Being Thankful

My break from writing here has certainly not been due to a lack of great reading adventures, but more due to the addition of new adventures in the real world.  While my sweet Little One and I have continued to read great books for the last three months, we have also been consumed with preparations to leave our home and to explore another.  Our real life "moving adventure" will be a mix of the excitement of a new place and a return to the familiar, since we will be closer to family and our hometown.

Every move is challenging, and this one is particularly bittersweet.  This place was my first great adventure with my husband - we lived, learned and loved here for eight years.  We have wonderful friends here..... we bought and cared for our first home together here.  Most bittersweet of all, our LO first explored the world here, and it is hard to drive down a street without remembering something cute that she said or did in that place.

But for all the sadness surrounding this move, there are still many things to be thankful for.  I am thankful for the opportunities that my family had here, and I am thankful for the opportunities that have and will present themselves in our new home.  I am thankful for the great friends that we have made, and thankful for the opportunity to keep in touch with many of them through this blog.  And I am thankful for a curious and adventurous LO, who I know will grow and flourish anywhere that we go.

Here are some books that I have shared with LO about being thankful.  What a great life lesson and habit to teach every adventurous mind!

Gracias/Thanks by Pat Mora, John Parra

The perfect book about thankfulness for my Texan baby!  The bilingual storyteller shares his thoughtful sentiments in both English and Spanish.  He expresses thankfulness for the mundane and the profound, with humor and insight.  His expressions of gratitude are a great reminder for adults to see the world through a child's eyes....and they are great examples for children, to show them what thankfulness means.  If you are not comfortable reading in Spanish, you can certainly enjoy the book by reading English only.  As someone who studied Spanish for a long time, I enjoy reading both languages - it stretches my mind to enunciate and pronounce correctly, as well as refreshing my memory of vocabulary and grammar (in fact, this excellent book has made me seek other bilingual story books to read aloud so that I can continue to practice!)

The Thankful Book by Todd Parr

This book became a part of our permanent collection last year for Thanksgiving, and it is has become a year-round favorite.  Reading this book before bed has become a great point for which LO and I talk about the things in her life that she is thankful for.  While it still takes a lot of prompting from me at this point, I think that she is slowly putting together the concept of how she should feel thankful for the things that she loves, the people who love her, and the wonderful life that she has.  I am thankful for this book, because it has provided a colorful and poetic way to teach thankfulness to my young child!