I started thinking about ways I could make someone’s day a little brighter. For me, it all started with my family. What could I do to show kindness and to help them have a better day?

My first thought was directed to my husband. We all know the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach so I planned to make one of his favorite dinners. I could tell he enjoyed that after a long day at work.

For my kids it’s all about the cookies. When my daughter got home from school, she and my 2 year old had a fresh homemade batch of cookies waiting with a glass of milk. Cookies also seem to draw the neighborhood kids, which is a lot of fun, too.

For as much as I enjoy providing random acts of kindness for my family, I was thinking about my neighbors, friends and total strangers. What were some things I could do to show my kindness to others? Here is a list of ideas I came up with:

* Smile and say “hello” as you pass someone on the street.
* Thank the people who provide endless hours of service without a lot of recognition, like grocery clerks, librarians, school administrators and PTA board members.
* Offer to let someone with fewer items check out in front of you.
* Call a friend or neighbor out of the blue and offer to baby-sit.
* Compliment a stranger on something positive about them.

I would like to encourage all of you to “look up” and see what you can do to make someone’s day a little brighter …

The family was facing a grim Christmas last year, so the father took the children to the local mall and gave each child $20 with which to purchase four gifts at no more than $5 each.

When the family reunited, they were all laughing and talking — all except this 8-year-old girl, who appeared very serious and was carrying a small, flat bag that contained only four, 50-cent candy bars.

Apparently while looking for gifts, she had come across one of the Salvation Army’s “Giving Trees,” which carry cards describing real local children for whom the agency is seeking “angels” to buy their presents. One card featured a little girl who asked for a doll and a hairbrush. The young shopper made the purchases and returned them with the card to the Salvation Army booth in the mall. Then she bought candy with the money she had left.

“This girl felt she was so richly blessed that she gave to another girl who was less fortunate,” Brink said.

That is the kind of holiday spirit that prompts generous friends and area residents to make gifts to the Pocono Record’s annual Toys for Joy campaign. We collect the donations between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, and then turn over the proceeds to the Salvation Army and the Pleasant Valley Ecumenical Network, which buy and distribute the gifts to needy children all around Monroe County.

You, too, can brighten a child’s holiday. Send your check to: Toys for Joy, Pocono Record, 511 Lenox St., Stroudsburg, PA 18360.

The 32-year-old Duquesne University employee only recently revealed herself as the woman behind “Secret Agent L,” a giver of random acts of kindness that has been brightening the days of unsuspecting Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, residents since July 2009.

The project began, Miller says, with the birthday of one of her blog readers who had become a close friend. But instead of asking for the latest book on the best-seller list or an iTunes gift card, the friend suggested Miller perform an act of kindness in her name.

So with a single, lavender hydrangea bloom tucked under the windshield wipers of a random vehicle, Secret Agent L was born.

Miller used her friend’s birthday idea to launch a new blog documenting subsequent secret missions, posting photos of the gifts — all inexpensive to fit within her administrative assistant salary — that have included $5 Starbucks gift cards, a roll of quarters at a laundromat and decorative cards emblazoned with uplifting quotes.

The gifts are all tagged with a business card printed in “secret agent-y” type, she laughs. Her tagline: “All-Around Swell Chick.”

The blog — with the help of Twitter — took off, and Miller now has about 80 “Affiliated Agents” across the United States and abroad who are implementing the idea in their cities.

Her favorite mission came on Valentine’s Day when she took blank notecards and wrote inspirational messages about how the holiday “isn’t just about romantic love.”

“I wanted people to know that today’s the day you can celebrate love for your own family, your own friends and your own life,” she says. “I left them all over the city, and I just thought it felt so good.”

She tries to do at least one mission a week, but notes “if I had the money, I would do it every single day,” calling the project “one of the greatest honors of my life.”

Miller says she decided to reveal her double life at a coming-out party last month to help advance her charitable efforts. The party was a fundraiser for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an organization “near and dear” to Miller, she told HLN’s “Prime News” on Wednesday. More than $1,500 was raised, she said.

“I think people are so hungry to not feel alone and not feel weird and that they don’t matter,” she says. “I think people really want to feel valued and noticed because there’s so much hurt out there and my project is an attempt to heal some of that.”

She hopes her anonymous gifts will help at least bring smiles to those going through a tough time — though she never sticks around to see who finds them.

“I think that’s part of the fun — it’s just sort of putting the gift there and leaving, and just knowing that somebody’s going to get it and it doesn’t matter who,” she says.

She often receives e-mails afterwards from gift recipients to her secret agent account.

“One of the sort of themes that I’ve noticed in these e-mails is that they all seem to find things on days when they’re having a really bad day,” she says.

Mission: Accomplished.

