I Heart Good Hearts

I have been the recipient of good hearts this week. I don't know why so many good things happened to me all at once, but boy do I feel GOOD!!!!

1. The lady from Kennewick who tracked us down to give us the newspaper has a good heart. She made my day. It was so thrilling to me to know she hung onto that newspaper on her trip to be sure to find the family it belonged to. I kept telling her over and over again how great it was for her to go out of her way for us. I hope she knows how much I appreciated those efforts. There's a good heart for you.
2. My first day of teaching preschool was on Wednesday. I was somewhat nervous but mostly excited to start on this new path I've carved out for myself. After the bumpy route we took to open the preschool, I have to say the first day was as smooth as butter. The kids were fantastic, the schedule flowed, I was so excited for them to come back on Friday and do it all over again. It was a great day. It didn't end there. While I was cutting the craft project for Friday, there was a knock on my door. To my complete surprise, there was a friend standing there with a cookie sheet of homemade pizza with the directions how to cook it written on the foil, and a plate full of homemade cookies. Her words to me were, "I've been thinking about you all day, on your first day of preschool. I've been there before and I didn't want you to worry about dinner tonight." She couldn't have done something more timely and thoughtful for me. How perfect is she? I hope she knows how extremely grateful I am for her service for my family. The pizza was delicious and the cookies lasted only 4.5 minutes in our house. There's a good heart for you.
3. Yesterday, unlike Wednesday, was a lot harder for preschool. The 3 year old class wore me out. It will be fine eventually - I hope - but I was exhausted after they left. Brady had been telling me for 3 days that his lizard was out of crickets and I didn't want to kill the poor thing so after dragging my feet yesterday, we headed off to Pet Smart at around 7:00 in the evening. My kids were starving, the lizard was starving, and Jeff was on call and not home from work yet. I told the kids they had to decide where we were going for dinner and ran into get the crickets. When we got back in the car, it was 3 to 1 in favor of McDonalds. We mosey over to the MickeyD's in the Pet Smart parking lot and I ordered 3 Happy Meals. (Brady wanted Wendy's) So I get up to the cashier's window, hand her my debit card and she said, "Your meal has been paid for!" "What?" "Yeah, the guy in front of you wanted to buy your meal!" "Are you serious?" "Yeah, he said, I don't know the lady behind me but put her order on my tab. Tell her it's just an anonymous person doing something nice." "Really?!?! He bought us dinner?!?! That's the nicest thing ever!!! Shoot! We all should have ordered McDonalds! No, really, did you tell him thank you? How do I tell him thank you?" "We thanked him for you." "Wow. I've never had that happen before! That is so great!" "Go ahead and pull forward. Your paid meal is ready!" That's a good heart for you.

So, after we left McDonalds, we headed back to Pasco and went to Wendy's. All of us were talking about what just happened and we all felt so good. The kids couldn't believe a complete stranger in the drive thru would buy us dinner. So we pulled up to the drive thru at Wendy's, placed our order, and an old man by himself in a pickup pulled up behind us. The kids were so excited to do the same thing for him. They were yelling, "Look Mom! We can buy his dinner!!" So we pulled up to the cashier's window and told her what just happened to us and said we wanted to buy the man's dinner behind us. She of course thought it was so awesome and charged us for his dinner. We were given our food and pulling away slowly to watch what the man might do. All the kids were turned around and fixed on the old man. He handed over his debit card and was told by the cashier what we had done, she pointed to our car as we were driving away and he slowly pulled his debit card back into the window probably in disbelief that someone would do that! I hope we made his day. Maybe he'll do the same for someone else. I hope my kids know the importance of having a good heart. It really does feel good.