Fill our service jar: check

Happy New Year!!

One of our very first acts of the new year was to eat ice cream.

Normally, that would not really be a blog worthy event in my book, but this time the ice cream came as part of a family goal and that part (to me) is worth chatting about so here you go.

Every year, we set a couple of goals as a family at the start of the year (we do a couple other crazy things too, but we'll talk about those later).  Last year, one of our goals was to fill a large, empty, pretzel jar with papers denoting acts of service our family members did throughout the year.  

Anyway, so as 2014 came to a close all eyes were on our service jar to see if it was full clear to the brim (to be honest, it got harder to fill as the year went on because the papers tend to kind of fold into each other so they nestle onto each other's laps and take up less and less space...but no excuses around here, we told the kids they just needed to work harder).  

And, as you can see, they did it.

Hooray Kidlets!!

This did actually take a lot of work, especially because it is easy to forget to jot down the service you give and sometimes you might not see something kind you do as service in the first place (Mom and Dad did tend to write papers for kids when we saw them do things for others that they might not remember).  

On January 1, 2015 we got the jar down and read a bunch of the slips (not all of them, that would have taken too long).  It was fun to be reminded of kind acts given throughout the year, and the kids loved the surprise papers written about their actions by Mom and Dad.  The kids wanted to count the strips so we did and they had just under 500 papers shoved into that jar (and when we tried to put the papers back in after dumping them out, we had to really shove to fit them all since they hadn't had the chance to slide together and settle).  

It just really was fabulous.

But the best part in the eyes of the crew was that having completed their goal, they earned their promised reward which was a trip to Leatherby's for ice cream.  Seriously, you can't beat that!  (Good stuff!) 

I don't know if we will do this exact same goal again, but this is definitely one of my favorites that we've ever done.