Giving Thanks

(I promise I will provide you with happy Halloween pictures later. However, my camera and computer are not cooperating with each other right now and I am just not in the mood to deal with it, so you'll have to wait.)

Halloween has come and gone, and it is now November. On to Thanksgiving!

(On a side note, today is MY Daddy's birthday. Happy Birthday, Dad!)

I'm sure many, if not all, of you have seen the facebook thing that runs around in November encouraging people to post a status each day for one thing they are thankful for? I think it's a marvelous idea. It really makes you get down to the heart of the matter. By the end of the month, you can really be reaching deep within yourself to find something you are thankful for that you haven't already posted.

We are going to do a new variation on that this year, and I'm going to involve the kids. Well, okay, Monster Boy. Miss Sunshine isn't quite big enough yet to understand (or heck, tell us) what thankful is. But each night at bedtime, I'm going to have each of us say something we are thankful for and write it down. After the kids are in bed, I will then take scraps of fabric (probably quilting squares cut in half) and carefully write our "thanks" on each scrap of fabric. At the end of the month I will quilt them together to create a table runner for our Thanksgiving table. I will probably leave one end "unfinished" so we can continue to add to it next year, or perhaps I will just make new ones for each year. Either way, I think it's a great way to teach our kids about thankfulness, as well as creating wonderful memories, and a family heirloom to remind us how important it is that we give thanks for all that we have!

I'd love it if you'd like to join me in doing these things too - in fact, feel free to comment throughout the month with me and show me what you are doing too! I'll try to do a weekly update on the table runner and some of our "thanks" for the week.

And I'm going to start it off right with a little thanks of my own today : I am so very thankful for wonderful friends and family who are so loving when we need them to be, so supportive when we need them to be, and just so themselves when we need them to be!