Good, Good, Good, Good...

Good for Kids, Good for Parents, Good for the Environment, Good for Finances, Good for a Better World for all.

Dear Readers,

I can't tell you how thrilled, elated, relieved and so on and so on... I am to have discovered EchoAge, a new concept in celebrating a child's birthday. As the mother of P 9, G 7, R 5, and D 3, I consider myself to be the luckiest mother ever in the whole wide world and it is my dearest hope that all other parents out there feel the same sense of fulfillment, pride and exhiliration.

Along with all the fulfillment, pride and exhiliration, I also have some sadness and frutstration at times. Two of our angel gifts arrived to us in the month of October and I am still in the midst of cleaning up from the second October birthday party of 2008. If only I had known of EchoAge, http://www.echoage.com/, before we threw the parties. Whenever we have the occasion to host a celebration for one of our troop, I have a deep sense of sadness and regret mingled in with the excitement. I feel sad about the money that somebody will be spending on a gift that my child might not appreciate because they already have too much clutter to even appreciate what they have. I feel sad about the piling up in the landfill sites because so much of what is available in the toy market is complete junk and breaks the day the package is opened and does not get returned to the store as the parents don't know where the gift was bought and don't have the receipt or the time or the wherewithall to hold the manufacturers responsible. I feel sad about the extra clutter that will be added to my basement, when I don't seem to be able to find the time to help sort it out and to gather all the pieces of an unappreciated toy to move it to somewhere else where it could be another child's treasure. Mostly, I feel sadness thinking about another child somewhere who has no clutter to sort through -- some with nothing at all even.

This concept is brilliant. It helps address all of these problems and more. As is highlighted on the EchoAge site, it helps reduce the waste of packaging and wrapping material, it helps children learn a fabulous lesson about sharing and it gives children a great sense of achievement when they know they are contributing to the happiness of another child as well as they celebrate their own birthday. The benefits are so manifold I'm overwhelmed!!! This is so great!!! Thank you Debbie and Allison for taking action to help on so many levels. Congratulations on your success.

I am all the more thrilled to see that one of the charities you support is one that I also hold dear to my heart, Free The Children. I feel almost a sense of kindred spiritedness as I too have just started a company and one of the most compelling reasons I decided to take the blind faith leap into entrepreneurism was that I wanted to find a way to support Free the Children, [http://www.freethechildren.com/index.php], and another worthy charitable organization I just learned of recently called Hands for Help, [http://www.bilaalrajan.com/confirm.html]. Both of these charitable organizations were founded by children with respective mottos of "Children helping children through education," for the former and "Inspiring kids to help kids," for the latter. Compelled by the words of Craig Kielburger when he was 12 years old, "Nobody has an excuse good enough to ignore the problems of these child workers," our family felt a need to find a way to help.

Our new company is called Commuteducation. Our aim is to raise proceeds and awareness for these two noble organizations, while selling educational and self-development material in audio and video format as inspired by the mottos of the two. We are truly elated to see the brilliant means by which EchoAge has found a way to make the world a better place in so many ways. Congratulations and best wishes for all the success and goodness you deserve for your efforts and initiative, which make me think of a story I heard yesterday about God's boomerang that always finds its way back to those who do good deeds. You rock!

Our next round of birthdays is in July, when we have our other two to celebrate. For the first time in the history of my motherhood, I'm not putting off the planning until the last second. I have a great idea, thanks to EchoAge. I love it. In the meantime, I'm planning to share it with as many others as I can.

Ardently,


Kathleen Betts
commuteduation@lycos.com
http://www.commuteducation.com/