Weekly Challenge: Serving with a Happy Heart

As a general rule I love mail. Not the junk stuff that typically fills it up or bills, but the good stuff...   letters, cards, magazines and the like. It makes me happy. It makes me smile. My husband got the above gift in the mail from some folks that he works with as a part of their promotional mailers. One side reads "smile" and the other is their logo. If you look closely at the card (pardon the poor photo) it shares various things one can do to provoke a smile. This is where the challenge comes in. As a stay-at-home Mom I get to serve my family as a part of my job every day. Sometimes cheerfully and other times, honestly, pissed off with every fiber of my being. It's so mundane at times even with 80's rock or MGMT blaring in the background. For this week's challenge I thought I would serve others with a happy heart - truly happy! Guess what? It brought on a ton of smiles! Here's a look at my week.

My awesome neighbors across the street cut their tree down this past week. Our entire family (except for my youngest) helped them move the branches off their lawn and into a pile to be hauled away. My 5 year old was in heaven using his huge muscles to move the "big ones."

Because it's Texas and still very hot, all that work required the replenishing of fluids. I made a bunch of Gatorade for all the hard workers.  Later in the week, I peeked outside to find my husband and oldest working out in our garage gym. More Gatorade. STAT.

I packed up a ton of clothes for friends. Some are waiting to have their first boy while others just need clothes for the kiddos that are growing up too fast!

I got the honor of serving in our church's marriage ministry with my loving hubby. This is truly our favorite part of the week.

I hand wrote (gasp!) cards to sweet friends to let them know: how much I miss them, I am grateful for them and well, for no reason at all. Do we really need a reason to say, "hi" and "I love you"? Besides, it seems to be said with so much more sincerity when it comes in the form of handwriting versus email. Right?

I made cookies for my neighbors, but we ended up eating them all ourselves. Hey, I'm human. What can I say? It did bring my boys a lot of joy though.

How do you serve two young boys under the age of five? You let them do this to their room and say nothing about the mess. I don't know who this brought bigger smiles to, them or me. They had so much fun and I  had about an hours worth of time to clean the house interruption free.

Lastly, I encouraged my husband a lot. I praised him for his parenting, his leadership and his mad new dancing skillz. He's pretty much the shiz. New dancing skillz you say? Yup. He taught himself to do the running man as we sang the SNL skit song "What Up With That?" to our boys and danced like crazy. If you aren't familiar with the skit - watch it here. You'll be glad you did. PS - keep your eyes on the man in the red adidas jumpsuit. This has to be one of SNL's funniest skits in years. 

Happy Friday peeps! How will you challenge yourself this weekend? If you wanna play along with me in my challenges I'd love to hear how you do and your thoughts. A friend at church joined me in the no make-up challenge. Come on... no one likes playing alone! xo