What are you grateful for?

This post is dedicated to my friends and family celebrating Thanksgiving this weekend. Wish we could be there with you! Please know how thankful we are to have you in our lives!

Every day there are things that don't go our way, things we take for granted, things not accomplished. Far too often we concentrate on what has gone wrong, worrying and stewing about how we haven't yet obtained all the things we want in life. As a Mom, it's easy to focus on what our kids could have done better - how they could have behaved better at the store or how they didn't clean their rooms. I know that I often get trapped into busyness of life and feel the knots in my stomach when I fail to accomplish the tasks on my perpetual "to do" lists. But, there is hope for us. My father taught me something that has helped me live life better and I want to pass it along to others.

My Dad was a remarkable man. He passed away April 19, 2008 of Stage IV colon cancer. At a time in his life when most people would have felt little to be grateful for, my Dad started to write a gratitude journal. He told me how the simple fact of writing down 4 or 5 things he was grateful for each day had changed his whole outlook on life. Focusing on the positive each day left less and less time to think about the negative. He wrote simple things in his journal like how he was "thankful for thicker soup at the hospital today" or "thankful that Edo added salmon to its menu". Can you tell he loved food? Of course he also wrote about important stuff like how he was "thankful for seeing his grand kids and how they made him laugh". Some of the things he wrote in that journal I will treasure for always.

After he told me about his gratitude journal I started writing my own. On a bad day it might seem a daunting task, trying to find the good things to list. However, I've found that once you get started it gets so much easier. You might start with a silly thing like "I'm thankful that my car did not run out of gas today" (something that I am thankful for far too often, given my propensity for pushing the little red light) to being "thankful for a friend's call" or "for a night out without the kids". It's amazing how once you start listing things, more and more ideas pop into your head, and in no time you've actually pulled a good day out of a bad one. I've even added a gratitude journal application on my iTouch. What could be easier?

I may not always write my list down every day but mentally at night, before I go to sleep, I try to recall all the things that were good.

I don't claim to have discovered gratitude journaling but it has helped me focus on what is really important in life - like Caitlyn's love notes, Jack's wide eyed joy about the awesomewater slide we went on, laughing with my friends on Skype, or the best popsicles I have ever tasted - they're called Cyclones here and they are amazing! On that note, I guess I am my father's daughter!

So try a journal yourself... you might like it.

Turkey et Vin

My friend Shannon was teasing me the other day that she was only going to "follow" my blog when I wrote about cooking Coq au Vin - like the blogger whose life was made into the movie Julie & Julia.

If you haven't seen the movie yet, you should go, it has some pretty hilarious moments. Part of the movie is based on a woman who started a blog about cooking Julia Child's 524 recipes in 365 days. An interesting idea for sure, but not something I would ever want to duplicate.

So, I'm sorry Shannon but it's so not going to happen. For one thing - I didn't even know what Coq au Vin was until I Googled it (rooster cooked in wine, for those non-gourmets like myself), and for another - I don't have a passion for cooking. So consequently, I would never choose to cook my way through Julia Child's cookbook, or for that matter, any cookbook. Well - unless it was a cookbook dedicated solely to cupcakes! But then I'd have to blog about my exercise program... boring!

However, in an effort to gain readership (are you there Shannon?) I have decided to cook something on par (at least in my mind) with Coq au Vin - namely Thanksgiving dinner. And while the turkey may not be cooked in wine, the cook may need some to make it through!

For a lot of people cooking a Thanksgiving dinner wouldn't be much of a problem. Usually one person in the family is always responsible for the turkey, year after year after year. I am not that person. Last year I ordered the whole dinner from Sunterra. That's how I roll!

So my decision to cook Thanksgiving dinner will be a challenge, and not just of my cooking prowess. First, there's no such thing as Thanksgiving in Australia. I guess when you come over on a boat as a prisoner of Mother England you don't have a lot to be thankful for! Since they don't do Thanksgiving here, it's proving difficult to find all of the ingredients that you'd associate with a turkey dinner. For one, the only turkey I've found so far looks more like a cross between spam and a turkey - a "spurkey"! Scary!!

Then, the pumpkin pie. Is it too late to get someone to send me a can of pureed pumpkin? I might be willing to risk a rubber glove search by an overeager quarantine official just to get my hands on one! Apparently the Aussies like to work their frustrations out on their pumpkins. The lady at the grocery store looked at me like I had escaped from a mental institution when I asked about pumpkin in a can. Couldn't they have spared a row for cans of pumpkin, or are three rows of jars of beet root really necessary?

With no pumpkin puree in sight it looks like I will be mashing up some fresh pumpkin myself. That got me to thinking - is apple pie associated with Thanksgiving? Who am I kidding?Pumpkin pie is Thanksgiving!! Just like kids jumping in leaves, family around the table, and my brother and cousin Mary moaning about how they need a nap after so much turkey! Guess I better just buck up and smash some pumpkins!

So, I will cook Thanksgiving dinner. Not because I want Shannon to read my blog, but because I love what it represents. Giving thanks for all the good things we have in our lives. This year, far from home and family, celebrating Thanksgiving is a chance for us to appreciate what we have together, while also emotionally linking ourselves with those back home. They will be eating turkey and pumpkin pie - and so will we!