Credit:  By Sarah Aarthun, CNN

• It is said that 160,000 kids a day miss school because of bullying issues
• Bullying was a factor in 2/3 of the 37 school shootings reviewed by the U.S. Secret Service
• Research indicates that bullying occurs at approximately the same rate in kindergarten as in elementary school

The Children’s Kindness Network, a nonprofit 501(c)(3), has produced a new CD aimed at kids ages Pre-K to 3rd Grade, featuring 17 celebrity voices – and the 90-piece Arizona State University Symphony Orchestra (led by Conductor Timothy Russell) – in a story and musical performance promoting kindness and identifying kind behavior. Moozie’s Musical Adventures is available in stores or on the website (www.ckn-usa.org) for $9.99–digital downloads also available on this site.

There are neighbours who smile and wave at each other, maybe get together for the occasional barbecue or shovel each other’s driveway.

There are neighbours who never speak and secretly wish the other people would just move away.

And then there’s Tracey Louvros and Dave Kozoris, neighbours in Brocklehurst for the past eight years.

Dave needs a kidney.

Tracey is jumping through all the medical hoops she needs to so she can give Dave one of hers.

Why?

“Because he needs one,” Tracey says matter-of-factly.

Right now, Dave’s living without his kidneys, which were removed in February as a result of the polycystic kidney disease he had — essentially, his kidneys were filling up with grape-shaped growths, distending his stomach and shoving all his other organs into places they weren’t meant to be.

After the surgeons removed the two organs, they were weighed. One hit 20 pounds, the other was seven pounds.

Kidneys usually weigh not much more than four ounces.

“I couldn’t breathe,” Dave says. “It was hard to walk.”

He’s been on dialysis ever since.

When he got home from the hospital, Dave and his wife, Betty, talked with Tracey and her husband, Nick.

Dave told them what the doctors had said — the next step was to find a kidney for transplant.

“I said, ‘I’ll give you one of mine,’” Tracey says. “And he laughed at me.

“But I thought it was day surgery. In April, when we started the paperwork, I started reading it all and I was talking to them [medical staff] and I said, ‘I’ve got to call you back’.

“And I went over to Dave’s and said ‘Dave, this isn’t day surgery’.”

In fact, if Tracey’s kidney turns out to be one with which Dave can live — phase three of the tests will be completed today (Aug. 25) — Tracey is looking at several days in St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, and then up to six weeks recovering at home.

So far, having gone through a battery of tests, all she knows for sure is that she is in good health.

The process started with reams and reams of paperwork.

The next step was to review Tracey’s medical history and discuss the steps she needed to take before she would even be considered, which included ensuring her body-mass index was at a specific level.

It is.

The third phase addresses compatibility and, although they have different blood types, Dave says there are so many ways doctors can address this to ensure her kidney would work in his body.

At one point, when the two families were talking about this unique neighbourly exchange, Tracey’s son, James, said he’d donate his kidney if his mom couldn’t.

“He can’t. He’s too young,” Tracey says of her 19-year-old son.

“But that’s just how we all feel about Dave.”

Tracey’s been on the organ-donor list since 2006, when Kamloops residents were urged sign up as Nina Johnson waited for a heart transplant.

The Kamloops teen died in July of that year, but Tracey’s commitment to step up if her name was called didn’t waver.

Should she not be compatible, the surgery could still proceed.

Dave says in cases like that, doctors opt for a process called pairing, which sees two incompatible kidneys exchanged — helping out a pair of patients.

Dave says his doctors have told them they’ve done up to six pairings at one time.

While Tracey’s been going through a battery of tests, so has Dave, most of them focused on ensuring his mental health is strong enough to cope with the transplant.

Now retired, Dave once worked at the Weyerhaeuser mill as an assistant manager, responsible for hiring, firing and other work.

“So I cope with stress well,” he says. “And I’ve been a little lucky with my genes. I act and feel a little younger than I am.”

That luck stepped up when his kidneys were removed. After the surgery, Dave says, he didn’t recover as well or as quickly as doctors expected, resulting in a quick air-ambulance trip to Vancouver for more tests, which revealed he had a heart attack during the kidney-removal surgery.

“Part of my heart was just flopping around in there,” he says.

But doctors quickly treated it — to the point Dave and his wife were able to spend about 10 weeks in their motorhome driving to Newfoundland and back, with the dialysis machine on board.

“He doesn’t like to be kept down,” Tracey says of her neighbour.

While Dave’s been lucky, having a potential donor next door, others wait for months — and sometimes forever — for a transplant.

“Oh, God, there’s lots of waiting,” Dave says.

“They say for every 93 people who sign up [on the donor list], by the time they’ve all filtered out, there are only two or three left.”

Potential donors change their minds. Their health changes. There are many reasons why so many drop out, Dave says.

Tracey says people have questioned her decision.

“Some of them have said I’m jeopardizing my own family.

“Well, how?

“This is the right thing to do.” (Story by Kamloops this Week)

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Please check it out and do your best to support this organization. www.feedthechildren.org

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