What a glorious day it is today! The sun is finally out! It was only sunny 3 days out of the first 29 for the month of December here, and the bright sunshine is a welcome sight today.
Today I want to share with you a couple of our Little Special Things :). Nearly every family, I would hope, has little things that sort of bind them. I find more and more that these tiny little acts of kindness and love are like super glue--just a little dot of time but binds the family tightly together :)
I must confess: I am not a perfect wife or mother :). MANY is the morning that TWS needed a shirt or socks, and I prayed down the hallway to see if I, by chance, happened to wash some without realizing it (and thank the Lord, I always found some for him!). The children have an absentminded professor for a mom so, while sometimes our days are awesome and filled with deep geeky/spiritual/etc thoughts and fun, sometimes I forget that it is youth group night or to put money under their pillow for teeth (nothing like having your 6 year old come in and say "Mom, you forgot the money under my pillow...again." Yikes!)
Of course these are things that I work on, but thank the Good Lord, He has provided ideas for "Little Special Things"--those little tiny habits and traditions that seem, on the surface, to be nothing much at all on my end, but carry a surprising amount of weight in the minds and hearts of my family.
For example, I remember when I was young and would go to my grandmother's house. She kept a spare freezer right inside from the carport. In there went typical things like extra pecans and vegetables, but ALSO there was always chocolate of some sort. Her freezer was always a place of hidden treasure and happiness.
So I decided that I, too, wanted to do that when we moved back down south (with a carport and a place to put a spare freezer inside the house!). I buy packs of regular Hershey bars and tuck them into the door of the freezer.
You know what the BEST part of this is (besides 24-7 access to chocolate hee hee! )? Precious has added to the "event" of getting chocolate from the freezer by breaking each bar into fourths and offering a piece to all of us. I have gotten into the habit of that too, and find it is a sweet, kind, gentle way of bonding the family. So a couple of times a week, generally at about 2 or 3 pm when we are all a little slumpy, one of us will go to the freezer, and pass out a little bit of candy to us all.
Another Little Special Thing is our Cake Plate Treats. This actually stems from two things: a)I have a glass covered cake plate with no extra storage in my kitchen in which to tuck it away and b)Empty cake plates sitting on the table look so .....sad. Depressing. Stingy, even. I mean, you KNOW that at some point there was a cake or something in there. And you know that, hopefully, sometime there will be a cake again, but at that moment you missed it and just look at a cold, empty piece of glass.
So I decided to start making sure there is something nice under that dome. Sometimes it is blueberry muffins. Sometimes a cake. Sometimes I just whip up a bag mix of cookies. Rarely is it anything too involved. My only rule is that I do not make any more Cake Plate Treats until the cake plate is cleaned :) Which brings me to the realization of how much and how quickly my family started seeing this as a "thing" for our family....one day The Wonder Sweetie made a big show of play-pouting and looking at the empty cake plate. I reminded him that it needs to be washed first, so he started leaving notes for Precious to remember to clean the cake plate :)
What about you? Are there any little special things that you do for your family or friends or even strangers? Any bits of God-love that make their way into your habits and life? I would love to hear about them!
No comments:
Post a Comment