(Forgot to hit publish last night.)

There was a dad grocery shopping with his three-year-old daughter yesterday when she suddenly started being loud. Friendly loud, and nothing at all wrong with that–but we had four kids in six years and man I remembered the days when the adults around us would frown at the sounds of small children in public.

I will forever be grateful to the empty-nest parents, whoever they were, who from time to time made a point of telling me my kids were cute. A few of them even said that when they weren’t acting all that cute, because they  remembered those days.

It is a privilege to get to pay their kindnesses forward.

I was thinking puppy, but the dad declared it a polar bear in his post today on NextDoor thanking whoever it was out there who had given it to them. He wanted it known that his little girl had been talking to it for several hours now (Nextdoor didn’t send his post to my inbox till today) and she had walked it around their home telling it all about the place and had introduced it to all her stuffies. I can just picture it. She had a new friend.

He so made my day.

I thanked him in a private message and told him I was going to do one more random thing: invite his family at whatever time might work for them to come to the creche exhibit at our church that runs through this Wednesday. The entire building is basically turned into a temporary museum. There’s a hands-on children’s area for his toddler, concerts every night, all of it free and open to the public. (I should have added, come see the puppet show.)

Link: www.christmascreche.org/