Reflections

On New Years Eve 2008, my hubby and I dubbed 2009 the Year of Fun! 3 days later he had emergency surgery (appendix). 2 days after that we found out that our daughter had a congenital kidney condition. She had 2 surgeries as part of a total of 9 trips to that Dr, who is 90 miles away. Our teen had his wisdom teeth removed over the summer and got his braces a few weeks ago. So 2009 really ended up being the year of medical/dental. As we neared the end of the year we wanted a new outlook for 2010, but we didn't want to jinx ourselves. LOL! We were discussing this on Christmas and hubby said that maybe it should be the year of no complaining. My sis was here and said how about gratitude? Hum... Sounds good!

So we have officially dubbed 2010 the Year of Gratitude! It's now Jan 2 and what has changed? Nothing really. Have we had been overly thankful for things? Certainly not! I went to bed very grumpy about my dog peeing on my new slippers (because people didn't get him out right away) about 90 mins into the new year. We are just going to need to keep reminding ourselves to be grateful. It's not exactly like remembering to make your bed each day or to give someone a phone message. We are going to need to focus on the positive side of things. Each night at dinner we go around and ask each other, "What was a positive thing for you today?" That barely scratches the surface~ so we are going to have to create some similar exercises like that. While our motivation for gratitude was to avoid complaining, I do think that practicing, even forcing gratitude will make us more gracious/thankful/grateful/appreciative of everything in our lives.

We'll see!