Monday Gratitude

(I meant to post this yesterday but never got around to finishing it)

What I’m grateful for going into this week:

1. Somebody in our neighborhood Facebook group is giving us a supposedly like-new jogging stroller. We’ve put literally thousands of miles on ours (not jogging hahaha, not for me [actually my kid would love that, maybe I’ll take up jogging]) and it’s falling apart, so I asked the group if anyone is looking to re-home one and got a response.

2. A somewhat related item – our crib is now out of our house. It’s really hard to find somebody who wants a used crib. Thrift stores don’t generally take them, and I see people trying to give them away in the Facebook group all the time without any takers. Fortunately for us, a couple months ago somebody in our preschool no buy group asked if anybody had one they were done with. I responded that we would have one in May and she said that would work, and she has now collected it. I had expected we’d have that thing sitting around for a long time. I’m very happy somebody else will get some use out of it.

3. We got new sidewalks with pedestrian ramps at all four corners of the big intersection leaving my neighborhood. It’s a big safety improvement and also means no we longer have to maneuver the stroller over the huge mounds of dirt that existed at one of the corners where there was no sidewalk before. It’s nice to see the south end getting some improvements.

4. Another big win for the south end: we’re officially getting our new light rail station (still years away ha), which will be only a couple blocks from my house. We were already pretty close to the existing station, but this new one will improve access for a lot of people coming from east or west of the tracks who previously had a 30ish minute walk to the train. And for us personally, it will make trips to and from the airport SO much easier. The station had initially been approved in the same package as another, far less useful and far more expensive station, and with funding problems they had both up for removal. The mayor recently amended the proposal, which effectively stopped them from considered a packaged deal. Now ours has been approved to go forward, while the other, less practical station remains on a list of projects to cancel if the money doesn’t miraculously appear.

5. And speaking of money miraculously appearing, a part-time job seems to have fallen into my lap. And not just any part-time job, but something that feels… absolutely perfect? Evidently an attorney I barely even worked with years ago recommended me so highly to an aquaintance whose company needed a little bit of paralegal help that they contacted me with an offer. At first I wasn’t very interested. I was initially told they needed somebody to work 3 to 4 hours a day, and I can’t work that much. I don’t have any childcare until September, and even then it will only be ten hours a week. But they decided they want to move forward with what I can provide, so it will be one or two hours a day, remotely of course, and at whatever time of day I’m able to fit it in. Throughout the past two years there have been several moments I’ve wished I could find a way to make a bit of money, but these opportunities are really hard to find. I can still barely believe this one found its way to me, and it feels good that the work I did years ago impressed somebody so much as to facilitate it. I am BEYOND excited about it.