Day 246: Do You Take the Time to Stop and Smell the Flowers?

One of the daily gives I almost always do whether I post about it or not is picking up garbage. Today I combined picking up garbage with time to Stop and Smell the Flowers. I have two dogs and a 3 year old and we are outside walking rain or shine. I find this one of the easiest ways to teach my son about giving back to the planet. Today I decided to take a new twist on our garbage picking so he would really understand the correlation between garbage and the precious life on our planet.

Day 246: Give 246

We are in full bloom here in Vancouver. It is one of my favourite times of year. The flowers are truly spectacular lighting up the streets in a rainbow of colours. Since my son was a baby we always took the time to stop and smell the flowers no matter where we went. Life moves so fast some days I wanted to make sure I taught him to stop, take a moment to appreciate where we live and what the planet offers us.

Now Nic is a little older at the ripe old age of 3.5, I can introduce new concepts to him and he always seems to understand. Their brains are little sponges at this age and will absorb anything you choose to teach them. Today every time we stopped to smell the flowers we also stopped and picked up garbage.

We smelled lilacs and picked up some cans we could recycle.

We smelled buttercups and stopped and picked up an old newspaper we could also bring home and recycle.

We smelled rhododendrons and we picked up plastic garbage instead of leaving it for the planet to absorb.

We talked about how important cleaning up our neighbourhood is for our community, for the flowers, for the planet and our the ocean.

Have you taught your child to give? Leave a comment to 365give on your philanthropic lessons you teach your kids. We will use them for our daily gives!

Time Commitment: 30 minutes

Cost: 0 (will make some money returning the aluminium cans to the recycling depot for our donation jar)