Early Thanksgiving

Although there's still another week until the official Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, Steve, Jonas and I are going to celebrate it this weekend before our big family gatherings. It's been a rough week and we need to remind ourselves of all we have to be thankful for. Our struggles sometimes get the better of our attitudes but we have so much to be grateful for.

While we struggled with our daily battles this week, my cousins Kelly and Brent mourned the anniversary of the loss of their son Ian, a few short days after his birth in 2006. A friend lost her dad after a hard fought battle with cancer and another friend lost her life to a heart attack. These sad occassions stir memories of the loss of our son Owen at his birth seven and half years ago. In a split second, it felt like all of our hopes and dreams for the future were snuffed out. As I know those other families have been, we were devastated.

That loss was something that Steve and I may never have gotten over if we didn't have Jonas and Tasha. In the weeks after Owen's funeral, we took Jonas on an aimless trip around the Canadian East Coast. It was the life bursting out of him that gave us the strength to come home again and try to put our lives back together again. Knowing that we had two other children with full lives in front of them gave us the strength we needed to get through the loss of Owen and embrace life again.

Jonas joyfully toddling on a beach in Nova Scotia in 2004.

Through our daily struggles we need to keep in mind how blessed we are to have those challenges to overcome, how grateful we should be that they are not worse, and how blessed we are for all the wonderful moments we are graced with. So, this weekend we'll roast a turkey and veggies and sit down to count our blessings.

Cheers!