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  As we enter our month campaigning for kindness – I would like to introduce some great crusaders, stories and guest bloggers. The funniest Mom blogger I know, Courtney from Stop Yapping, is our contributor to kick-off our monthly challenge. Here is how she does it. Thanks so much Courtney! xoxo “I’m hungry.” “I’m starving.” “What can I have?” “I’m LITERALLY starving Mom.” “If I were to think about eating lunch, what would you suggest?” “Is there any food in this house?” I hear this about 10 times a day from my husband and 3 young, growing boys.  All this complaining and nagging at me always makes me think how lucky we are.  “There are starving kids in Africa” comes to mind and I know how much my kids and myself included, take our food  for granted.  I have stocked our fridge and pantry with unlimited amounts of food and I realize it is me who has taught my kids to always expect there to be enough food for them.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I also need to teach them that we are more fortunate than probably 99% of the world.  Not only are there starving kids in Africa, but there are starving people right here. Since I got married and especially since having kids, I have always used coupons.  It just seemed like a no-brainer to save a little money.  I would buy a Sunday newspaper and match up the coupons to the store ads. But a few years ago, the show “Extreme Couponing” came out I thought I should step up my game.  So I followed all the blogs, printed every internet coupon I could find and chased every deal.  But then I realized that more is less.  I was spending so much time and  money on things I never would have bought.  I would drive around to 6 different stores tying to get the best deal. So I focused on a couple  of my favorite stores and narrowed it down to few printable coupon sites. Since this blog post is for one of the amazing non-profits out there I should mention one coupon site I really like is Common Kindness. When you register and print coupons from their site, the charity of your choice receives a % of sponsor fees from corporations. It’s free of charge to the consumer and the non-profit. If  you wish to give the Infinite Smile Project a little boost their reference code to select them as your preferred charity is 1451215. It didn’t take long before I had a small stock-pile that eventually turned into a giant stockpile.   As much as I loved having 60 boxes of cereal, 100 bottles of shampoo/conditioner, 80 razors and 25 boxes of granola bars, I knew I needed to start donating some of it. So I looked around for a local donation center.  

I would pack the kids in the car and bring a few boxes to donate.  As I tried to explain to them what we were doing, they couldn’t really picture what happened to the items after we dropped them off. They couldn’t get the connection between us, the warehouse and the needy people. It got me thinking that maybe there was a more personal way we could help.  Something that my kids could help with. I was talking to my husband about what to do with all our extras, and he came up with a great idea. He is a Firefighter and asked if we could make up some bags for the homeless  people he sees everyday. So Blessing Bags were formed. My kids and I went through my stockpile and picked out what to put in the bags.  We lined up all our supplies and started stuffing the bags.