Gratitude

This seems to be the word of the week..Gratitude! Gratitude is something that always seems to come naturally when life is going your way and the way you have planned/arranged it. Yet, when things go astray and I am thrown into a situation that is uncomfortable...gratitude is hard to come by. Life in Connecticut has been difficult and a journey I would have rather avoided all together. But this is where we are and all I can do is make the best of it.

My problems with gratitude right now are rooted in our house. I am grateful for my husband's job, his ability to pay the bills so that I can stay at home, we have plenty of "stuff" to live on and we have loving and supportive families. The house though, is another story. We have no Central Air...which I thought, "No big deal" at first. Now almost 3 weeks into it, I'm trying to figure out how to use the window units to keep the house comfortable yet not too cool that we are paying an arm and a leg for it. I guess we will find out next month when we get the bill. This house is old and needs about $50,000 dumped into it to renovate it. It is mostly wood floors (again, not feeling grateful for having to sweep and mop these floors, vacuums are SO much easier) that are very beat up and need to either be refinished or have carpet laid over them. I have never seen a house in such bad shape. Everything is "jerry-rigged" and barely held together. The closets all have these ridiculous doors that fall off every time you just look at them. There are four levels to the house and I'm not enjoying all the stairs, especially carrying a newborn up and down them, it feels very dangerous. Caleb has already taken 2 falls down the stairs and one time for Jacob. The washer and dryer are in the basement, so kind of a pain to have to go down there all the time...especially having a newborn, I'm doing laundry all the time! The kitchen is ridiculously small. It held about 1/3 - 1/2 of my previous kitchen and there is no pantry. So we bought some storage unit for our dried/canned goods ($100) and have the fold up table in the kitchen for more counter space. The bathrooms are disgusting with mold and look like they hadn't been cleaned in a year. There is only one tub and there is NO way I will be taking any hot tub baths in that thing unless I bleach it out first. The colors in the house are hideous and there were NO drapes or blinds on any of the windows or any hardware to hang them, so we had to purchase rods and curtains, over a hundred dollars gone. The basement is very moist so we had to purchase a de-humidifier to keep the humidity from ruining our things, another $200 gone. We spent over $500 getting our vehicles re-titled in CT and driver's licenses and blew about 7 hours total of our lives doing it. The oven didn't work for the first 2 weeks we were here and the list could go on and on. So, do I feel grateful? Well, I'm working at it. Life has been really hard the last 3 weeks especially but I keep praying things will get better. I will continue to wake up each day and focus on the things that are good. Most of all, I have a loving husband who works hard and three beautiful, healthy children. There are many people who don't even have that...so that is what I focus on! The rest of it is just stuff. Stuff that I can't take with me to heaven (assuming I make it there). It is our family and friends that matter the most and that is what I will focus on!