No More Excuses
By Polly Schlafhauser, Fri Dec 9th

Up until a couple weeks ago, our family always had an excuse notto volunteer our time. There always seemed to be a game,family commitment, work obligation, or birthday party to get inthe way of us spending our Saturday mornings volunteering ourtime to help others. Well no longer, we have adopted a newfamily motto, "No More Excuses", and this past Saturday we putit to the test.

It was a dreary cold morning and all of us were tired from along week of work and school. When the time came to get out ofbed at 7 a.m. and go volunteer our help delivering food to theelderly any previous enthusiasm we had suddenly faded away. Wewasted no time in coming up with a lot of reasons not to go like"we're tired", "our beds are warm", "it's cold outside", "wejust want to hang with you" and the list continued. So after mymorning cry of "No

More Excuses!", I pulled them from bed, fedthem a warm breakfast, packed them in our new gas filledminivan, and sped off to our destination. I tuned the grumblesfrom the back seat out and continued to cheerfully cry "No moreexcuses!", "You'll love this, trust me!", "You'll feel so goodwhen you're done!" all the way to our church. At church we metup with some other families who looked just as enthused as us tobe there at 8:30 a.m. on a cold dreary Saturday morning and allof us loaded into the van and off we went. It wasn't long beforewe started talking about all the great things in our lives andall of our past volunteer experiences and suddenly we were alittle more enthused. After arriving at the charityheadquarters, we were quickly put to work delivering food to lowincome elderly where we were greeted with smiles of hello, criesof happiness, and thanks filled with gratefulness. Suddenly ournice warm beds of a couple hours ago didn't seem so importantand we ended our day of volunteering by getting just as much outof it as those we helped.

So the next time your family has the opportunity to volunteer,what will be your excuse? Remember, your kids will thank you forthe little things later.

About the author:Polly Schlafhauser is Founder and President of Families withPurpose, a website dedicated to helping busy families enhancetheir family life. To subscribe to their newsletter or to learnmore about volunteering as a family, visit their website atwww.familieswithpurpose.com