All February long, Namine’s school has celebrated what they called “Kindness Month.” Each week, the students would focus on an aspect of kindness that was perhaps overlooked in the bustle of everyday life. These included notes of gratitude to teachers; family portraits to parents; and words of encouragement to classmates. Namine, for her part, took inspiration from my “so bad they’re good” jokes to send some math-related puns to her Algebra teacher.
Jessica and I have never really subscribed to what we call “Hallmark holidays” — holidays which, to our minds, exist simply for the express purpose of selling to consumers. That said, we do like the idea of celebrating love and kindness (and not just the romantic kind). To that end, we hosted what we called a kindness party for our family to come for food and games.
Since we moved, we’re not exactly close in proximity to any of our family members. That said, we’re all pretty well spread out over the state anyway. Not everyone that we invited was able to come, but we still had a pretty good turnout. We had pizza, wings, fruit and veggie platters, and chips and salsa.
In preparation for the party, we planned on all kinds of activities: not just food and games, but crafts as well. And wouldn’t you know it, we actually didn’t get to do much of it. The time simply got away from us!
We — that is, the adults — did play one game, a movie trivia game called Blockbuster. Namine and her cousin played separately in another part of the house while we did so.

We were happy to have everyone over. While we didn’t get to all we had planned, we had a wonderful time. I can only speak for the three of us, of course, but I think it’s safe to say it was a success!
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