Category: 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.

Here are a few things I’m grateful for going into this week:

1. That I feel fairly rested. Some weekends I feel like I spend my time chasing something I’ll never catch, and then I start my week feeling physically exhausted and also disappointed that I didn’t do better, which always feels like a moving target anyway. This past weekend, though, felt both energizing and restful and for that I’m grateful.

2. For a nice meeting with my writing group friends. Over the summer I roped a couple of my old grad school classmates into creating a writing group with me where we create a new prompt each month (ish) and we each write a short story based on that prompt. It’s always a lot of fun reading the stories and seeing how different (or sometimes similar!) they turned out. We hadn’t met since November because of the holidays, and it was fun getting back together and chatting.

3. We do yoga in the mornings now. Some rainy day last week I was trying to figure out how to keep my kid occupied indoors and I decided to try doing yoga together. I got out a mat for him and a mat for myself, put a 15-minute yoga video on the TV and he stomped gleefully on his mat the whole time. He now expects yoga every morning. He isn’t as participatory now, one week in – usually he hangs out on his mat for a minute or two before moving on to something else – but it still means I get to do yoga and that’s something I had not otherwise been able to fit into my day regularly.

4. My husband took the kid out a couple times yesterday so I could get my food prep done for the week. They went to the Museum of Flight in the morning and a brewery with a play area in the afternoon, and that got me about 3.5 solo hours for cooking. They had fun, and having all the food I need for the kid and I ready before Monday makes going into the week feel much more relaxed.

5. We had a great time at a party on Saturday night. We received the invitation just the night before from some down-the-street neighbors with a kid the same age as ours. As a person prone to social anxiety, a last-minute invitation typically makes me assume I’m not actually wanted there. But this party – a family-friendly Lunar New Year dumpling party hosted by some neighbors who have always seemed very nice – sounded too good for my anxiety to get in the way of. Their house was PACKED, but full of friendly faces and great food. We ran into several people we already knew and chatted with lots of new people. We’ve been struggling with doing this whole parenting thing alone, and are always hoping we’ll start forming relationships with other parents near us. Was this party a stepping stone to get us there? Who knows, but it was fun nonetheless.