Being Nice

Recently I've had a bunch of people do really nice things for me (or just BE nice to me), and I decided I must write about them, and hopefully will continue the tradition in the future (writing about them and DOING those types of things for others).

#1:

Bryndon went to The Ohio State University at the beginning of this week for his first Residency interview. The week before he left, he happened to get in touch with a young couple who lives there in Columbus, who knows my cousin. These people, who we have never met or talked to before last week, straight-up offered to let him stay with them, picked him up from the airport, fed him, invited over a guy from their ward who is currently a Resident there so they could talk about it, took him to the school for his interview the next morning, then took him back to the airport! Can you believe that? Strangers! And they treated him like a family member. I talked once to the husband on the phone before Bryn left to help figure out the details while he was at school, and after I thanked him profusely, he said, "That's what we do." Amen!

#2:

Yesterday I had a dentist appointment in Sugarhouse and I had to bring Avery with me for lack of a babysitter, which turned out just fine because she slept through most of the appt. First of all, all the dental assistants kept coming over to see her and once she had woken up, they wanted to hold her and keep her happy. The receptionist also offered to take her if she got fussy. That was nice (although not much of a chore because Avery is so darn LOVABLE!). But then when I was leaving, a man was coming in the door and saw that I was carrying her in her car seat and my purse, etc, so he said, "Oh, let me help you! You've got your hands full!" It wasn't SO out of the ordinary for someone to hold the door, but he said it so kindly and with such a warm smile that it actually made me really happy.

#3:

Last night I went to the grocery store to re-print some photos I had printed the other day, which had turned out really dark. The woman who helped me ended up spending at least a half hour with me as we went through all of my pictures, one by one (I had like 80 of them!), and she did the fancy fixing of the pictures to make them look better, etc. We realized that last time they had made some mistakes with printing the right pictures, so she ended up just re-printing ALL of them (after she had gone through and fixed all of them) for FREE! She only made me pay for the new 8 x 10 photo I had ordered. She was going to have me go through and trade the dark ones for the good ones she was replacing, but didn't even end up making me give those back. I grabbed some yummy grapes that were on sale while the photos were printing and decided to grab a candy bar for the woman because she had been so helpful and so nice about it. I don't say that to get credit for what I did-- I say it because I recognized that someone being nice to me made me want to be more nice to others (not just her), so that made me more determined to "pay it forward" (I haven't even seen that movie, but I get the idea).

All of these examples of kindness have done the same for me.