Day 8: Knowledge

 

I am grateful for the knowledge I learn every time my son develops a new area of interest. Josh develops pretty intense interests in things and then those are his favorite things to talk about, so I'm going to take a little walk down memory lane of the different interest areas over the years. None of these have completely gone away, but they fade after a few years when a new topic captures his imagination.

 In preschool, it was trains, so we knew all the characters on Thomas, but we also knew the difference between a boxcar, hopper, and gondola.

In early elementary, the interest was bridges. We learned about the different kinds - arch bridge, suspension bridge, cable-stayed bridge, etc. We learned about the longest and the strongest and the most unusual bridges throughout the world. Two favorites were the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the memorable Gallupin Gertie in Tacoma, Washington.

In late elementary through middle school, it was natural disasters. We learned about the different wind speed classifications for hurricanes and tornadoes, about what causes natural disasters to form, and most of all what were the biggest and most notable disasters in history - everything from Vesuvius to Mt. St. Helens with volcanoes, Hurricane Katrina, the Tri-State Tornado. We still take note of every tsunami sign we see when we're on the coast and keep track of wildfires pretty closely.

Now, the beloved subject is shipwrecks. Titanic and Lusitania are the two that he can tell you about backwards and forwards, but he likes to learn about more obscure ones, about ship captains who acted honorably and dishonorably, and about how lifeboat regulations have changed over time.

These are all subjects I knew very little about before Josh, and they are subjects that make me think of him with a smile every time they come up in even the smallest way in every part of life. I'm grateful for the passion he brings to his interests and how that overflows to all of us.

Day 7: Changes this Year

 

This one is an anticipated change that's coming up in August. After four years of homeschooling, Zoey is going back to public school to start high school. In honor of this, I'm going to do a thankful about some of the things I loved about high school.

I'm grateful for teachers and academic opportunities. Like McQueen, my high school was one of the biggest in the state. This meant that we had quite a range of classes to choose from and sometimes got really great teachers. In particular, I loved my high school English teachers and credit them for helping me learn to get technically skilled as a reader and writer while not taking away the joy and fun of either pursuit. I had an Anatomy and Physiology teacher who had us eat all kind of strange animal body parts and try to earn the "Iron Stomach Award" as we learned about the different body systems. I had social studies teachers who showed me that history can be the most exciting and relevant subject rather than the driest. I hope Zoey has some teachers who inspire.

I'm grateful for the events, like Spring Day and football games and pep rallies and the dances and the graduation ceremony. I wasn't especially into any of these things at the time, but looking back, they are special marker posts during your teen years and though they weren't the highlight of the experience for me, I'm grateful and glad they were there. I hope Zoey enjoys some of the traditional high school events.

I'm grateful for the sports and coaches. It's so helpful in high school when you find your thing, and for me this was definitely sports. On my teams, I found friendships, learned many life lessons (scattered throughout previous blog posts), and made some great memories. I got to experience both victory and defeat as intense as anything I've faced in adult life, and I found a place of belonging. I hope that Zoey is able to find an activity that excites her and gives her a place of belonging.

Most of all, I'm grateful for high school friendships. I wasn't a popular kid, but I had really great, strong, real friendships. None of us were inclined to party, so our weekends looked more like spending an hour at Blockbuster picking out a movie, driving around for hours, listening to music - and it was the absolute best. I loved my high school friends and definitely count them as the highlight of my high school experience, and I hope that Zoey makes friendships like these.

Day 6: Character Trait

The character trait I'm grateful for today is one that I've had to grow more than one that comes naturally, and that is adaptability. I tend to have an idea, once I start down a path, of how life is going to look both day-to-day and also 5, 10, and 15 years out with following that path. The thing I've had to learn about life is that it doesn't work so predictably as to be planned out neatly for decades into the future. There will be surprises, curve balls, and challenges that force you to pivot. There will be things about both you and your family members that make what seemed like the best life path turn out to not be so anymore as time goes on. 

•  Vocation-wise: I've learned how to be a stay-at-home mom and a homeschool mom for a good chunk of my adult life when I never in a million years would have envisioned that life for myself; and now, over the last couple years, am learning how to transition back into the workforce after so many years away. 
• For everyone who raises kids: you see that the only predictable thing is change over time. Just when you get the hang of one stage, they are on to the next, and each stage comes with increasing independence and a need to trust the kids more rather than try to control everything. 
•  In my line of work, the cases are extremely dynamic, so it very frequently happens that you have conversations and do research and make plans based on one set of facts and then things have already changed by the time it gets to the decision making deadline. Everyone in this work world has to learn how to plan and move forward with plans, but stay adaptable for changes at any time.

All of this has been stretching and growing and teaching that me how to re-invent, how to be a beginner in middle age, and how to adapt to what life demands of you at different times. I'm grateful for that lesson, which I think I have grown in but which will also continue to be a lifelong learning project. 

Day 5: Day-to-Day Bore

One of my regular trails

I can't let a gratitude series go by without writing at least one post about my gratitude for running, and this works as the category to slot it in because this gets to an aspect of running that I appreciate - it's the same thing, over and over. I will occasionally try a new trail or get out for a run on vacation or see a new route via a race, but generally I do the same 3-4 routes every single time I run. This familiarity allows you to notice things - the changing seasons, the people who do really creative and beautiful things with their yard, the little tucked away green space that's not officially a park. You get to know the landmarks that you pass each time and gauge how the run is going based on how you feel when you hit that point in the route.  It allows you to zone out of the activity itself and either work through things in your mind or attend fully to music. It makes it very easy to get out the door when you're just grabbing your shoes and heading to the same few places - no time or energy used up in planning. And it's comforting, when you're going through stressful and chaotic things in work and in life, that running can be a space that is not stressful or chaotic. I'm grateful for the day-to-day bore of running.

Day 4: Talents

 

This is not a unique talent, judging by the number of memes available on the subject, but I am grateful for my talent of memorizing song lyrics. (My unique twist is that I can hear a lyric in a close-but-wrong way and then maintain that as the correct lyric in my head even if I hear the song with the correct lyric 500 more times.) I'm grateful for the joy that music brings and I'm grateful for the way that singing a song you loved when you were 11 or 16 or 25 brings you right back to that time in life. I'm grateful for the songwriters who come up with just the right words to capture a feeling or moment, and I'm grateful for the musicians who add the music that elevates the whole experience to another level. 

Day 3: Invention

 I am grateful for the invention of dishwashers. There are many chores that I enjoy if I'm in the right mood and have a good audiobook playing, but handwashing dishes is never on that list. I'm grateful that dishwashers allow you to avoid the level of rinsing and scrubbing, the dealing with really hot water, the wondering if you got it clean enough with glasses, the trying to dry in the weird nooks and crannies, and the finding drying space on the counter for a meal's worth of dishes. And I'm grateful that because dishwashers are common in primary homes now, the one thing that's fun about handwashing is the signal to the brain that if you're handwashing, it's probably because you're somewhere new and different and hopefully on vacation. Here's to you, dishwashers!

Day 2: Part of the Day

 

Since I do a series like this every year, I like to try to choose things that are true of our family for a stretch of time, but likely won't be true forever. One of the things that we like to do a couple times per week right now is play Settlers of Catan. 

I'm grateful that the kids are old enough to play games and watch movies that all of us can genuinely enjoy. I'm grateful for this game, which has just the right amount of complexity and length of gameplay to be maximally enjoyable. I'm grateful for how it brings out the girls' personalities, showing their increasing abilities to strategize, negotiate, and adapt. I'm grateful for the Longest Road card and getting a killer 2 for 1. Most of all, I'm grateful for the time together.