Fresh start

Why I started this blog. When I was planning my kindness challenge, I gave all team members a checklist of 50 acts of kindness. I quickly realized it would be helpful to have a place to go to get more information about some of them. Most of them are relatively easy to do, though a few were more unique (as are all of us!) and required a bit of advanced planning. I wanted to make the experience as friendly as possible. A website. A blog. Yes!

At various times in my life, I thought about creating a website and blogging—at least after it became a thing. I wanted to share information about life with a disability and my life with a rare genetic condition in particular. Yet there were already places to learn about FOP and a guidebook to read. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel.

So I waited until an idea came to me. My blog would be a place to share kindness and little pieces of my life that I hope others might appreciate. I am the first to admit I haven’t been great at showing up here. I’m still a work in progress. This year one of my goals is to revitalize my website and blog. 

I’m starting with the project that was one of my favorites during the kindness challenge. One of the items on the list of 50 was to “create your own act of kindness.” My team got a bunch of glitter, water bottles, and set out to make calming jars. Originally designed with children in mind (thus their other name of time-out bottles), they made us feel calmer and happier and we wanted to spread the joy. Here is what we wrote on the notes we distributed with them: "The is a mindfulness jar, also known as a calming jar. Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we're doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed my what's going on around us. Shake it and watch as swirls of glitter move at their own graceful pace from one end of the bottle to the other." Download a set of the notes that are ready to print if you would like to spread some glittery kindness around.

There are a lot of different instructions out there. These instructions worked best for us. 

​And thank you to my teammates and all others who participated in my little challenge to add more kindness in the world.