A Thanksgiving Tradition

The Blessing Tree

We've always spent the days leading up to thanksgiving talking about what we're thankful for. This year when I found these leaf cut outs at the craft store I decided it would be fun to make a tree to keep our blessings on so the littles would have a visual of how many things we had to be thankful for. 

Some of the things we were thankful for were.........chickens, goats, books, God, Jesus, Church, everybody, houses, vegetables, flowers, microsoft, computers, homeschooling, learning something new, family, this meal, Ronan, Kiska, Tyler, Auri, Mom, Daddy, doctors.

I especially enjoyed Tyler starting off the "grateful for each other days". We had a bad scare with Ronan. He had a seizure in the middle of the night and the next night Tyler said he was grateful for his brother Ronan. Before that Tyler had been grateful for lots of selfish young teen things and was driving me nuts with his answers. Halo, tv, pop music, the color black...things like that. I was encouraged to see that he COULD be mature and caring when there was something important. 

He's a good kid. He just makes me crazy....although I hear that most 13 year old boys make their parents crazy. :o)

We weren't as faithful with it as I'd have liked. The children spent a lot of time visiting friends or we would be running late for bed. (This was during our foray into the private school life. All we did was rush around...at least it felt like it.) But it was a good start. We enjoyed doing it and I know it will be something we keep.

I had already started removing things when I took these pictures, so the tree is a little bare. We're also missing the pumpkins that I had placed at the base of the tree with our family names written on them. 

I believe the total cost for our project was around $12. Well worth it. :o)

Hopefully I'll get better at making trees as the years go on.

But my children didn't care. They LOVED it!