A Week of Gratitude, Day 6: Free and Easy

Taking the WHOLE week off to spend time with my amazing family. Am auto-posting a series titled "A Week of Gratitude" while we're off doing cool stuff like baking, digging out the Christmas decorations, jumping in piles of leaves, making final visits to the playground before the weather gets too cold, visiting with the relatives, taking looooong drives all in one vehicle, singing songs loudly, and anything else we can think of. Be back in a few days! Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. This year, let's be glad of all we have...


A Week of Gratitude, Day 6: Free and Easy


Driving the hundreds of miles from my mom's to our house gives me plenty of time to daydream and stare out the window. This year, I'll be thinking about how lucky we are to have the freedom to do as we please, to travel from one home to another, to celebrate the early days of our nation and those dedicated Pilgrims, who despite having brazenly stolen the grain that kept them fed that first winter were no doubt focused and persevering.

That will inevitably lead to thoughts of other travels, like our long-postponed honeymoon trip to Hawaii and Europe, and how seeing things even for the second or third time is seeing them through new eyes when you share them with the people you love. Hawaii was brand-new when seen with my husband, who had never participated in any type of ocean watersport before--anathema to the ears of this beach baby, and I delighted in taking him ocean snorkeling for the first time and seeing his excitement at all the fishies.

Neither of us had been to Paris or to Spain, and exploring those places together was joyful, not least because finding a travel partner whose temperament and personality complement your own is a monumental task, and ours mesh fantastically.

All this freedom, all these memories. We'll talk about them this weekend, I'm sure, telling stories to our family from our adventures. And I'll be reminded for the 1,278th time just how much I have to be grateful for.