Love What Is

Jason and the boys (Poor Baby J has an eye infec­tion in this picture!)

He is.  He’s a great hus­band.  He’s a won­der­ful dad.  He’s patient.  He’s a hard worker.  Man, do I love that guy.

Last night, we were talk­ing about some­thing, and Jason said, “If you had to choose, would you do it again?  Get mar­ried so young, I mean.”  We were 22 and 23 when we got mar­ried.  At the time, I remem­ber think­ing that wasn’t that young at all.  Now, look­ing back…  :)

I thought about our mar­riage and the past 9 1/2 years together.  I thought about our trips together, our moves, our kids.  I really couldn’t think of any rea­son I would do things any differently.

Some things that make him are awe­some are:

• his cof­fee mak­ing ability
• the way he loves our children
• the way he takes care of me
• how he lets me sleep in on the week­ends even though he’s tired, too
• how he cleans up the kitchen
• how he works so hard at his job
• and a mil­lion more things

Jason and I sat down today to start think­ing about what we want to make for our Thanks­giv­ing din­ner.  I’ve been telling my dad for a cou­ple weeks that we are hav­ing a tofurky (tofu turkey) as our main dish.  I’m not sure he believes me which is fine, I sup­pose.  We’re not hav­ing a tofurky.

I fig­ured it is get­ting close to the time when we actu­ally have to start decid­ing what we are going to have though.  So far, I think we have enough food for at least 15 peo­ple.  There will be 4 adults and 3 kids at our meal.  :)  When we were mak­ing our list of foods to have for our meal, Kael made it very clear that he would really like some corn.  It turns out he wanted corn on the cob which is tough to come by this time of year, but he says frozen corn will be alright.  Jason wants the tra­di­tional parts of the meal.  He is in charge of the turkey and gravy.  For some rea­son, I’m fix­ated on hav­ing sweet pota­toes, but I do not want the ones that have marsh­mal­lows on the top.  We’ll also be hav­ing cran­berry sauce and cran­berry lemon­ade.  Now, we just need to fig­ure out how to make sure every­thing gets cooked at the right tem­per­a­ture for the right time and is ready all at once.

Yum!

The other day I wrote about want­ing to read more.  Then, yes­ter­day I was think­ing about what I do on Pin­ter­est (beyond win­dow shop­ping for clothes and nail pol­ishes for hours).  I real­ized that Pin­ter­est would prob­a­bly be a great resource for knit­ting projects and pat­terns.  So, I looked through some of the pat­terns for knit­ting and cro­chet­ing.  After I looked for a while, I had a nice list of all the projects I wanted to start.  I real­ized that I had every­thing I needed.  I have the nee­dles, the yarn, the pat­terns.  All I need is more time.  Unfor­tu­nately, at this point, that may not be in the cards for a few more years.  Oh, but it’s fun to look.

I knit­ted this scarf for my sister-in-law for Christ­mas two years ago.

Yes­ter­day, I posted about want­ing to model thank­ful­ness and grat­i­tude for my chil­dren.  Then, I felt guilty about that post, because today I’ve spent a lot of time think­ing about how much I want a cou­ple things for myself.  A dif­fer­ent van would be so nice, one with the LATCH sys­tem and seat back teth­ers.  Also, a nice, new cam­era would be so won­der­ful.  Our cam­era is a lit­tle too slow to catch three fast mov­ing boys.  Many of my pic­tures are happy blurs instead of memories.

Dur­ing this time of year when I want to think about being thank­ful and grate­ful for what I have, I find myself doing the same thing as my kids.  I, too, am mak­ing my “I want” list.  So, I sup­pose my first step in teach­ing my chil­dren about thanks­giv­ing is to model it myself.

We had a con­ver­sa­tion tonight at sup­per that has left me won­der­ing how I can do a bet­ter job mod­el­ing grat­i­tude and thank­ful­ness to my chil­dren.  I know that they are 6, 4, and 1.  They are pretty young, and it’s nor­mal for them to think a lot about them­selves and a lit­tle about oth­ers.  I just want to make sure that as they grow, I’m able to help them make the tran­si­tion from being self-focused to includ­ing oth­ers in their focus, too.

I’m not quite sure how to do that or where to start though.