365 Days of Blessings, Day 175

Feathered Turkey Pine Cones - photo by my Anna, my oldest daughter

Giving thanks for these wonderful blessings:
1. Feathered turkey pine cones! We had such fun making these!

2. Finding this awesome photo blog sisters through this article A Father Who Creatively Captures His Kids Please check them out - they show some wonderful creativity made possible by a father's love.

3. Good exercise makes for a full night's sleep, and a full night's sleep makes for good exercise and writing (I hope).

4. Living country enough to hear coyotes, deer calls, and roosters, and yet living city enough to be just 2 miles from grocery stores, a bookstore, a library, a highway exit, and a small airport.

5. I haven't written on my novel yet, but today I plan to take my characters to an island which I admit is sort of based on my fuzzy recollections of Fantasy Island shows. I was always too little to stay up late enough to watch more than the first five minutes, and I don't want to include anyone shouting "The plane, the plane!" However, it's not a normal island that my characters are going to . . . not normal at all.

6.
The Newest Book by Donita K. Paul, Dragons of the Valley, is a really fun read so far. After getting about five chapters into it, my daughters stopped me and demanded I read it to them at bedtime, so I backed up and am in the midst of re-reading chapter 3. We are really ejoying every word of it, and I'm fighting my impulse to sneak it out of their room and just read it to the finish on my own. However, they could do that too, and with bedtime stories we have a deal. Everyone stays on the same page at the same time with no reading ahead. Sometimes this causes me to read aloud for an hour instead of twenty minutes because we all "need" to know what happens next.

7. When reading Snoopy's take on writing in Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life, I find that I'm glad I don't start my novels with "it was a dark and stormy night." That's Snoopy's line.

8. A few days ago, we visited Word Vision International's home office in Federal Way, Washington and we had a wonderful kid-friendly tour. With five moms, one Grandma (my mom), and 14 kids, we had a nice sized group, and we all learned a bit more about the humanitarian efforts of World Vision in over 100 countries. I may have to do a post one of these days on some of the stuff we learned, because I can't just capture it all in one little paragraph.

9. Elfenesh Beferdu has been our sponsored child for nine years now, and we are so blessed to have her in our lives, even if it is a long distance from here to Ethiopia. My daughters have plans to write to her again today, and we love praying for her.

10. I didn't know what my ten blessings were going to be today when I started writing and here I am, at the end of the list, with more blessing ideas pouring in . . . God is so good, especially when we take time to thank and praise Him!

Scripture Blessings:"A kingdom is divided against itself, the kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, it cannot stand." Mark 3:24-25
and
"Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother.'" Mark 3:34-35