Thankful Thursday September 3 2020

Welcome to Thankful Thursday – September 3, 2020! My plan is to make this a weekly linkup post. Please check out the articles linked below and/or leave one of your own. Thanks so much for stopping by!

During times of trouble, one of the best things to do is to remember to be grateful. I know crazy right? But when all the negative things of 2020 started happening, it was important for my mental health to search for what positive things have come out of otherwise not so fun circumstances. 

Here’s a list of what I’m thankful for today looking back over this past year so far…

1. Lice-aggedon. Yep, we were infested with lice at the beginning of February. So why in the world would I be thankful?! It was the beginning of the great purge of 2020. This was even before quarantine purge. I got rid of 20+ garbage bags of clothes and blankets (after sanitizing). Who knew we were such cloth hoarders! These were for me and three kids not counting the bags my husband purged throughout this year. Click here for how we eliminated lice in our home.
2. Quarantined for 5 weeks in a 1 bedroom apartment with 3 kids. I’m thankful sooo thankful for this time my family had together. The first week was a heck of an adjustment. We ended up visiting my husband at his job site over the first week of March during spring break. And you know the joke about how long 2020’s spring break was right? Add putting 5 people in a 1 bedroom apartment. I know. I’m spoiled to have a house with a couple bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms. So I’m thankful for that 5 weeks. Our family was all together for a long stretch. We learned to live with each other in tight quarters. We realized we didn’t need as much stuff as our over-stuffed home is stuffed with. Stuff. Stuff. Stuff. And we spent a whole bunch of time hiking, going to the park, and going to the pool. LOTS of outside time! It was such a huge blessing in disguise.
3. School’s closed down early. Ok, this was a tough one but what a GIANT blessing in disguise. The week before spring break, a postcard came in the mail about UniversityView.Academy which is an online school through the state of Louisiana. You have to be a Louisiana resident to enroll because it’s like it’s own parish district. I had been considering homeschooling for over 7 years for my kids but I am sooo scatterbrained I knew I needed an outlying force for structure. The postcard piqued my interest. Then the schools shut down and I thought why not try it out for the end of the Spring semester. They send each kid a laptop, course material, have online onboarding (training on how to use the computer system etc), and the staff and teachers are awesome! This fall with all the crazy open/no open/switch AB schedules/masks all day/etc. we opted to keep going with online school. My kids are happy to not have to wear a mask all day and we can plan school around our schedule instead of the other way around. I’m sooo thankful!
4. Visiting a family member during his birthday. My family decided to all get together for a family member’s birthday this summer. It was all planned out and then a couple days before his birthday we found out he was diagnosed with cancer. I’m so glad #1 that we all got together and #2 it was planned before finding out about the cancer diagnosis because that way he knows we wanted to get together for him not just because we are worried about his health. Also good news is his prognosis turned out really well and his chance of survival is I think over 80% or more. Praise the Lord! Please keep him in your prayers as the treatment is brutal but necessary to get rid of every last cancer cell and there are several more rounds to go possibly.
5. We had junky, clunky furniture in the living room for a little over 3 years. When we moved here 4 years ago, we were in debt and I was constantly worried about finances. So our living room was looking more like frat house with our old movie room types of over-sized chairs. For 3 years I searched for just the right pullout couch. We don’t have a “guest room”; we ain’t that fancy round here. Plus, if we did it would be turned into an office/art studio in a flash! LOL Anywhooo, I’m thankful for the living room and living with it how I didn’t want it for so long so I could really really appreciate how much I love it now! I searched and searched for just the right couch for 2.5 years and finally just drew out what I had in my head. Literally a couple months went by and lo and behold. There was my couch! But it was EXPENSIVE(at least to this frugal gal). So I ordered fabric swatches and waited and waited for 6 more months in hopes of a sale. Finally, I got a great deal and the exact fabric I wanted. What a blessing to have a comfy living room that feels like home!
6. My blog income took a plunge after February. This sounds coocoo but there are things to be thankful about this.  It has made me realize how much I need to diversify my blogging income. I am still making the majority of my income from one source but am working on new ideas for income streams and not just limited to blogging but also start selling my stock pile of artwork I created in 2019. For my blog specifically, I’m going to start creating printables. Printables are digital files that can be purchased and downloaded for customers to use for personal use. These will be fun things like coloring sheets for kids and adults, organizational charts, inspirational quotes to print and put in frames, and digital images of my art and my husband and daughter’s photography. I also plan to increase promotion for my Preparing for Surgery binder(only $5 for the download) and my book Out On Your Own and also more promotion for my artwork. I know this will take some late nights especially with about 5 hours a day just to keep my kids on task with school, but it’ll be worth it in the long run. What a blessing to lose a bit of income to light a fire under me to get it together after years of dillydallying.

Ok, so my gratitude list is like an opposite day type thing. Sometimes we have to smack the negatives into something positive. There have been plenty of  negatives that have happened in my life but so so so many positive things that have happened. I’m thankful for that. I’m thankful for the silver linings in just about anything. 

Ecclesiastes 3:1-14

⁹ What do workers gain from their toil? ¹⁰ I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. ¹¹ He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet^[a] no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. ¹² I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. ¹³ That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. ¹⁴ I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.