I’m Blessed

Sorry in advance for this post being a little random.  It’s Monday, and it’s all I can muster up today.

With the return to Fall activities, it seems that sickness always returns.  Solveig was threw up a few times last night.  She’s fine now.  I’m still holding my breath that it doesn’t spread.  I’m trying to sanitize everything now.

I’m so thankful that her stomach issue was short lived and no one else got sick.  I’ve lived through everyone in our house being sick at the same time, and I never, ever want to do that again.

Solveig is such a sweet girl.  She’s constantly giving out hugs and kisses to all of us as if that were her solemn duty.  She’s not yet 3, but she’s determined not to be left out of the big kids doing school.  Her latest thing is cutting up pieces of paper.  She loves cutting paper so much.  So we’ve gotten into the habit of just letting her come to the table where we’re working and let her cut up the older kids’ worksheets and other finished papers.  She’ll be at the table and cutting for 2 hours easily.  She sits there quietly listening to the big kids’ lessons and just cuts and cuts and cuts.  I figure it’s a great fine motor skill practice.  I’m so blessed to have this amazing paper shredder right in the family.

I’m blessed that this week both my brother and my parents have messaged me that they just bought plane tickets to come visit us.  My brother’s coming for the long weekend of Veteran’s Day, and my parents are coming here for Christmas.  I’m already making some fun Christmas plans.  I’ve never hosted before and I’m so excited.

I’ve been overwhelmingly blessed with friendship lately.  There’s at least a half dozen women who have really blessed me though their friendship and just chatting these last few weeks.  When Knut and I first moved here, we went through a few years of feeling like we had no close friends.  We sat down and had talks along the lines of “What is wrong with us?  We used to have friends…”  Then we would ask each other if we had bad breath or stood too close to people.  We both started getting really self conscious.  We joined small groups and tried way too hard.  Then of course we go to a church near a seminary.  Families often move to go to seminary, and move away when they finish.  We made a few friends and then they moved.

So the fact that we couldn’t list on one hand the friends who have really touched our lives in such a deep way in the last year is truly beautiful.  We are so blessed.