January 26

Tonight, I am thinking about additions...

I am grateful for the chance to attend a new, second book club, happened upon through our neighborhood facebook page; this collection of fascinating and intelligent women who are all here, right in my own backyard.  I am grateful to add this to my life, this conversation and laughter, these connections, this extra push to read and write and think.

I am grateful for the safe and healthy arrival of 4 new souls to this world, this week (and it wasn't even a full moon!), new babies who will enrich and complicate the lives of co-workers and friends.  Miraculous, beautiful, squishy-faced beings one and all.  I love other people's newborns, very much.

I am grateful for time to talk with teachers I admire, for glimpses into their lives, for the chance to listen and learn and connect in a new way.  Relationship-building.  A very valid reason to be a half hour late coming home from work, no?

I am grateful for my husband who does not bat an eye when I am a half hour late from work and then leave two hours later for a book club.

Really.

How lucky am I?

And even more so because I get to be grateful for those two hours in between, for the two funniest little children in the world who dashed in "nakey" circles through the halls, and splashed and poured and giggled and kicked for nearly 30 minutes in the tub.  I am grateful for their exuberance and noise and for the mess of capes and stickers and slides and playing cards littered around my house.  It is a visible incarnation of their life and joy and, I like to think, a sign that we are doing something right.

I am grateful that no one has asked me to host the new book club because it means I don't have to worry about cleaning up all that joy, just yet.


Savings report:

When, after driving by the book-club house and seeing no cars there just yet, I drove in a loop through Coventry so that I wouldn't be the first to arrive, I did NOT go into Marc's "just to look around".
Savings:   At least $15, I'm sure.

I did buy my coffee at Starbucks today (a traditional Thursday treat, of course)-- but I used a gifted Starbucks card (*note, I mean a card I got as a gift.  The card has, at least as far as I can see, no special talents).
Savings: $1.95