Monday Gratitude

1. I got some time yesterday to do my food prep. I have some extra soup to use up this week, so I didn’t have to do quite as much – just some oatmeal, roasted broccoli and sautéed garlicy kale. It makes going into the week feel much more peaceful when my food is ready.

2. Mangos have been on sale recently. For the last few weeks Safeway has had good prices on mangos, and eating them makes me happy. They are, I believe, my favorite fruit. I think sometimes about which fruits I’d choose if I could only have five for the rest of my life, and I think I’ve settled on mangos, bananas, apples (cosmic crisp, specifically), red grapes and strawberries (frozen when fresh aren’t in season). The last one is tough, though – sometimes I lean toward a different berry. I love raspberries in my oatmeal, blueberries are so versatile, and there’s little better than the fresh blackberries that grow all over my neighborhood in the summer. Anyway, it’s important to have answers prepared for questions like that. You never know when you’ll need them.

Also, on the subject of fruit – before having a child, I always thought green grapes were the superior grape. However, having a toddler requires some flexibility with fruit and to my surprise, red grapes have emerged as the clear winner.

3. Our memberships to fun places to take B on rainy days. We are members at the aquarium, the Burke Museum and the Museum of Flight, which all offer a lot of indoor play space. We usually request these memberships for Christmas and birthdays in lieu of gifts. Our Burke membership also gets us into several other local museums, which we haven’t explored much but may soon because it’s supposed to rain all week.

4. Longer days. Enough daylight for one parent to take B to a playground while the other gets dinner ready is really a life-changing difference this time each year.

5. A healthy stretch of days. It feels risky to even acknowledge this out loud, but our house has been illness-free for about six weeks and with a toddler that feels miraculous. I know our luck will run out at some point, but sometimes when the back-to-back illnesses hit I look back and realize we weren’t sick for a while and wish I’d been aware and appreciative while we were in that healthy stretch. So, I’m aware right now that we’ve been healthy and I’m grateful. It’s wonderful to not be sick.