The Way I View “Blessings”

November is a time of year when many of us find ourselves particularly aware of and grateful for the blessings in our lives, but ever since Emily was very tiny, part of our nightly routine year round has been what we call “Thankful Things”. As we’re kissing each other goodnight, we each list two “things” that happened, or that exist in our life in general, from our day that were particularly special that we’re thankful for (and we can’t duplicate items too often!). Of course I am trying to instill in her a sense of appreciation and gratitude, but on a more selfish and pragmatic level, I also want to encourage her to be cognizant of the wonderful things in her life, so that she will have that “reserve” for those inevitable times when life isn’t quite as rosy as I want it to be for her. We do have so much to be grateful for… We have a wonderful family, friends who mean the world to us, a cozy home that we love, a comfortable income, and of course, our health. We love and feel loved in return. We have good days and bad, but even on the bad, we have so many Thankful Things. We are, in a word, blessed.

But as I’ve been stumbling around in my brain all month trying to figure out how to depict “blessings” in a photo, I finally asked Emily tonight what she would do. And as so often is the case, she had my answer immediately—none of my “overthinking”. “How ’bout the picture you took yesterday of the spiderweb? We have beauty and blessings all around us. We just need to see them!” And I realized she was right. Yesterday we had a big storm, with lots of wind and rain. But as I was walking past the window during the height of it, a glorious spiderweb loaded with sparkling droplets of rain caught my eye. The poor little spider was crawling up and down his web to find shelter in the tree when the biggest gusts would hit (and then when I came out to bother him with my camera ;-P). The way the droplets were catching the light and reflecting was just glorious!

And just because our perfect little family is my greatest blessing of all, here’s my favorite recent image of my two greatest loves:

Next please continue our little blog circle on to the fabulously talented Leah Cook with her take on “Blessings”; I can’t wait to see what she has up her sleeve for this month!