So far, Dinner with the Smileys has been about us and what we are going through while Dustin is away on deployment. My boys have met interesting people who have given them unforgettable experiences and thoughtful gifts. My boys are forever changed because of it.

For our fifth Dinner with the Smileys, I asked my friend Jenifer Lloyd to show the boys what philanthropy is all about. Jenifer is a seven-year breast cancer survivor. She works for Champion the Cure. She knows a thing or two about giving back all that has been given to you.

Jenifer planned to take Ford, Owen and Lindell to the pediatric floor of Eastern Maine Medical Center, where they could meet children who have cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.

In the days leading up to our dinner, I talked to the boys about what they might see and how they should behave. I told them they might have questions, and if they did, either Jenifer or the nurses could help them understand.

The boys were attentive and curious. They also were a little nervous. We decided to buy small gifts for the patients. Doing so helped the boys put themselves in the other children’s shoes: What would I want if I was in the hospital? Older kids, Ford decided, would want crossword puzzles. Younger kids, Lindell said, would want coloring books.

I reminded the boys that our dinner guests had done the same thoughtful planning and questioning before they came to our house.

We met Jenifer at EMMC and rode the elevator to the eighth floor. When the doors parted, the boys saw a lighthouse and a mural of fish on the walls. This was not the “hospital” they had imagined.

Inside the double swinging doors and down the hallway past the patient rooms was an atrium filled toys, a foosball table, books, sofas and tables with umbrellas bathed in natural sunlight from the glass ceiling.

Amid such a child-friendly environment, my boys eased back into kid mode. Lindell rode on a stuffed dinosaur. Ford and Owen checked out the foosball table. There was laughter and noise.

Then a boy shuffled past in a hospital gown. He was close in age to my older boys and like them in almost all respects. Except he was carrying a bag for his catheter.

Now the boys remembered.

They made crafts with the boy in the family resource room. Then he offered to help them pass out gifts to the other patients.

After the hospital, it was time to have a meal with our dinner guest. While the boys were away from the table, Jenifer asked if she could share her cancer story with them.

I wasn’t sure how much the boys would understand. But when Jenifer showed them pictures of herself being wheeled into surgery, they ‘got it.’ The table was quiet for a couple minutes. She pulled up another picture, this one of her bald head and her naturally bald husband wearing a wig meant for her. The boys looked at me as if for permission to laugh. Jenifer beat them to it. When she laughed, they did, too.

It’s hard to know how much the boys absorbed from the day, but they’ve been unusually quiet ever since. Did I show them too much? Did any of it make sense? I’ll probably never know.

Yet, as we left the cafe that night, Jenifer gave each of the boys a gift. It was a stuffed bear. My older boys are past the age of stuffed animals, so I worried they might make a face. I held my breath.

Then Owen read the card tied to the bear’s neck. All the proceeds from the stuffed animal go to Cancer Care of Maine. No one said a word. The boys stared at their bears. And my heart was glad because although everyone got a gift, I saw what the boys had come to know: It wasn’t about them.

Sarah Smiley is a syndicated newspaper columnist, author and military wife. Her columns appear the second, fourth and occasional fifth Friday of each month.