Happening around here lately

1. Practicing Gratitude.

I’ve never much liked the expression “an attitude of gratitude.” It doesn’t resonate with me. To me attitude is something you “put on”, like an external thing you adopt. The saying even goes “adopting an attitude of ...” Again, its’ like something that is not from you or in you -  and you’re just trying it on for a while. And an attitude doesn’t necessarily denote an action to me - it’s more of a concept.   “Practicing gratitude” suits me better. Because to me it is a practice - you actually DO it over and over until it becomes you and you become it! By practicing every single day, you become a grateful person - a grateful person that practices gratitude every single day! The “goal” and the journey are the same here! From very early on, I have had the practice with my children, to snuggle up before bed, look back on the day, remember or list what happened, what we liked, what we didn’t like so much, what we are grateful for, etc. As they are older now, we have really started to focus a little bit more on the actual practice of gratitude. Not only the forming of a

mindset, but hopefully the habit of a life time. I have a gratitude journal in my bedside table, and I write in it as often as I can. My kids have little gratitude journals too.  They write in them if and when they remember to.

I also used to have a list on the fridge. A few month ago, I went big however, covered the refrigerator in some chalk board vinyl and invited the kids to participate in writing their gratitude on the gratitude chalk board too.

It has been such fun!

And yes, occasionally we swipe against it and end up wearing our chalky gratitude, but it’s all good!

I LOVE reading the things the kids come up with! The board alone is an awesome read, but their little journals are great in themselves. Max is short and sweet, often with just daily one word entries, of whatever he felt grateful for that day. Quite often it can be a thing or something practical.

Anna tends to be a little more elaborate. She has longer entries and mostly they are about people or experiences related to people!

I also often find my kids standing in front of the board and reading out all the things we have written down over time, which just makes us feel the gratitude all over again as they do it!

And when the board gets all filled up, we wipe it and start all over. Not before I take a few pictures though!

 

2. Blissful aroma.

As I type, the house is filled with the blissful aroma of apple butter bubbling away in my crockpot. We’ve had some amazing organic apples from Azure this year, for around 50 cents per pound (and there were many many pounds!)  and I have been canning our year’s supply of ever so yummy homemade, unsweetened applesauce (and some apple jelly) over the last few weeks and now I’m using the last of the apples to make a few batches of apple butter. It’s such an easy thing to do in the crockpot and it makes your house smell oh so good!

 

3. Spreading Joy.

I always like to make it a point to do some random acts of kindness. Sometimes they are slightly more planned, sometimes they are very random and spontaneous. This weekend they were a bit of both!

Some of my fellow “flyers” were inspired by Kelly Rae Robert’s kindness mission and got together to love-bomb the world! I was only too happy to join in! You can read more about it here. So today, I left a few of those lovely little print out’s around my neighborhood. Our community mail boxes looked like they need some art loving, as did a couple of park benches and some lamp posts!

 

 

I also love the practice of love/kindness pebbles, which I left the last of today as I went about my business.

Those are little pebbles with words of love, appreciation or inspiration on them. Like "you are loved”, or “I love you”, or “smile!”, “Ease. Joy. Glory”, etc. You drop these pebbles wherever and whenever you feel inspired to. In people’s pockets, on their desk, in their bag, at the checkout stand, wherever somebody will find it later. The idea is that it will bring a smile on their face and a little wondering as to who it might be from!

I’ll be decorating another batch of pebbles soon!

 

4. Little pleasures

 

Reading and re-reading this at the moment!

Hello, yummy veggie rainbow juice, fresh from the garden!

 

This makes me happy:

 

These make me happy too: