On the 4th Day of Giving...

For the 4th Day of Giving, our family is sponsoring one of the Heartline Runners - my friend, Corey - for the 2010 Disney World Marathon.

Some of you may be familiar with Corey from that rather embarrassing, and certainly deluded, Jillian Michaels reference from a few weeks back.

And if you recall, Corey and an equally crazy team of runners have all signed up to compete in a marathon next month to raise money for an emergency vehicle for Heartline Ministries, which operates in Haiti.

They have an amazing BLOG that lets you meet all the runners (did I mention they're crazy?) and the blog does a great job on updating on what Heartline is doing in Haiti.

Have you had your daily cry or your daily dose of inspiration yet? Well, then just stop on by!

Anyway, we had budgeted to sponsor Corey for the race (and you can help sponsor her by visiting her blog. You'll also be entered in her raffle, but you'd better hurry because she's drawing names on Friday!) but I forgot to send her the money. Whoops!

And now Corey's our 4th Day of Giving person and I get to scrapbook it. Pretty cool.

Now, this is our 4th day of giving. Would you like to know if it's making any kind of impact on the kids? Well, listen in to an actual conversation that we had before school this morning:

Me: Hey! Guess what? It's the 4th Day of Giving!! Do you want to know what we're going to do today?

Eli: Can I watch cartoons?

Me: No, not before school. (Eli interrupts with a "Oh, great" - his word du jour). So, listen, we're going to send some money for Mommy's friend who is running a race...."

Eli: (Interrupts). What's so special about a race?

Me: (Wondering how on earth my sweet little boy morphed into a disrespectful teenager overnight).... Well, the runners are going to raise money for an ambulance for a country called Haiti!!

Eli: (Looking dead serious). Mom, I'm not very interested in this giving stuff.

Me: (Wanting to smack him upside the head) Why not? Giving is fun!

Eli: No, it's not. It's boring.

Me: (Who IS this child?) No it's not.... and besides, guess where they're doing the race? Disney World!

Eli and Nandi: Disney World? Whooo! Whoooo! Disney World! Disney World! Disney World! We wanna go! We wanna go! Can we go, Mommy? Can we go? We wanna run! We can run!

(Crap. Why did I have to go and bring up Disney World????)

Me: Hold on, calm down. No, my friend Corey is going to Disney World and we're giving her some money for the race.

Eli: (Crestfallen) Why are we paying for COREY to go to the race? Why don't you pay for US to go to the race?

Me: Because we DON'T run. And besides, that's not the point. The point is that this is the 4th Day of Giving and we're going to help Corey out so that she can raise lots and lots of money to help buy an ambulance for all the sick people in Haiti. That's really good, right?

Eli: It's BORING! I want to go to Disney World! Whhhhaaaaaa! Whhhhaaaa! Whaaaa!

Nandi: (Who copies everything Eli does). I wanngo Disney Whirl! Whaaa! Whaaaa!

Me: THIS IS NOT ABOUT DISNEY WORLD. THIS IS ABOUT HELPING PEOPLE IN HAITI!!!

Eli: Haiti is BORING!

Me: It is NOT!

Eli: Yes it is!

Me: Well... well... you know what? (Oh no. Don't say it, Leslie. Stop. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Count to ten. Don't say it.... don't say it) Well, you know what? Maybe Santa Claus isn't going to come this year because he's too BORED. Maybe giving Christmas presents to little boys and girls is too BORING. Because giving is soooooooo BORING!!!!! Maybe he'll just save all the money he was going to spend on giving out Christmas presents and go on a nice vacation instead! You know what? Maybe he'll go to DISNEY WORLD instead.

(Ah, good. They stopped crying. Wait. No, no, no, no, no. Don't look like that. Don't cry. Oh crap. What have I done? I've damaged them. Oh man. I suck. I suck at parenting. I just told them Santa wasn't coming. I just told him he was going to Disney WORLD. Crap. Crap. Crap. What do I do? What do I do???)

Me: No, no, no. It's okay. It's okay. Santa's still coming. Mommy got a bit confused. Come here, it's okay. It's okay. Santa's coming. I promise. Santa never gets bored of giving out presents. Mommy was just being silly. It's okay.

Sigh. I have to remember that the kids are really young. And that when I started this whole thing that I knew this would happen and they might not be interested in it. And that the whole point was to start a tradition that we could do each year that might mean something to them when they are older.

And, hopefully the memory of Mommy going mental in 2009 will be firmly wiped from their brain.

I don't want them to hate the 12 Days of Giving and think it's just one big chore, so I have to rethink some of the things we're doing and see if we can make it more fun for them. Eli doesn't know it yet, but he's going to help me with a special task tonight. Just the two of us. And I have a really fun activity that I think they'll like planned for either Saturday or Sunday. It's all a big learning curve.

In the meantime, though, the important thing is that the Heartline Runners are $40 closer to their goal. My kids will probably never ever forget that giving to Haiti was what we did on the 4th Day of Giving. And Santa is NOT going to skip out on Christmas and go to Disney World. He will be making a very anticipated stop at our little house, leaving a super nice present for the kids, a new CD and book for Daddy, and a huge lump of coal for Mommy.

Because she's been very naughty this year. And not in the way Daddy would've liked.

Happy 4th Day of Giving!

P.S. We were the recipients of two days of giving!!! The Holt family left us farm fresh organic eggs on our doorstep that they'd gathered from their hens. The cool thing is that we had actually run out of eggs and had already spent our grocery money for this week.

And then today, I scrounged up $2 of change and ran through the donut shop drive-in to get the kids some donut holes this morning (to, you know, make up for the trauma I caused them) and the lady waiting on us saw our dog, Ginger, in the car (Ginger goes on the school run with us every morning) and she gave Ginger a pig in a blanket, which Ginger promptly scarfed down.

'Tis the Season of Giving!