35 Thanksgivings and counting!

Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian friends and family! We celebrated with you, even though we are a long way from our Canadian family! Can you smell the turkey stock simmering away? The children have come in from playing in the cool crispness and sniffed the good smells in the air a few times, greatly anticipating tomorrows good soup! I won't tell you that I got a nice juicy turkey breast for $.69 per pound and then had a $5 off coupon for the meat department! Poor mum was just having a fit over the cost of turkey in Canada this year!

We have always chosen to celebrate both Thanksgivings as one of the first family traditions we established after marriage, since it was a beautiful Thanksgiving weekend in Canada 18 years ago today when were joined together before God as husband and wife. Can that really be possible? I keep on wondering where the time has gone. So, no matter where we were living at the time, we've enjoyed 2 Thanksgivings each year and that has really added up quickly!

We always have so much to be thankful for, and especially in difficult times I love the reminder to have a thankful heart in all circumstances. It's one of the areas I continually struggle with in my thought life - worrying instead of being thankful and resting. Seeing all we have be blessed with, two lively children who are overall quite healthy and enjoyable, close family, dear friendships, a caring church family and all of our needs met, plus much more - we are quite overwhelmed by blessings. We just need to be reminded that hard things are blessings too - and learning and growing is never without a small cost or discomfort.

One of the things we are lacking right now is heat - the furnace is not turning on, so we are hoping it is a minor repair! Our kindly furnace man will be here tomorrow. This lovely front room where our computer resides is all windows and quite chilly, so I'll head back to the warmth and coziness of our kitchen and to another cup of tea, and wish you all a lovely day!