Thanksgiving

Things I'm grateful for. Seven.... That seems small for a list like this (don't people just love the top-25 or top-50 lists? ;)), but Thanksgiving Day was our 7th Anniversary! My marriage with Matt is the most important thing in my life.... It gets the big fat #1, and here are seven more to celebrate! :)

1) Seth! I love everything about this person. I'd love to fast-forward ten or fifteen years and see if we got the chance to fall this in love with another kiddo or two, but even if we never do, Seth is more miracle than a person should be able to hope for in one life. :) And he's awesome, too! To paraphrase the illustrious Tom Cruise, he completes us. (Haha!) I love my family so much more than I could ever say.

Ok.... With those two big fat #1's, the rest seem pretty silly. But I'll put six more anyway.... :)

2) The ocean. I love, love, love seeing it every day....

3) Waking up every day and assuming I'll spend most of the day outside, and it'll be pretty and pleasant. This keeps me sane! I love being outside!! (And, maybe even more importantly, Seth loves being outside. A happy, not-pent-up Seth also helps keep me sane. Hehe.)

4) Matt's residency program. Sixty-to-One Hundred-hour weeks and all, this program is perfect. They support the residents, they give him a breadth of experience that keeps him happy, they have a variety of excellent hospitals, and his fellow residents are high-quality great people.... With a schedule like this, it makes such a difference to have the perfect program. THANK you, UCSD!

5) The awesome mega-recording of Tosca, featuring the incomparable Andrea Bocelli. I could listen to this for all eternity.... :) (You know it's gonna be good when the best track is a freaking soprano aria.... Andrea Bocelli+Puccini+awesome tenor arias, and Puccini+soprano makes for an even better piece...? That's a recipe for complete bliss through all 45 tracks.... :))

6) The names Seth and Gabriel. If those hadn't existed, I don't know what we would have done for Seth! Consider the fact that in more than seven years of thinking about boy names, we haven't been able to come up with a single other one that we don't loathe on some level. Everyone says we could find something we love if we had to, but I don't think they understand how much we've thought about this and how little success we've had. I'm scared. Hehe.

7) We took a FABULOUS 24 hours sans-kid to celebrate our anniversary in the exotic location of...San Diego. Got a hotel in the gaslamp (and somehow snagged a great room on the top floor! On the view side!), ate INCREDIBLE Indian food, strolled through some beautiful, clean, pleasant downtown areas, strolled along the harbor, and just had a perfect time. I stood in our room looking out at a couple boats in the harbor, Coronado and the ocean beyond the harbor, the trolley going by, a pretty park underneath us, people strolling around together from all different backgrounds and races, the BLUE, blue sky and the green trees, autumn trees, flowers, and even flowering trees, thinking . . . I . . . LOVE . . . this city. Love it, love it, LOVE it. I don't think half a day goes by that we don't mention to each other how grateful we are to live here! Heaven.... (And a heavenly anniversary! :))

So many more things to be grateful for! I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving full of thankfulness and giving thanks and feeling thanks . . . and eating good food. Food that you were thankful for. Hehe. What a great holiday! (Even when it doesn't fall on your anniversary.... :)) Happy Thanksgiving!