After the trip: Thankful

• There’s no one with whom I would rather spend 20 hours in the car (Wednesday and Sunday combined, mind you) than my husband. Isn’t it amazing that I still like him so much, especially when the back seat is full of weeping children?

• A sister-in-law who is willing to cut my boy’s hair for me. For the courage to chop off that mop of blonde hanging in his eyes. For the shock of almost brown(!) hair underneath and the reality that my 3-year-old looks like a 5-year-old. (I’m still recovering and trying not to gasp at that face with almost brown hair and those expressive eyebrows..they’ve been hidden by bangs for awhile.)

• My nephew’s baptism and the holiness of being sealed as Christ’s.

• The opportunity to celebrate my granddaddy who is turning 90 next week.

• A husband who takes his turkey roasting Very Seriously.

• A husband who plays ping-pong with my brothers into the late hours.

• A baby who longs, LONGS to crawl. Oh, it’s so difficult! He’s so tired of scooting and sick of reaching.

• Brooksie’s older girl cousins who are so faithful to play with him.

• The new Muppet movie and its songs that are still stuck in my head. (So good, by the way.)

• August’s 11-year-old boy cousin to whom he whispered during the movie: “You are my hero!”

• August and his cousin Blythe’s new game called “Toast.” (You really don’t want to know.)

• My grandmother Memaw rocking Brooksie and singing “By and By.” My grandmother Deenie (90 years old!) down on the floor playing peek-a-boo with my baby. Having them with my boys is such a sweet gift.

• Actually being able to run in my family’s goofy 2-mile Thanksgiving race. I was 7 minutes slower than the boys, but this little asthmastic long-distance vomiter  was just proud to have run that far.

• Halfway to Amarillo on Wednesday, I took over the driving after we passed Abilene (my college town). It’s more than a four-hour-drive from there and the boys were asleep most of that time. The stars in West Texas really are the brightest and biggest. The blackness of the night air really is the darkest. And the chance to drive late at night down a highway I knew so well was a gift. I love whispering with my husband in a dark car.

• My baby sleeping in my parents’ closet in a pack-n-play (because there was no room for him anywhere else)! I love that my parents are willing to host him in their space, that my mom is willing to get up with Brooksie in the night and let me sleep, and that he got plenty of snuggles from them.

• Chris, August and I barely squeezing in my old bedroom (still decorated with a  pink and yellow heart mural that quotes John Keats…ahh, high school) and sharing the rest of the house with my parents, grandparents and aunt. I’m so thankful that I grew up in a house where I couldn’t hide from my family, were we had to learn to share the living room and the TV. I’m thankful that I was taught from the youngest of ages that my bed belonged to my grandparents when they came to town and I slept on the couch. And I’m thankful even now that we get to squeeze our family into my parents’ house. Maybe it helps that I’m an extrovert. But it was a gift for the space to feel full.

Thanksgiving is over! And it’s Thankful Tuesday. What are you most thankful for today?