Every Sunday, I sit on the sofa with a cup of tea and my blankie, and I read the newspaper. Arguably the best part of the Sunday paper, after the triple sudoku, of course, are the sales ads. Most weeks, tucked between the Kohl’s ad and the Best Buy circular are a couple of packets of coupons. The hubby and I don’t use 80% of the products in the coupons. It seems a shame to throw all those savings in the recycle bin each week.

So for the last two weeks I have clipped the coupons with the biggest savings. Monday after work, I furtively slunk around Walmart, affixing the collected coupons to their respective products. All in all, I left $30 worth of savings opportunities in my wake. Hopefully, my simple little coupon operation will be a welcome surprise to some unexpecting shoppers.

In the future, I’ll be sending my unwanted coupons to our troops overseas, who can use them in the base commissaries even after they have expired. Support Our Troops® has a coupons for the troops program, Troopons®, that simply asks me (and you!) to cut out the coupons, sort them into expired or unexpired, then sort both groups into four main categories before bagging them up and mailing them to the program headquarters for distribution. I’ve seen for myself how much young military families living overseas appreciate these coupons. If you have unwanted coupons and a little extra time, click here to find out how you can get involved with Troopons®.

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In an attempt to overwrite all the negative feelings I have about April, I have made a pledge to complete 26 random acts of kindness this month. Reporting on these acts is the theme of my participation in this year’s April A to Z Challenge. If what you read here inspires you to commit your own RAoKs this month, please share what you’ve done in the comments. Together, we can rewrite April’s legacy!

If you’d like to check out how some other bloggers are responding to the A to Z Challenge, click here. Beware, there are 2279 participants…I accept no responsibility for the hours you are likely to lose once you start browsing! 🙂

How cool would it be to buy a gift for a complete stranger? A gift that you absolutely knew he or she really wanted? Well, thanks to Amazon.com’s public wish lists, you can! And I did.

There are literally thousands of wish lists on the website, so I had to come up with some way to choose just one. The only way to search for a list is by name or email address. Since April is not only the month when my dad passed away, but also the month he was born, I decided to search for someone who shares his name. I looked through the five pages of John Williams my request turned up, hoping to find one born on April 25. Not every wish list maker shares his/her birthday, so I was limited to only three people who’d posted April birthdays. One was a child (I couldn’t tell how old), and his wish list items were much cooler than the two adults’, so that’s the John William I chose. 🙂

Not wanting to miss young John William’s April 13 birthday, I placed the order for his “Kidnoculars” last week. Of course, because I did not procrastinate, the order arrived at John William’s house about three days later…a full two weeks before his birthday! He loves the binoculars. I know this because his mother took the time to track me down via the internet (Amazon.com didn’t allow me to send my gift anonymously) and sent me a lovely email yesterday.

A wonderful surprise from a kind stranger just arrived for my son John William. (I did a bit of Google searching and found your email address–I hope you don’t mind.) Thank you!! My husband Ben and I are so touched. And John William (we call him by both names), who turns two on April 13th, is thrilled with his new binoculars. He has been practicing bird watching at pre-school and will use them for birding this summer in California with his Opa. 🙂

What a wonderful way to celebrate your father’s memory. I read his obituary, and I’m struck that he died just two months after my own father died, also very suddenly in his 50s. His name was John, and my John William is named for him. He shares his grandfather’s curiosity, adventurousness, and sense of humor. And I’m so glad that he shares his name with another special person, even one we’ve never met. Thank you for connecting them with your random act of kindness.

As I sat at work, smiling through my tears, reading and rereading the unexpected email (a random act of kindness in itself), I knew without a doubt that my plan to defeat April was going to be a smashing success.

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In an attempt to overwrite all the negative feelings I have about April, I have made a pledge to complete 26 random acts of kindness this month. Reporting on these acts is the theme of my participation in this year’s April A to Z Challenge. If what you read here inspires you to commit your own RAoKs this month, please share what you’ve done in the comments. Together, we can rewrite April’s legacy!

If you’d like to check out how some other bloggers are responding to the A to Z Challenge, click here. Beware, there are 2227 participants at the time of this posting…I accept no responsibility for the hours you are likely to lose once you start browsing! 🙂

“Not My Friend”–Norah Jones
Help me breathe,
Help me believe,
You seem really glad that I am sad.

You are not my friend,
I cannot pretend that you are.

April is not my friend.

It seems that no sooner do the bells ring in the new year than my stress level begins to increase. Even when I’m not consciously thinking about it, my anxiety rises incrementally day by day as the calendar creeps closer to April.

It’s not just the fact that, historically, April has been unkind to our nation. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. were both assassinated in April. Tragedies at Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine, and Virginia Tech all occurred in April. Last year, the bombing of the Boston Marathon joined the list of this nation’s April heartaches. All of that is reason enough to make any American dread the first full month of spring.

But April has also been especially cruel to my family. I lost three of my four biological grandparents in April. My dad and his younger brother both died in April. My beloved kitty had to be euthanized two Aprils ago. The days of loss and sadness on my calendar far outnumber the days of joy.

I’m tired of letting April cast its dark shadow over my life. Instead of sitting around this year waiting for the other shoe to drop, I’ve decided to take proactive steps to put some light back into the next 30 days, to create some happy moments that will crowd out sad memories.

April also happens to be the month of the A to Z Challenge, brainchild of Arlee Bird. The idea is that participating bloggers will publish one post each day (except Sundays) during April, with each entry corresponding to a given letter of the alphabet. In other words, the blogger’s post will somehow be tied to the letter A on April 1, will revolve around the letter B on April 2, and so on, right through to the letter Z on April 30. Bloggers are free to interpret this challenge any way they choose, so photographers, travelogue-ers, memoir writers, fiction authors, poets, and recipe junkies alike can participate. Last year, I had a regular weekly schedule of postings that I followed throughout most of the year, so I just tailored my A to Z Challenge entries to fit.

This year, I’ve decided on a unifying theme for the A to Z Challenge, a theme that will hopefully help to loosen the chokehold April has on my emotions. I will spend the month committing random acts of kindness, 26 of them, one for each letter of the alphabet. I don’t claim that every act will be my own unique invention–I’ve found a lot of great ideas out there that I plan to borrow. I will log each RAoK here, and hope that doing for others will boost my mood as much as theirs. Ultimately, I hope to make this April something to smile about.

I also hope that everyone who is inspired by my posts to commit their own random acts of kindness this month will share their experiences in the comments. Maybe a plague of kindness will infect the nation and we can drive out whatever madness has repeatedly made April such a tragic month in American history.