Blessing Bank, take 2

This post has been a work in progress for at least a month! Back in September, I wrote about how I'd found the neatest thing ever, Blessing Banks. Long story short, M's mother in law saw my blog post and called to tell M about it. M owns the company (Blessing Banks) and well, you can read more about it here. She was so kind and sent me a bank, and et me just say, it is beautiful. I absolutely love it! It is so simple yet really stunning.

The pictures were taken in a weird setting but definitely visit the website for pictures too. The bank I have is the "girl" bank, but there is also a "boy" bank that has different wood pieces on the sides.

A Blessing Bank would be a great gift idea for anyone - children or adults alike.

"Based on Jesus' words in Acts 20:35, Blessing Banks are more than a gift; they are a lifelong lesson in the blessing of giving. They are available in handcrafted hardwoods for boys and girls, hand-painted ceramic and also in a hammered, silver-plated option. And Little Blessing Bags are a convenient way for collected change to bless someone with an immediate need.

From our beginning, Blessing Bank® has had one mission:We want to provide a meaningful gift that will give children an opportunity to learn about generosity and the Christian principle of tithing.

Our banks reflect our desire to blend form and function into a sturdy, yet beautiful handmade piece that will last for generations. Whether used as a tithing or savings bank for helping those in need, we believe the Blessing Bank will help nurture a giving spirit that will grow with the individual for a lifetime."

If you happen to order, let M know that you read about it on my blog! I don't get anything or benefit from it, but I think she'll appreciate how neat the "blog world" spreads word around. I had the opportunity to have some email exchange with her and she's an amazing woman, very kind and genuine.

December Days of Christmas Kindness

To follow up from my post earlier this week... a couple of friends posted some great links to articles about Santa and Jesus.  Instead of regurgitating a lot of similarities, I'll just post the links.  We will be doing something similar. I just need some good children's books on St. Nicholas.  If they don't exist, I'll need an illustrator to partner with me so I can write one of my own.  Hmm... :)

What We Tell Our Kids About Santa (this is most similar to how we plan to teach Santa)

Smackdown: Santa vs Jesus

Moving on to our December project for 2011.
December Days of Christmas Kindness
The Plan: One random act of kindness every day for the month of December.
-Oliver is too small to really do a lot of actions with love other than grab your face and try to eat it kiss style yet we still wanted to do something for others to share in the spirit of giving this season.  We came up with the idea to do one act of kindness every day and made a list of things to do if we didn't see an opportunity.

The Budget: $86.34
-We didn't think of this until just a couple weeks ago and we'd already spent or budgeted our Christmas allowance so we decided to use two pots of money.  The first was incredibly fitting - the second was our jar of spare change we had just sitting around.  Ok so the first pot  of money is from Oliver's Blessing Bank.  (If you haven't read about Blessing Banks on my blog, I'd encourage you to read the posts I linked just now, it's a really neat story!)  I've been putting change and paper money in Oliver's bank (we use that instead of a traditional 'piggy bank') since I was pregnant so it was full.  Next year we will plan this better and will hopefully have learned from this year how much we want to allocate for this project.


The deets: Both Chandler and I will be carrying out the project, but since he works full time, I'll be doing most of the days.  We'll report back each day with what we did and how much we may have spent.  I am so, so excited to do this!!!  We have a list of about forty-five random acts of kindness that we pulled from around the internet and came up with one night while up talking in bed.  I'm hoping that there will be some things that arise naturally and we won't have to pull too much from the list.  To keep us on track and accountable, I'll be keeping a log of what we did (as a plus, I'll be adding that to a page in Project Life).  I would love to be able to post what we did each day, but my track record stinks lately so I'll plan to post weekly at a minimum and more often if I have time and think about it.

I would LOVE if you would participate too!  If a month is a little much for you, try a week - or perhaps do the Twelve Days of Christmas, Kindness style! :)  If you do, let me know - I'd love to hear how it went for you.  If you have a favorite act of kindness we'd love to hear it!

Blessing Bank

Click here to read more! I think these would be great baby gifts - and I love the idea behind them.