Use the longest days of the year to volunteer for a cause that’s close to your heart, GoodNet suggests. “Volunteering brings with it a deep appreciation of all that you have in life, and helping those in need is a firm reminder of what really matters,” the blog says. One easy way to help veterans in need is to use a few of those extra daylight hours to weed out your unused clothing, small appliances and other household junk and make a donation to ClothingDonations.org. We’ll pick up your donation and resell your castoff goods to fund valuable veterans’ programs.
Tag: summer
Take Advantage of Extra Daylight for Summer Fun
More hours of daylight mean more hours for summer fun. Wake up early to enjoy the sunrise, then get out and enjoy the sun by taking a long hike in the wilderness, Ecological Calendar suggests. Invite friends and family to enjoy the twilight hours at a cookout after work, or take the day off to go swimming or boating. Cool off with an ice cream cone or tall class of lemonade. Starting Saturday, the days will slowly get shorter and shorter until there’s as little as nine hours of daylight in the lower 48 states, so the #solstice invites you to make the most of summer while you can.
Set Goals on the Longest Day of the Year
You’ll cast the year’s smallest noontime shadow when the summer solstice arrives at 11:54 EDT on Friday, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make big plans. Use the sun’s extended presence to get recalibrate yourself toward life goals, Vogue suggests. “Energetically, it’s a great time for a check-in,” says healer Emily Mikaelah. “Take the time to ask yourself, ‘What progress has been made on my dreams?’ and ‘Have I been doing my part to make them come into fruition?’ The fruit is ripening soon, and we want to pick it off the branch when it’s at its peak.”
Celebrate the Summer Solstice
Friday, June 21 marks this year’s summer #solstice — the longest day of 2019. Every location north of the equator worldwide will have at least 12 hours of daylight, and a few U.S. cities — in Alaska, naturally — will see no sunset whatsoever. Celebrate the sun by making sun tea, planting a garden or making a solstice feast of fresh (yellow) summer ingredients such as lemons and summer squash, WikiHow suggests. As the sun finally sets, light a candle or bonfire and keep it lit until the sun rises again, as the ancient pagans once did to honor of the gifts of dark and light.
Get the Kids to Declutter on Their Summer Vacation
School’s out (for the summer)! And if you have kids, that means you’ll be looking for something to keep them busy for six or eight hours on most weekdays. Summer camp, a family vacation and other diversions are great options, but they can’t fill every one of those hours fast enough. This summer, get your kids involved in a good #decluttering.
You can already hear the collective groan you might hear as you suggest such a chore. But if you organize and incentivize the task, you might find that it gets done faster and more completely — and then everyone can really enjoy the summer fun.
Set a goal; the Making Lemonade blog suggests a summertime target of reducing stuff by one-third. Kids tend to accumulate lots of toys, clothing and other junk that they outgrow quickly, leading to overstuffed closets and drawers, so extra stuff should be easy to weed out. Put each of them in in charge of choosing what to keep.
Find a rainy day or quiet weekend to have everyone pitch in and declutter their personal spaces, or simply set a deadline. As an incentive, put a garage or yard sale on the calendar; anything that the kids are able to declutter and sell will mean extra money in their pockets — money they can spend on whatever they wish.
Toys can present an especially challenging decluttering task, says Simply Well Balanced. Sort them into categories — building toys, stuffed animals, craft supplies, etc. — and ask your child to keep only a limited number of favorites. Those few items will go back to the closets and shelves, and the rest will be bagged and boxed for sale or #donation. Anything broken or unusable can go directly into the trash.
After you hold your sale and distribute the proceeds, you can box up the leftover clothing, toys and other household items and schedule a ClothingDonations.org pickup. A driver will stop by on the appointed day, load up your stuff and leave a donation receipt for tax purposes. That lightly used merchandise will then be resold to fund veterans’ programs.
This, in itself, can be a lesson in personal responsibility for younger children, decluttering coach Gari Julius Weilbacher told WHYY. “It’s wonderful to teach kids from a young age about making meaningful donations. Involving kids in packing up the books, toys and clothes that they are no longer using can engage them in the process.”