Food, Fun and Thanks

 What do you need to have a successful Thanksgiving?  Family.  Friends.  Food.  Some thanks and giving.  We drove to Houston this year to be with Nate's oldest brother's family, his parents and one of his sister's family.   It was nice to go to some warmer weather and be with family.  We love family and think it is important to spend time together.  Nate had to do his now annual deep fried turkey, which was the hit of the dinner.  We had tons of pies, 2 of which I made.  They were raspberry peach and I used the fruit I bought from a farm in Oregon.  Delicious!  The kids got to have loads of fun hanging out with their cousins and doing some pretty fun things.

To try and bring the thanks into Thanksgiving, I got a great idea from a speaker I recently heard at a conference for women.  She started counting positive thoughts.  She did a 1 month experiment on what it does to how you feel about yourself and life when you count negative vs positive thoughts.  Well, I haven't gotten around to doing that myself so I turned it into counting what you're grateful for.  I had a little bright green hand held counter that I wore on my wrist as a constant reminder of our goal.  At the start of our trip I told the kids what we were going to be counting what we are grateful for.  They were to come up to me or be ready at anytime to tell me some things they were grateful for and the goal was to get to 500 before dinner 2 days later.  The kids were really cute and surprised me with how into it they became.  They would just come up to me and say they had some more for me to count. It was going so well that we decided that 500 was too easy and we needed to up it to 1000.  Every time I saw someone being kind or helpful that counted as well.  We started getting pretty creative with the things we were grateful for.  What it did though, was get our minds focused on how great life is and just how many things we have to be grateful for.  Life can get pretty dreary if you are only focused on what you don't have and your list can be just as long counting those things, but if you start counting off your blessings you realize that your mood is better and life is good and you have much to be grateful for and then you are open to sharing with others.  It's a great little experiment.  You can use a counter on your phone, a clicker, rocks in a jar, a pencil and paper, whatever.  Take 1 day or 1 week and make a conscious effort to count all the things you are grateful for and see how many you can get to and what it does to your mood.