The inspiration behind our Weekly Kindness Project is from the touching story of a woman, Robyn Bomar, who spent her 38th birthday doing 38 random acts of kindness.  She spent her entire day doing these acts of kindness and is now inspiring people all over the world to make birthdays more about making the world a better place.

My older daughter turns six-years old this weekend, so we decided to follow Robyn’s lead, and start a new birthday tradition in our family. From now on for every birthday in our family, our hope is to do random acts of kindness in honor of the family member who is celebrating the big day.  Since my daughter is turning six, we are starting off with six random acts of kindness.  Instead of doing all of them on the actual birthday, like Robyn had, we decided instead to do the small acts the week leading up to the birthday.

Here are the six things we decided to do together, and we were lucky enough to include some family members in our little kindness adventure:

1. Give our handyman a just-because gift:  Our handyman has been very helpful over the years, so we decided to make him a just-because gift. We gave him a gift card.  My daughter also included one of her birthday party favors and wrote him a small thank you note.  We set it all up while he was working at our house, and my daughter could not wait to give him his gift.  Upon receiving his small gift, our handyman smiled really big and gave us all hugs.
2. Make Welcome bookmarks for our visitors: For my daughter’s birthday celebration, we have several out-of-town family members visiting.  My daughter made personalized bookmarks that said “Welcome to our House!” for each individual.  She also laminated each bookmark so that they can become a keepsake.
3. Buy frozen yogurt for the person behind us: One of our favorite spots in town is a frozen yogurt shop.  After the first set of grandparents got into town, we stopped by for some fro-yo and decided to pay for the person behind us in line.  We were still in the shop eating our yogurt, when the next person received our gift.  She looked pleasantly surprised and even said..”This must be my lucky day!”  On her way out of the shop, she gave us a heartfelt thanks and said she would pay it forward.
4. Bake cookies for the mailman: With our recent pen pal adventure, my daughter and I talked about how hard mail people work.  So she and Grammy baked cookies and made a thank you card for the mailman.  We left the note and the cookies in our mailbox.  When we picked up our mail later that day, we saw a note from the mailman that read: “Thanks for the gift. I really appreciate it. Have a blessed weekend.”
5. Donate old toys: We decided to pick out some old toys to donate as another act of kindness.  My daughter got to choose which ones she wanted to part with.  This may become a staple kindness act we do for every birthday.  With the influx of new toys that the girls get for each birthday, donating old toys is a great way to clear out space in the house and teach my littles about giving back.  We added the toys to our Family Donation Box, so that we can drop them off with the rest of our family donation items.
6. Give a flower to 16 neighbors: This was a super fun and meaningful activity. I bought two bouquets of roses from the grocery store.  Grammy and the girls wrote out a note of well-wishes to staple around each flower stem.  The notes read wishes like, “Hope you have a happy day!  Love, A Mindful Little.” Then several of us- aunt, uncle, Grammy included- went around with the wagon to hand out a flower to 16 neighbors.  If the neighbors were not home, then we left the flower on the doorstep. If they were home, then my daughter said..”It’s my birthday, so I wanted to share this flower.”  A few of the neighbors were really moved and invited her in to their house to meet a new puppy or ask her about her birthday.

These acts of kindness are very small gestures and very easy to do.  We luckily were able to witness how a few of these gestures brightened up someone’s day.  More importantly, my daughter was very excited about doing these kind acts and felt a little extra special that she could do them in honor of her birthday.  This is a tradition we hope to continue in the years to come, so would love to hear your ideas of other random acts of kindness we could do!