Thankful Thursday

This week I am thankful for:

1. Sleep.  We are getting more.  Usually all the kids are asleep by 8:30 pm and then up just before 6 am.  I'll take it!  There are still wake ups throughout the night BUT someone is able to put themselves back to sleep now.  The final big step is to get Gary to do the full bedtime routine for the Little One.  I have my final 53 hours of foster parent training starting in 2 weeks so Gary will need to put them all to bed two nights a week for 2 months (I've only done this once myself as the Little One takes 1-2 hours alone..fortunately Nya is just 5 minutes and the boys should be able to put themselves to bed on those nights.)

2. The power of a sweet smile.  I brought Miss Nya with me to bring our Little One to visit with birth mom.  Birth mom SMILED at us both and HUGGED her TWICE.  What?! What?!  That's all it took?! I feel like we were friends bonding over our sweet kids. Obviously she's coming every time now.

3.  My little introvert.  I've really realized how much he savours and NEEDS his down time.  He'll often say "I'm going to go cuddle with my friends."  His "friends" are all of his stuffed animals and he will cuddle with them in bed for about an hour a day.

4,  A new car seat for our Little One.  My sister had one for us--saved us $100+.  Yay for sisters and saving money.

5.  More great meals. I should take pictures of all of them.  This was a homemade pretzel bun with pulled pork and coleslaw (by Gary of course.)  Totally not on our low sugar plan (yikes--the bread and sauce) but I tried to fill up on the coleslaw and pulled pork :)

6.  Books.  I love having time to read right now.  I just finished "The Pilgrimage of Harold Fry" (6.5/10) and am now reading "All the Light We Cannot See".  Oh, and my friend who lent me the latest book also gave me a treat along with it.  Thanks, L.

7.  Netflix.  Gary and I watched "The 100 Year Old Man Who Walked Out the Window and Disappeared." I read the book last year so it was nice to watch this quirky movie together. PS How did we not get Netflix sooner?!

8. Hands-on nerdy activities.  Kai got a volcano kit for his birthday so they built it, painted it, and then did the chemical reaction.  They loved it :)  

9.  Health.  Dare I say we are all healthy?  When you add an additional young one to your family, it seems like the chance that someone will be sick increases dramatically!  

10.  Date with Nya.  I'm not very good at one-on-one dates with my kids; it's usually all or none.  They actually prefer to be all together which makes it tougher to get them alone.  Nya has been missing her role of being my little side-kick as I've had another child very attached to me so we had a really nice date this week.  We went shopping for birthday presents (I even let her pick a new preschool outfit since 3/4's of her clothes are second hand), we got ice cream, and we visited the Disney Store at Guildford Mall.  Oh, and we rode the escalator 4 times in a row just because.  Then, we finished it with a visit to the playground.  It was perfect.  You should see her, she just lives her life in exclamation marks and I love it.  So, so sweet.  I look forward to the routine of September where I can have more time with my little Nya Bear.  

I hope you are having a good week!  Gary is back to work next week so it should be "interesting" around here :)  Please let me know one of your thankful items of the week (and if you don't want to do that, I'd love a Netflix movie suggestion!)

Love,

Louise