Gratitudes 17-20 - slow it down, Charlie Brown!

Yikes, who pushed the fast forward button without warning me? Life has sped up to an unnatural speed and I want to find the slow down button!
It seems like I was just looking at the calendar not too long ago and the end of November was just lots of little boxes that I was filling in with way too many plans and was still forever away. But now here I am in all those little boxes looking back and wondering where the time went.

Details and pictures will come in a few days, but here are my gratitudes for the past couple of days:

Gratitude 17 - I love, Love, LOVE having dear friends. Maybe I am still 6 years old at heart, but having best friends is so important to me. People who can see me at my worst and laugh at me and I know they still love me. People who make me want to be happier and nicer and who bring out my inner kid. I have been blessed to have a few of these people in my life; some are older, some are younger, but all are wonderful!

Gratitude 18 - I have an amazing hubby. He can do things that I could never dream of! Things like being able to move large objects safely (like ovens) ~ fixing practically anything with simple household items (just like his hero, MacGyver!) ~ or driving for 14 hours straight after being awake and at work all day long. (I am a terrible travelling buddy, always have been and will probably always will be.) I wonder what it's like to have superhuman skills like that!

Gratitude 19 - I am grateful for my competitive nature. Growing up, sometimes it seemed like it might have been a downfall of mine. It made me a perfectionist and a tough competitor at almost everything I did. I wanted to push myself to be better than just me...to be the best me. Today it came out again. While visiting family today, we got to participate in one of their monthly activities of doing a timed mile run as a family. The last time I did a timed run I was still a teenager and was more than 30 pounds lighter - I had a pretty fast mile too; 6 minutes and 46 seconds. Today I ran a mile even though I haven't run anything near that in years. It wasn't fast (just over 13 minutes) and involved a good deal of walking time, but I did it to encourage my kids. Owen was the daily winner running his very first timed mile in 9 minutes! And Teagan beat me by less than 20 seconds; she admitted to having a personal goal of beating me... and so my competitive nature continues to live on in the next generation!

Gratitude 20 - I am grateful for the comfort that can only come from heavenly intervention. Right now I am doing something that should be super tough for me - being away from four of my babies, making life changing decisions for our family - and I am not having as tough of a time as I could be without having a comforting Heavenly Father who loves me so much and looks out for me in all I do.

More details will come later, and some wonderful pictures...but for now, and for a few days, it will be just words. But look forward to seeing cucumber eyes, more trophies, and beautiful sites.