Counting Our Blessings

I spent the day indoors with the girls who are a little under the weather. Ash seems to be recovering well from a brief cold but today Caitlin was miserable, despite the fact that James saw to Ashley for breakfast and Caitlin and I got to lie in till 9:30am. Although Caitlin was emotionally very sensitive today she does seem better than yesterday. Her eyes were lightly weeping yesterday (which I'm sure has to do with touching her nose with her hand and fingers and then touching her eyes-no matter how alert I tried to be to prevent her from doing it). After breakfast we read three Curious George books that we picked up at the library yesterday. Then I tried to get a little housework done but had to abandon the attempt to attend to the girls. After lunch we settled down with our water bottles and hot cocoa to watch a new Berenstein Bears DVD. James and I picked up a few at Half Price Books during the summer and we reveal them intermittently. Today was a day for newness to occupy the housebound girls.

At the end of the DVD was an episode based on the book ‘The Berenstein Bears Count their Blessings' (which we've read in the past).  The girls really liked it. After the DVD we continued the theme by reading a new book called ‘Thanks for Thanksgiving'. I recently placed an order through my neighbor who is in charge of ordering books from Scholastic Press for her daughter's class. We received a bumper crop of new books just this morning (a great big thanks to the universe for its timing). When we finished the book we talked about our plan to share Thanksgiving dinner with Christian and Jennifer at their house on Thursday. Then we discussed the things that we are grateful for and wrote down a list at Ashley's suggestion.

Here goes. A denotes Ashley's suggestion, C denotes Caitlin's, M denotes mine (M for Mammy) and ACM indicates we all came up with it simultaneously.

We are thankful for:

ACM: Daddy

ACM: Ashley

ACM: Caitlin

C: Mammy

M: Our friends...

A: Christian and Jennifer

C: Pauline

A: Isabella and Juliana and Rosemary

A: Oliver and Eliza and Chris and Maylynn

A: Dance class

A: Pieces of paper

A: Our faces

A: Houses (it was raining as we wrote and the bears had been counting their blessings that they were dry in their house during a storrn)

M: Food

M: Grandma and Granddad

M: Books

A: Community Center (they love running around and riding little trikes in the indoor play gym and playing in the toddler room)

A: Easter

C: Library (both of them love the library but Caitlin has the edge in adoration)

A: The whole world

C: Night time (it was starting to get dark with the rain falling and Caitlin loves to clarify several times during the day whose turn it is to take them to bed. She usually asks "your turn take us bed night mama?")

A: Rain