It's Monday and I'm grateful!

I am so glad to be back!  I have just spent an entirely miserable week trying to nurse myself and my two children back to health and meanwhile keep the many other "plates" of my life spinning in air at the same time.  Impossible.  Many of the plates stopped spinning and fell crashing to the floor, and that is totally OK.   One of them was this blog.   Another was the general upkeep and daily tidying of the house.  And the cooking.  Nobody cooked this week.  Big deal.   And the bills.  I'll have to pay the bills this week, because nope - that didn't get done last week either.  Also the laundry.  I did feed the cats.   Gold star for that.  I remember bathing the kids once.  I think.

 And then, of course, the small fact that I didn't go to work all week.  That should make for an interesting couple of days while I try to pretend that I can do 3 weeks of work in 4 days.  (Because the week before I was sick I was just "phoning it in"... sitting at my desk, sure, but not being terribly productive... I was probably thinking that I could afford to goof off a little bit, and that whatever I wasn't getting done could surely wait a week.  And so it did.

And now - instead of dwelling on any of this unpleasantness...  I do intend to fully focus on the positives.  Some of the many many positives.  Would you like to join me?

1.  I am so so grateful for a mostly healthy body and healthy life.  We are, all four of us, normally very healthy people who have very few sick days, very few ailments on a yearly basis.    Spending so many days this Winter impatiently waiting for that golden day when good health would return to me has thrown into light how really lucky I am on those days when my body and brain are fully-functioning.  When I'm my usual self.

2.  I was able this weekend to gather a full van load of items to donate to the Goodwill.  This has been on my to-do list for a while, so it is a very pleasant thing to finally check that off of the list!  And also extremely pleasant to see the nothing where before there was really too too much everything.

3.  I feel grateful to have so much to give away, but also, I have to say, slightly guilty that we have so much to give away.   Even while we try as a family to have "just enough and not too much" we seem to always have more, much much more than enough.   This is something to be grateful for - but also something I must continue to work on, because this over-abundance of "stuff" does not align with my values, and it causes a lot of inner conflict.  But lets keep focusing on the positive...

4.  I am deeply happy to celebrate my fifth anniversary as a mother.  My beautiful boy turned 5 this past week!  How completely amazing!  We celebrated by going on an overnight family trip to an indoor water park in the White Mountains (more on that in my next post).

(mike caught me on lifeguard duty.  the one and only picture proving I actually joined my family on this trip)

How oddly fast and slow those 5 years went by at one and the same time! I am wondering if I learned as much as I should have in those five years, if I spent my time well - or if I squandered too much time complaining about how hard it all was.  Because it was definitely hard.  But also so so fantastically wonderful.    I feel I am an utterly different creature than I was five years ago.   Five years, one big move - 375 miles or so north, another big move into our present home that I love so much, another baby, a new business adventure, many new friends and experiences...   Whew!!  I feel tired when I think backwards.

5.  I am grateful for you.

  Deep thinker... preschool philosopher... emotional firecracker...   You surprise me with your empathy, your ability to tune into someone else's feelings at such a tender age.  Your bright blue eyes notice so much in the world around you...  You are easily happy - deeply excited by birds in the bird feeder, by water in a wading pool, by the happiness of your little brother

(on whom you are forever either enthusiastically entertaining or trying to inflict bodily harm.  One or the other), by the prospect of perhaps having ice cream later, by your father walking in the door after a long day of work, by the announcement that we're having MeatLoaf!!! for dinner...

I love you little super-hero, with absolutely every ounce of my body.  So I must be doing something right as your mom.  You're awesome!  And I am a very lucky lady.

6.   I am so happy to see the cows return to their field across the street.   Wandering again out of their barn and onto the little bits of grass (GRASS!!!!) that are beginning to peak out of the blanket of snow that is growing thinner and thinner every day.  I am happy to hear new birds singing in the trees outside my window every morning when I wake up now.  I am happy to choose my lovely red Clarks

over my ugly black snow boots when I go out to the store for some groceries.

7.  I am grateful that I can see again to work on some of the many projects in my work basket.  (I have been suffering with multiple eye problems this week and have been for all intents and purposes half-blind)  I've still been knitting a bit, which I can do for the most part (when a pattern is straight-forward anyway) without looking - but the trickier projects, and projects like this one - had to wait a couple of days.

8.  And lastly, I am grateful for ice cream.   Ice cream makes everything just so much better.   Doesn't it?  I don't know, I just felt like it needed to be said.

9.  Happy Happy week to you all!