black witch’s hats from our dress-up clothes box: one to be placed each child’s head and the other to hide our baby monitor.  When the guests entered the room, we asked them to sit in a chair near the door and placed the “sorting hat” on their heads.  On the other side of the room, Dad held the baby monitor.  Speaking into the monitor, he pretended to be the voice of the sorting hat and selected a house at random for each child.  The children giggled in delight upon hearing our talking sorting hat.

As the guests made their way to their tables, we served chips and filled their goblets with Butterbeer (Root Beer).  Then, to begin our Hogwarts celebration, we sang “Happy Birthday” and served the cake at the start of the party because the planned activities would take us outside and give the children a chance to burn off the sugar high.

For my potions lesson, I told my students as I assembled the ingredients, “I’m not a very good witch and I always mess up my potions, so I don’t know what may happen here.  Sometimes the results are very explosive!”  I poured in a cup of powdered bat’s bones (baking soda) into a cauldron.  I added a drop of frog’s blood (red food coloring) and then poured in some ogre sweat (white vinegar).  The students squealed with delight as the concoction erupted out of the cauldron. 

After our explosive potions lesson, Dad lead the children in a quick game of Quidditch for Muggles.  No broomsticks required, but it was a fun game of controlled chaos. 

At the end of the day, Allana exclaimed, “THAT WAS THE BEST PARTY EVER!”  Although, she’s said that before, it felt good to hear it again this year.

On Halloween night eight years ago, groans and moans filled the air, but not by any spooky creatures of the night.  These terrifying howls echoed through hospital halls as a first time mom felt the pains of childbirth.  The howling carried on through the night until 2:50 a.m. when our precious baby girl entered the world on November 1. 

As I held our tiny baby for the first time, her big brown eyes looked up at me and I cried tears of joy.  She was so beautiful.  Even then, she looked just like her dad, Allan, and we knew that her chosen name, Allana Rose, fit her perfectly.

It’s hard to believe that 8 years have passed, but as the years have flown by, I’ve treasured watching our Allana Rose blossom into an amazing young girl.

Happy 8^th Birthday, Allana Rose.

At our Moms on the Go Halloween party, Allana proudly posed for a picture with a cupcake that she cleverly designed all by herself.  While the other children simply smeared on icing and sprinkled a few toppings on their cupcakes, Allana created a bootiful masterpiece.  With a dab of vanilla icing, she created a small ghost.  She added two sprinkles for the eyes and another for its mouth.  The candy corn represents a tombstone in a graveyard.  Isn’t it spootacular?

Any girl with a shoe fetish will tell you, you never throw away the boxes.  These stylish ladies save the boxes and neatly line their closet shelves with rows of shoeboxes.

As for runners, there’s a never ending supply of shoeboxes or at least a new shoebox every three months or so.  

During my life as a running SAHM, my shoes consisting mostly of running shoes, Crocs and flip-flops which I wear too often to keep neatly stored in rows of boxes, but rather piled in heaps on the bottom of my closet.

Although I don’t save the shoeboxes to store my shoes anymore, I do save the boxes for a charity first brought to my attention by my friend, Lori.  I credit Lori for introducing me to two things: running and Operation Christmas Child.  Under her direction, our moms group, Moms on the Go, began an Operation Christmas Child drive every November. 

Throughout the year, my daughters save the toys from their fast food kid’s meals specifically for this charity.  Naturally, they each prefer to fill a box for a girl and I fill a box for a boy.  If our boxes seem a bit empty, I take the girls to the dollar aisle at Target and have them pick a few more items to add to their shoeboxes.  This year, my girls will include drawings, photos and a letter telling a little about themselves.

For the first time last year, I pre-paid the postage for our shoeboxes on-line.  After our boxes were delivered, I received an e-mail from Samaritan’s Purse naming the destination of packages.  The e-mail included a link which highlighted the destination on the map and from that same link, my girls and I viewed images of children in Guyana holding their small treasure chests.  My girls found the photos gratifying and I appreciated the brief geography lesson it offered.  Most importantly, I truly appreciated the larger lesson Operation Christmas Child has taught my girls year after year:  Our small boxes of joy have a huge impact on another child.

Thanks to Lori, my girls and I look forward to Operation Christmas Child every November.  It brings us such pleasure to fill another child’s life with joy and love.