Its all about the kids

I get a bit depressed this time of year, and I will tell you why.

So Friday morning, I was waiting to take the train at the Morton train station and I had some time to kill, so I ran across the street to this little coffee shop to grab a coffee. Right next to the counter is a basket for new toy donations.

Something like that breaks my heart. My girls are my life and they havent never gone without. We have a very generous family, and the girls arent necessarily spoiled but they are certainly treated well. Its to the point where Heather and I dont have to do very much for them around the holidays. Anyway, I see this basket and then I get this picture in my head of some poor kids living in some ramshackle house and they are just over-joyed that they have this awesome new toy to play with. While at the same time, that picture makes me very happy, it makes me sad at the same time, that there are kids who dont have it as good as my kids.

Every year before Christmas, Heather and I go through all of the kids toys and donate some of the old ones to Goodwill. The girls get excited about this, and I think thats a friggen great behavior to instill in these kids. Additionally, I think we’re going to do what we did last year after Christmas – we took one new toy from each of them and had the girls donate them. Amazingly, my girls do not take any exception to this – I think most kids would vehemently protest if there parents tried to pull this on them.

I am going to say something that might sound politically incorrect on the surface, but hear me out. While I think its notable that people are adopting asian kids from China and Vietnam, I gotta wonder why were not looking internally at the kids in this country who use a good home. I understand fully that the living conditions in some parts of China are third-world at best, but there are kids in this country who are suffering as equally bad.