My little act was something for my form group, 9 Fleet, at the inner city London secondary school where I work. They are generally quite difficult and pretty hard to handle as a group. I often have weary teachers knocking at my office door sharing tales of horror about what 9 Fleet did next! As a result I tend to shy away from events with them, nervous how they may behave. This year, however, I decided to throw them a Christmas Party dedicated to Theo. We had a great time. One of my main aims was to ensure that one particular student, who is often excluded and unpopular in the class, would be involved and stay for the whole party...and he did! I made a conscious effort to give him special responsibilities and have a chat. All the kids brought in something to share.....homemade cookies, Bangladeshi rice, Greek cookies and Pringles galore!
At the end of the party I made a little speech about what a great class 9 Fleet can be and that they all deserved a pat on the back. It was lovely and in our final assembly (straight after our sugar fueled party!) they were a real credit to themselves. Ultimately, it reminded me that whilst they drive me insane they are a fabulous bunch, all special in their own ways! The highlight of the party was a class song to the tune of Jingle Bells. Highly amusing. The lyrics escape me, but we all had a good laugh! I hope you have a lovely Christmas with your family.
All my love
Gemma D.
From Tadashi:
This Christmas I am committed to doing something I've never done before: I am going to make Christmas dinner for my family. When I'm living in Richmond and making my own meals my diet usually consists of cereal, canned tuna, deli-meat sandwiches and Shafer. Not exactly Christmas appropriate. I'm not sure if I am going to be capable of preparing the feast I have planned for tomorrow, but I'll definitely try my best.
I hope it turns out okay, but if it is a total disaster I assure you it was intended to be an act of kindness!
Merry Christmas guys, I hope you have a great one.
Tadashi
From Laura:
I think your idea for Theo is absolutely wonderful and I'm so happy to participate!
This year, I did something nice for my mom. Every year she spends hours and hours decorating the house, inside and out. She string the lights on the tree (her least favorite thing to do) and she puts up all the ornaments with little to no help. She makes the outside of our house look beautifully lit up, and makes sure to get the right gifts for everyone. What she is most proud of, however, is the small and often unnoticed decorations that are all over the inside. She hangs ornaments on our staircase and lets red ribbon cascade downwards beneath them. She sets up tiny nativity scenes in random places. She gets all the teddy bears (including my old beanie babies) from around the house in an arrangement near the presents under the tree. She sets up a winter scene including ribbons, candles and pine cones along our mantlepiece, and uses old christmas crafts made by my brother and I when we were little. My mom takes so much pride in the decorations to our house, so this year I decided to acknowledge them. I let her take me all around the house and show me every little thing she put up. Part of the time I was bored, but part of the time I was delighted, especially to see the crafts I had made when I was too young to remember and when Christmas was the most exciting thing to happen in my life. I was also very delighted to see how happy it made my mom for one person in the house to sit by our tree on Christmas eve and just look at it, just simply enjoy it. She just wants other people to enjoy the Christmas decorations, so this year I did. I decided not to just walk past them.
Consider my acknowledgment of my old pasta shell candle holders and glitter picture frames made in preschool an acknowledgement of Theo Fueglein. An acknowledgement of how lucky I am to have been able to make all those things as a kid and an acknowledgement of how much I wish he was able to make them too.
Have a very Merry Christmas Fueglein family, I hope Theo gets many stocking letters this year!
-Laura
From Minh:
To the Fueglein family,
I know it is Christmas already but I still wanted to have the chance to share my good deed. It has taken along time for me to do something or even think of something good enough to write on a blog. Each day I would try and figure out what I was able to do to help someone, however, I felt like nothing was good enough. I wanted so badly to do something extraordinary to make a difference but it was much more difficult then I thought it was going to be. I finally realized I have been thinking to hard about it.
So I looked back on things I have done and there it was. Every Thursday around 4:00, I volunteer at the MCV hospital, in the pediatric emergency room. Being only a volunteer I wasn’t able to have as much hands on help as I had hoped to. My job was to give out books to the children while they were waiting or just simply organizing and filling the book shelves with new books. I felt it was a waste of time since I thought I didn’t have any effect on the children. But once seeing the happiness in them when receiving something as small as a book I feel relief and a feeling that I have done so much more than just read a children’s book. When reading a kid one of my favorite book as a child I can see the interest in their facial expressions. I can’t really explain the feeling but I like being able to interact with the kids and getting their mind off their illness. I am glad I have the opportunity of being able to volunteer in an environment such as the MCV hospital.
This is my good deed that I felt was good enough to be written down.
I hope the best wishes to you family!
Happy Holidays :)
--Minh
From Ms. Sharma:
Dear Mrs. and Mr. Fueglein,
In the honor of baby Theo, I would like to say that it was a brilliant idea to design a blog for him. I feel it’s great that every dear one and friends that you know will be able to convey his or her regards for baby Theo. As a friend I would like convey my warmest regards and share the good deed I have during Christmas.
I volunteer at St Mary’s and throughout my volunteer experience I have realized a lot of things. One of the things I have felt or deeply realized is that not many people, whom we come across throughout the day, can celebrate Christmas as happily as we imagine everybody to celebrate. There are so many patients in this hospital who cannot be home with their loved ones during Christmas.
It is great to discharge patients right before Christmas and give them the chance to be with their dear ones and share happy moments together. As volunteer when I see a patient get discharged, or when new mothers go home with their new born baby, I feel as if a miracle has happened; a miracle in the sense that they were lucky to be home during Christmas.
I sincerely hope that this would make you all and baby Theo happy. Christmas is mostly about doing good things for others, and I wish I did something good during this Christmas.
I wish you all MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR
Posts
