Today we went for a walk around the neighborhood when my 4-year old said, "Look." He was holding up an empty juice box someone had littered. I was about to say aacky, drop that, when I realized we should be picking up trash to throw it away. So our walk consisted of 6 blocks and the bottom of our stroller full of trash. We even found a pizza box.Luckily, it was trash day, so we deposited the litter into our can on the curb. My 4-year old wanted to keep walking to find more trash. It was like a scavenger hunt for him. I think every walk will involve litter clean up now.
Instead of the trash scavenger we played in the back yard. I praised them for picking up other people's trash, which let to the conversation about who picks up our trash. I explained that the garbage collectors take it away to the landfill. This is when it occurred to me that a garbage collector is one of the most thankless jobs, but probably the most needed. What would we do without the garbage collectors?
It seemed fitting to make thank yous for the garbage collectors, which is what I called them for the boys benefit. (Sanitation engineers would probably be preferable.) We taped the cards to our trash can on the curb. We didn't wait for them to collect the trash, but the cards were gone when we brought in the cans.
Our morning walk snowballed into an entire conversation about garbage. This walk could have gone very differently, but I'm so glad that I didn't tell my 4-year old to drop the garbage and keep on walking.
With this Thanksgiving project I find myself looking for ways to be nice or give back, which gives me a very different perspective on my daily activities like parenting. We aren't going above and beyond to do things, we are just finding things in our everyday activities. If we can do it, so can you.
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