live thankfully.

As you all know I've been doing a lot of thinking and planning about the coming weeks, events and holidays as I try to prepare as much as possible now so that I have as little as possible to do after our baby girl comes in the coming days or weeks.  (yes, I am ridiculously excited and sometimes equal parts nervous, but that's normal, right?) 

Anyway as I was thinking about Thanksgiving I knew I wanted something more to remind me of gratitude throughout the month, at the very least, if not all year long. 

Last year I had some cards we could write daily "thankfuls" on each day of November but I never got a cute branch to stick them on like I'd seen on Pinterest, so they sat in a sad little pile on our mantle. Of course the most important part was the daily thanks but still...let down.  

I think I'll do the traditional Thankful Tom Turkey my Momma always did, as Lee is actually at a age where that kind of thing will be SO FUN for him.  

(Thankful Tom is a simple turkey body that you add a thankful feather to each day after everyone in the family writes something they are thankful for that day on it.)

Well as it happens my thankful ponderings coincided with preparing a lesson for the 14-15 year old girls in our church congregation about why gratitude is important. 

I was so grateful for all the beautiful reminders of what gratitude brings to our lives and what we have to be grateful for. 

Here are just a few that stood out to me from this talk from Dieter F. Uchtdorf:

"Our loving Heavenly Father knows that 

choosing to develop a spirit of gratitude 

will bring us true joy and great happiness."

"When we are grateful to God in our circumstances, we can experience gentle peace in the midst of tribulation. 

In grief, we can still lift up our hearts in praise.  

In pain, we can glory in Christ's Atonement. 

In the cold of bitter sorrow, 

we can experience the closeness of heaven's embrace."

"In any circumstance, 

our sense of gratitude is nourished by the many and sacred truths we do know; 

that our Father has given His children the great plan of happiness; that through the Atonement of His Son, Jesus Christ, we can live forever with our loved ones; 

that in the end, we will have glorious, perfect, and immortal bodies, unburdened by sickness or disability; 

and that our tears of sadness and loss 

will be replaced 

with an abundance of happiness and joy, 

"good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over."

"Your testimony of Christ, born of the Holy Ghost, 

can help you look past the disappointing endings in mortality 

and see the bright future that the Redeemer of the world has prepared."

So with lots of thoughts of thankfulness bouncing around my head and being reminded of just how abundant my blessings are, I thought about how I just want to live thankfully; 

learn to see the good in hard moments, 

find the blessing in a situation, 

be grateful, 

be more quick to look to the things I know when something I don't understand happens, 

openly express gratitude better for all the incredible people I know, love, bump into and meet 

and especially show my gratitude for God who gave and gives me every thing and everyone in my life. 

I started this blog initially as part of my journey through infertility and as a way to record life, thoughts and experiences for myself and my family and along the way I've been bolstered, lifted up, cheered on, guided and celebrated by so many, so thank you for sharing your goodness with me.