There are times where my son says or does something that makes my heart swell and my eyes tear. Like the first time he said “I love you” out of nowhere, or the time when, at age 4, I took him shopping with me and as I tried on a certain shirt, he looked at me and said “Mommy, you look beautiful.” From preschool, he’s sat and pondered God, mortality, equality, love, homelessness, hunger, and all sorts of other subjects we often assume are too deep for children to really think about on their own. When he walked in on me watching the war scene from Benjamin Button, where 15,000 people died in a day, he asked if it had actually happened. I told him it had and after a quiet moment he said, “Mommy, that’s a lot of people. A lot of souls broke that day and a lot of mommies were very sad.” {Ya, that made me cry.}

So, I shouldn’t have been surprised when the other night at the dinner table he informed me that he wanted to donate his birthday to charity:water.

Several weeks ago, ABC aired a special, Be the Change: Save a Life, profiling a handful of awesome organizations making a big impact in some seemingly simple and innovative ways. One of those charities was charity:water. Aidan was taken aback by the number of children who didn’t make it to age 5 because of a lack of clean water. He sat quietly making the comparison between the cost of providing water for one person and the cost of products we consume on a daily basis. He quietly went to bed that night, but never mentioned it again until Tuesday night. He sat at the table and weighed the options, thinking to himself out loud, eventually coming to the conclusion that a life is more important than any presents he would receive. Instead of presents, he would ask everyone to donate $8. {Bonus cuteness: When I asked him how much he wanted to raise, he said $5 million, but when that wasn’t an option on the site, he decided $800 was a good number.}

I think he’s pretty spectacular for having made this decision all on his own at the age of 7. If you think he is, too, please make a donation here or pass the link to someone else.