{I Will Be Your Friend}

A 6-year-old boy named Blake is highlighting the power of kindness and friendship just in time for back-to-school season, wrote Caroline Bologna for HuffPost.  Last week, Blake’s mother, Nikki Rajahn, posted a photo of her son wearing a shirt that says “I will be your friend” on Facebook. She also shared the sweet backstory.:

“I told him that as a back to school gift, I will make him any shirt he would like. It could have anything- a basketball theme, football, etc. which are all his favorites,” she wrote. After thinking about it, Blake asked her, “will you please make me a shirt that says ‘I will be your friend’ for all the kids who need a friend to know that I am here for them?”

The Georgia mom ended her caption with the hashtag #stopbullying and concluded, “Never underestimate your kid’s heart for others! I love my sweet Blake!” The post has received more than 10,000 likes, and the comments section is filled with positive reactions and requests for the mom to make more of these shirts.

Read the rest of the story.

{This post is dedicated to my great-niece Maggie who turns 9 today...and is a great friend! xoxo}

{Vibrate Love}

...vibrate love...

...vibrate love...

...vibrate love...

{Talking to Daughters With Respect for All}

I appreciated an article that was published on Yahoo.com soon after the presidential election in November featuring a series of interviews with President Obama conducted by The New Yorker's David Remnick. 

The focus was how the president talked to his teen-age daughters, Sasha and Malia, about the outcome of the election and about a man who had spoken so viciously about him, so crudely about women, so maliciously about the disabled, and who had so little respect for telling the truth. 

Once again, President Obama, an articulate and thoughtful man, focused on "kindness and respect and understanding." 

What I say to them is that people are complicated. Societies and cultures are really complicated…This is not mathematics; this is biology and chemistry. These are living organisms, and it’s messy. And your job as a citizen and as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding. And you should anticipate that at any given moment there’s going to be flare-ups of bigotry that you may have to confront, or may be inside you and you have to vanquish. And it doesn’t stop…You don’t get into a fetal position about it. You don’t start worrying about apocalypse. You say, O.K., where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward. 

"The President’s words can certainly help in a time when many parents are wondering how to talk to their children about what the future holds in the face of a Trump administration," Remnick remarked.