thankful thursday

first of all... i don't know if someone else has come up with a thankful thursday scheme so i totally won't take credit for it. but this is something that has been on my mind for a while---that i need to be more thankful. and i should be able to come up with something every week shouldn't i?? (you're invited to do the same!)

the past week i've been trying to teach samantha about being thankful and grateful. the other night we were going to go out for dinner because it was too late to make anything scrumptious and i didn't have anything quickly fixable in the house that ben would like. so as we were getting ready to leave ben told samantha that we were going to go to the dumpster for dinner. i saw this as a great teaching opportunity and asked samantha if she though anyone would ever do that. "eewwwwww! that's so gross! no one would eat from the trash!" she said. so i explained to her that yes, some people do eat from the dumpster because they don't have food and we need to be thankful for the food we eat even when we may not like it the best and on and on.

so lesson taught and off we go. we ended up at dairy queen (which has a rep with my mom for not being very good). ben got 2 cheeseburgers and the kids and i split a chicken strip basket. long story short---the food was gross. everything tasted like it had been sitting for quite a while, the chicken and fries were cold and hard and the hamburger was pink in the middle. so i asked for a refund, got my money, we hopped in the car to go somewhere else, and right away samantha pipes up from the backseat, "mom, i thought we were supposed to be thankful for our food even when we don't like it. didn't we just talk about that tonight?? right??"

oh crap. i hate it when my daughter teaches ME a lesson. (but at least i know she was listening to me earlier...) so i apologized to her about not being thankful for my food and so on and then ben proceeded to tell her that if the food was free we would've eaten it and been thankful for it but we had to pay a lot of money and if we threw away the food we would've been wasting our money and dairy queen needs to know that the food wasn't good so that they don't keep making it that way. whew! (yes i know that was a run-on sentence) he made me feel a little better after saying that, but i still learned a lesson from my 5 year old.


so all that said, here's what i'm thankful for today: food! it's not number 1 on my list, but it goes along with the story! i have a fridge full of food right now. my freezers are plumb full and i have so much stuff in my pantry that there is some stuff i can't even see. i am thankful for food. food that is not dug out of a dumpster or trash can because my family is hungry. food that is fresh and healthy. food that is warm on a chilly day. food that i have chosen. food that is not hazardous to our health. food that satisfies our appetites. even food that is gross from dairy queen! we are so blessed.