Little gifts

I was going to show pictures of the kids at their Black belt graduation; but I am not. I was going to show you pictures of my beautiful Thanksgiving table; but I am not. I was going to tell you how overwhelmed I feel by my schedule, my calendar, my family, my Christmas-to-do lists; but I am not. Instead, I am going to tell you of a wonderful gift I received. Due to all the things above, I have not been sleeping well and for some reason, my filing cabinet has been bugging me. It is way too full of stuff I no longer need. So, I have been going through folder by folder getting rid of stuff I no longer need or duplicate pages. Every year when each of my children were in Kindergarten, we put up a huge turkey, cut out a million feathers and mailed them to friends and family of that child's choice with directions for them to write what they are thankful for and for them to mail it back to us. We get those feathers in the mail and tape them to our turkey. Since last year was my last Kindergarten turkey, I decided it would be fun to take the picture of every one's turkey and those feathers and put them in a scrap book. It is very cool to see how people's blessings changed from Emily to Ian. Well, I couldn't find Owen's feathers. I had a very distinct flash-back to sitting on the garage floor at my old house with the file folder of feathers in my hand. I put them in the trash, I took them out of the trash. When I couldn't find them, I assumed I must have left them in the trash. You see, I do not like junk. I am a junk a phobic. However, I am a sap for nostalgia. I was crushed that I let my state of overwhelmed with junk and a small house, persuade me throw out these precious feathers. I am sure the conversation went something like this: "I might want to do something with these one of these days" Only to which I would answer myself "Yeah, right, you are never going to do anything but let this pile up into more and more junk. Besides, you probably threw Emily's away too." Well, a few nights ago, I was going through my December folder and purging the things I no longer wanted. And there, in the December folder in a smaller folder labeled "foil names" were Owen's feathers. I was so glad to see them. You would have thought it would have been some long lost relative. I know this sounds crazy but I could have cried. I felt pure joy and relief at having these feathers in my hands. I didn't ponder (too long) or beat myself up as to why they were in the wrong folder under the wrong name and I didn't have anyone to tell (because they were all asleep) and even if they were up they would not have the same appreciation for these feathers that I have mourned over for the past 5 years. I would like to say I immediately made my scrapbook - I didn't. However, I did get out all 4 of our feather folders and read them and prayed over them and put them all together in ONE folder with each folder labeled correctly. I hope and pray that I never stop rejoicing and praising Him for the small, simple, pleasures of life He bestows upon me; and that I never come to the point where I don't recognize that they are from Him.