Saturday, I took my two kids, my 5-year-old niece and 10-year-old nephew to a park in Union, NJ. After playing an hour or so of baseball, we all raced to a cute little bridge with a creek below. A disgusting, trash-filled creek, shiny from the shards of glass covering the rocks and dirt.

I immediately found an old, dirty shopping bag and yelled, "Hey, let's pick up some of this trash!" My two kids immediately started picking through the garbage, calling out, "I found a shoe. I found a radio. Look at this gross shirt!" My niece and nephew pretended not to hear. They eventually came around and we took 6 bags of garbage to the trash cans about 50 yards away.

This isn't the first time I've done this with the troops. Last spring, I went to my then 12-year-old niece's software ball game in the same town. It was hard for me to concentrate on the game. Instead, I was trying to imagine someone (a lot of someones), throwing ice cream wrappers, water bottles, soda cans, etc. on the ground when 4 or 5 garbage cans were nearby. The place was a disgrace.

We stayed the night so the next morning I woke everyone up (including my sister and brother-in-law) and told them to grab the industrial-strength garbage bags because we were going back to the field to pick up trash. (I can still hear the moans...) But, they did it and returned with about 7 or 8 huge bags full of garbage - separated into recyclables and non-recyclables, of course.

Since this was their first time doing something like this, I had to get creative. I made up contests - Who can pick up 25 items first?, I divided us into teams where the winner was the team that found the most plastic bottles and cans. I timed us to see if we could clean up under the bleachers in 5 minutes. Just when they thought we were finished, I'd make up another game. Don't get me wrong, it's not easy motivating kids who've never done this kind of "work" before, but it paid off. They got ice cream and my niece got a softball field that was no longer an embarrassment. For me the pay off came when I overheard the kids bragging to their friends that they spent the morning picking up trash at the local softball field.