[Thriving Despite Us] Multicultural Monday #2 - Our MLK Day

[Kate]

Today is Martin Luther King Jr day. I like this day because it is a day to honor some of my most cherished values:

courage, dignity, service, unconditional love, forgiveness, nonviolence, racial justice, equality, peace, reconciliation, multiculturalism, tolerance and much more.

These are values that I work to impart to my children.  I came up with some ideas about how to celebrate the day last week for my first Multicultural Monday.- Multicultural Monday #1

On Multicultural Monday #2, I am going to tell you about how we celebrated.  Jeff and I took the kids to the MLK 5K walk/run in downtown Atlanta. 

I was pleasantly surprised this morning when I woke the kids up at 7am and they all happily popped up, immediately got dressed in proper walking attire and ate hearty healthy breakfasts….Okay…it wasn’t exactly that perfect but they all did get up without too much complaining, which at 7:00 a.m. on a non-school day is pretty impressive. Everyone got dressed in decent attire so long as you don’t consider socks a necessity for a 5K, and ate cold leftover pizza for breakfast.

You can see their enthusiasm in the car ride down town:

Elyse may have been asleep but everyone else was awake and happy to be going.  

It was colder than I had imagined.  We do live in the A.T. L. now so I mistakenly assumed that we wouldn’t freeze our hineys off.  We were all dressed well enough, except for poor Rosie and sockless James.  There are some days that having a messy car with everything plus the kitchen sink floating around in it comes in handy.  This blanket  that lives in the car was just the thing to keep little Rosie toasty warm and I was proud of myself for at least remembering her sock monkey hat.

The walk itself was great.  I enjoyed spending the focused family time.  We spoke about Martin Luther King Jr and how different our family would be if there hadn't been a Dr. King.  We talked about school.  We made a list of birthday present ideas for Rosie whose birthday is a mere 9 days away.  We were together and it was good.

I enjoyed being surrounded by other people who wanted to do something to acknowledge this day.   It was fun to march through Atlanta traffic as great drummers kept the beat.  I’m sure there were plenty of people who just wanted to get some exercise but there were just as many who were interested in honoring the day and that was good, too.

My kids had a blast, even the lazy ones and they know who they are.  We all agreed that we want to do it again next year. I love the symbolism of “marching” on MLK day.   

I also learned something very important.  I talk a good peace, love and hippy, dippy game but I have quite a competitive streak.  I may say I am not competitive at all but I do NOT like being last;  I do not like it at all.

Here is the view looking behind you when you are the last person in a  5K.

Here is the view looking in front of you:

Neither view is all that pretty.  I know I shouldn’t care.  I was there to be with my family and to think about all of those wonderful values that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood for.  Those important ones that I work tirelessly to impart to my children, especially on day as symbolic as today…the noble values that I mentioned in the beginning of this post:

courage, dignity, service, unconditional love, forgiveness, nonviolence, racial justice, equality, peace, reconciliation, multiculturalism, tolerance

If I’m going to be honest though, my thoughts were not that pure. I kept thinking, if I can just get Rosie to stop playing with her pants and speed up, we can take those 2 overwhelmed moms pushing their strollers.  After all, they were going pretty slowly.  Rosie was just going even slower…..I considered ditching her…..it would not have promoted unconditional love, forgiveness or tolerance but I would have escaped from the motorcycle cop who was hanging out a little too closely to my nether regions.

At the end of the day, I was able to forget about all of those values and focus what was truly important ... we didn’t get swept.....we weren't the very last ones.....and we all made it across the finish line:

Even Rosie:

And she was very proud of herself too!

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Posted By Kate to Thriving Despite Us at 1/16/2012 09:33:00 PM