Preparing for back to school always leads to expensive and perhaps stressful trips to Target and Walmart to get school supplies, lunch needs, school uniforms, and whatever else the new school year may need. My wife loves buying new school supplies because of the smell of new paper and freshly sharpened pencils while I'm breaking out into cold sweats because I'm getting claustrophobic with the amount of people in the store.

This isn't just my family, right?

Rewind to July 2016. I had lost my job after a decade-long career in college sports and we had decided to move our family back home to Louisiana. We soon realized it was going to be Addison's fourth school in five years. To make it worse, it was middle school, and middle school for any pre-teen girl might as well be the seventh layer of hell. As a dad, I knew I had to do something for my little girl.

At the start of her fourth grade year, I was making her lunch on the morning of her first day and I had an idea. What if I wrote a note and placed it in her lunch? When I wrote that first note, I didn't think much about it. I didn't think she'd notice. A few weeks later, she started to ask me if I remembered to put her note in her lunch box that morning.

To help other dads and parenting friends, I began sharing these notes on my Twitter and Instagram accounts because not only are these notes helpful for kids, but I think they are helpful to us adults as well.

What's the point with these notes? Our kids are bombarded with so many negative messages that they are overwhelmed. We must fight this negative with positive messages and encouragement. This is my way of doing it with my daughter and I've seen the impact on my kids, and the teachers at her school have used some of her notes as inspiration for their class lessons for their students.

We could all use a little encouragement each and every day. Start your mornings with a #DadLunchNotes encouraging message for your kids.

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