Random Acts of Kindness and Calorie Counting

Dear John,

Your dad and I have been watching our calories and working out a lot in the last year.  It's led to a lot of good things but it hasn't changed the way I feel about food... especially chocolate.  I moderate my chocolate cravings by keeping Dove chocolates around.  They are about 50 calories a piece and pretty satisfying.  Any other chocolate really can't be in the house.

So today when I told you that you could have a cookie from the Monument Cafe, that's all I wanted to buy: one cookie.  Any more than that is pure temptation for me.  Unfortunately, when I asked about the cookies, I found out that they only sell them in bags of six.

Some day, I hope to be able to have a bag of six cookies in the house, but now's not the day.  I tried to give the other cookies back to the lady, but she wouldn't take them and told me to freeze them.  Freezing them made me think of the other kind of cookies people freeze: Girl Scout Cookies.  I made it through Girl Scout cookie season with the genius plan of buying cookies only for troops... you pay the girl scout, supporting her fund raising, and the Girl Scouts of America send the cookies overseas.  Win-win.  And also, in my weight loss, I have learned that the only people who need to be eating all of the extra calories in things like Girl Scout Cookies are people burning lots of extra calories... like soldiers.

So, back to the five cookies (since you and your sister did eat the one).  I wasn't mailing them and I'm not sure where to find soldiers in Georgetown, so who else burns a lot of calories and deserves sweet appreciation?

Firefighters.

So we went to the local fire station and presented them with our problem of too many cookies.  They said they could totally take care of that and then they told us that their fire truck tours had recently changed in price from $26 to five cookies.  Our lucky day, I guess.

You were very shy around the firemen at first, but they were sweet and you warmed up to them.

 Especially when they let you drive their fire engine.

I know it was a completely random thing to do... taking cookies to firemen.  It makes me think of some of the random ideas my mother used to have.  She would say things like that, like "we should take these to firemen" but then she has your initial shyness in social situations and so she would think on it and wind up changing her mind.

So I hope I can teach you both, the random ideas, and the ways to get past the moment where you ring the doorbell on the fire station and wonder what in the world this fireman is going to say to you and just do it.

Because chances are, he's going to say "thanks for the cookies."

Love,
Mom