After reading One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp, I challenged myself to do what she did and start writing 1000 things for which I’m thankful. It’s going to take me a while, but I’m at 295. I’m finding it hard not to repeat myself!
After Sunday, I wrote:
#261: taking pictures of my kids
#262: looking at pictures of my kids
#263: driving down beautiful, winding roads
#264: dairy farms
#265: hay rides with the kids
#266: horses grazing in a field
#267: Little E making a joke and laughing at it
#269: fresh ice cream
#270: corn pits
#271: tractors
#272: pumpkins spread out in a field
Have you been to your local pumpkin patch yet this fall? You might find as many things to be thankful for as I did–maybe more! My family was able to go to Cruze Dairy Farm, which also had a pumpkin field (can’t really call it a pumpkin patch), for a double birthday party. When we first arrived, Mr. C and Little E LOVED the corn pit, so much so that I’m considering putting one in my backyard (not really, because then the squirrels really won’t leave us alone). After the delicious pumpkin cupcakes, chocolate chip cookies, and apple cider, we headed over to a small kids’ corn maze, where the children went from station to station to learn everything from planting corn to milking a cow–everything you need to know on a dairy farm. At the end of the maze was free delicious homemade ice cream on a tiny cone.
After that was the hay ride. We ended up on it twice, and by the time we were on it the second time, Little E was lying on the floor of it, she was so tired (she had taken so long to fall asleep for her nap that it was time to leave for the party before she even slept). In between hay rides, we spent a little time at the pumpkin field, where Little E kept sitting on big ones and saying, “Yee haw!!” although it came out more like, “Hee Haw!!”
I ended up writing all those items in my thankfulness journal afterwards, but it’s interesting because God taught me something about thankfulness right there at that dairy farm. I was taking pictures of the kids (I took a ton of pictures there) when I started coveting the cameras of the families near me–nice, fancy cameras that I know make beautiful pictures no matter the ability of the photographer. I told Greg that I wanted one of those sometime–not now, but I told him, maybe when my camera breaks. It seems that God decided to show me what that would be like just an hour or two later.
I took my last picture of the day as we were walking to our car. As we were pulling away in our car, I went to take one last picture of a tractor going by when I discovered that my camera wouldn’t turn on, which is when I discovered that the piece that holds my memory card and battery in had fallen out somewhere out there in the tall grass–a needle in a haystack. Without that piece, my camera wouldn’t work, but there was little chance I could ever find it. I prayed for help, feeling repentant for my lack of thankfulness for what I had, remembering my words earlier that day to a third grader I was teaching: “Don’t think about what you can’t have–think about what you get to have!” I walked all the way back to where I had last used the camera successfully and all the way back to the car to no avail. I had just given up and was about to go over to our car to leave, when at the last second, God showed me the piece glinting in the grass. You can bet that I’m thankful for the camera I have now!
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