Gratitude

My heart feels overwhelmed with gratitude at the moment. I feel so blessed to live in such a beautiful place with such high-quality friends. This past week has been filled with cultivating love, friendships and community. It started with a three day vacation for Steve and yours truly, without any kids! Our dear friends and fairy godmothers took care of all three rugrats while my sweetie and I goofed off on South Whidbey Island. Just last month, we met people at our neighbors' music jam, and they must have liked us because they offered their beach house to us. For free. And when I say beach house, I mean a beautiful vacation house RIGHT AT THE BEACH, with a view of the Olympic Mountains!

We read for hours.  We went for long walks and mellow bike rides.  We talked and talked and talked and talked.  We took afternoon naps.  We cooked healthy food.  We went to restaurants eating unhealthy food.  We looked at each other a lot and giggled, not believing our good fortune.  We felt guilty about not missing our children.  We did not milk any goats, did not feed any pigs, chickens, ducks, dogs or cats.  We did not do any laundry, nor did we weed any gardens.  We mowed no lawns.  Instead, we immersed ourselves in this:

When we came home, the fun continued, at least for me and the kids.  Steve is  putting his nose to the grind stone, building an addition on our house, which will give us a second bathroom (a necessity with five people wanting to use the bathroom at the exact same moment).  It also gives us another bedroom, and a hallway for storage (which is sorely lacking in our house, hence creating messes and piles everywhere).

While Steve has been working on that, the kids have been attending friends' birthday parties non-stop, which enables me to hang out with the parents of these kids.  I am feeling incredibly fortunate for this community of ours, with like-minded parents who home school their kids as well (and some of them don't).  Do you want to see where these birthday parties take place?  One was here:

And the other one was here:

What a paradise of a life we have!  Tonight, I made dinner from many different vegetables I grew in my garden and harvested just minutes before, while little Eva happily held court with her stuffed animals in the flower-filled, sun-drenched yard.  Our neighbor walked our goats over to our barn so he could milk them, since it was his day to milk.  Steve walked in with a armload of basil he gathered to contribute to dinner.  The boys were away at a sleepover with friends.  And I was surrounded by everything I love, including the chamomile I harvested from the garden days before, to be dried hanging from the rafters.

I am deeply grateful.  Life has been challenging, but right now, it is so good.  I am learning to slow down, to be more present, to rest in the awareness that I am good enough just the way I am.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I will leave you with several snapshots, including one of a moth we found on top of my car.
What are you grateful for these days?