Gratitude Journal

Thanksgiving is almost here! Just a few more days. We are planning a nice family meal around noon. The grandchildren are always excited to come to Grandma’s house for a meal. Isaac will have his first school holiday. How much fun is that! His other Grandma is home from the hospital, but will not be doing any cooking this year. We have all decided to put a meal together for them and carry it in. You can’t have Thanksgiving without leftovers in your frig.

I am going this morning to get my eyes checked. It will mean new glasses for sure. It is hard to get old. You can’t see, You can’t hear and nobody wants to hear you complain. LOL. After my eye deal we are getting all the goodies for Thanksgiving dinner. I may even make Crickets noodles ( I know the secret) It is so much fun to establish these traditions for the grandchildren.

I remember…Dinner was always at noon or one pm. My Father and brothers always went hunting and mother and I cooked dinner while watching the Macy’s parade on tv. The afternoon was filled with football. I come from a sports oriented family. I always say I was 14 before I knew you could get anything other than sports on a tv. LOL.

I am Thankful today for the traditions of Thanksgiving. A time set aside for thankfulness. After the harvest, enjoying the blessing of God. Take time to really be Thankful this year. Life is Good!

Today I am Thankful for the many blessings this year has offered. Even though I get a little frustrated with Sweetie being gone so much, I am thankful for the prosperous year we have had. I am Thankful that even though there has been some illness in our family and close friends, it has turned out to be a healthy year for all. Every illness has been controlled and no one is chronic at this point. We are making plans to make a quick trip to Tupelo, Mississippi. We are anxious to visit with Sweetie’s oldest daughter and her family. Olivia is almost walking! Time goes so fast. It is sometimes hard for this Grandma to keep up.

It was a grand weekend! Ohio State wins… on their way to the Rose Bowl again! WooHoo! The Colts also won. They needed it. It seemed like they all had the flu or something. They didn’t play very well at all…but we still love em! Jimmie Johnson won NASCAR with mom’s pick, Jeff Gordon, taking second. We had a very good “sports” weekend.

I didn’t feel very well on Saturday, I think I have had sniffly kids too many times this past week.LOL. Our neighbor came over Saturday afternoon, while I sacked out on the couch, and helped Sweetie with all the leaves! I am so Thankful the Lord has blessed us with the nicest neighbors! We love them dearly! They are always there to lend a hand.

I am also Thankful for our son-in law, Bob. He celebrated his 30th birthday yesterday! He is such a blessing to us. As you may have read in previous posts, his mother just had open heart surgery. She is doing very well and will be home before Thanksgiving! Bob, is a wonderful husband to our Mindy and a great daddy to Isaac and Andy. We kept the boys yesterday afternoon so Bob and Mindy could go for lunch and catch the Colts game. I think they had a great time. Happy Birthday Bob!

This is an old Amish recipe. Don’t worry if you don’t like dates. You won’t know they are in there. This starts as a cake then combines to make the most wonderful dessert.

Date Pudding

• 1 cup chopped dates
• 1 cup HOT water
• 1 tea. soda
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tbls. melted butter
• 1 cup flour
• 1 egg
• Cool Whip or equivalent
• 3 bananas
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Pour HOT water over dates and soda. Let this set until cool. Add sugar, butter, flour and egg. Mix well. Bake in 13×9 pan 25-30 minutes at 350 degrees. Cool. Cut in very fine squares. Mix wth Cool Whip, bananas,and nuts. Enjoy!

Southern Pecan Pie

Beat 5 eggs with 1 cup sugar, a dash of salt. Add 1 1/2 cup light corn syrup and 1/3 cup melted butter. Mix well. Add 1 1/2 cup pecans. Bake at 350 degrees until done, about 1 hour. For a real treat substitue walnuts for the pecans. Enjoy!

As promised, some recipes from my kitchen. Who doesn’t love Pumpkin Pie! This is the absolute best Pumpkin Pie recipe ever. It is very simple to make. I always use Pillsbury ready pie crust. It is better than homemade.

Pumpkin Pie

• 4 beaten eggs
• 1 lg. can pumpkin
• 1 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tea. salt
• 2 tea. cinnamon
• 1 tea nutmeg
• 1/2 tea. cloves
• 1 can evaporated milk
• 1 can sweetened condensed milk

Combine ingredients in order given. Mix well. Divide into two unbaked pie shells. Bake for 15 minutes at 425 degrees. Reduce oven to 350 degrees and bake 45 -55 more minutes. Enjoy!

I am Thankful today that Sweetie got home, safe and sound, three days early!! This two weeks at a time away from home is getting old. He will not be done until sometime in January. (sigh) Our weekend will be full. LEAVES!!! ugh! Living in the woods is usually quite wonderful, except for these leaves. This will be the third time we have had to clean the yard. I love doing it the first time but by the third time I am so done with it. I am thankful the weather is nice enough to get them done for the LAST time!

Today is the BIG day. The day we wait for all year…OHIO STATE vs Michigan! GO BUCKS!! I will be stopping my world at noon to watch the game. I get to see so few these days. It is on ABC so I will be able to see it. It is going to be interesting after last weeks upset vs Illinois. It was not our week for sports. The Colts also lost making it two in a row, ugh! I hope we have better luck this week………………….Have a great weekend!

Today I am very thankful for another year with Dad. He is 81 today. I had an all day meeting in Columbus so I did not get home until an hour ago. I had planned to take him out for dinner but he did not feel up to going out. He requested Wendy’s french fries, which I readily ran downtown to pick up. He is napping on the couch now. I have a pumpkin pie in the oven (his favorite) so we will have warm pie when he wakes up. A quiet birthday evening for just the two of us. How nice.

Just a quick update…Bob’s mother had heart surgery this morning and is doing well. Thanks to everyone who said a prayer for them. I have spent another day on Grandma duty. Andy was not feeling very well today so it was kind of light duty. I am getting anxious for Sweetie to get home, two weeks is long enough! Thursday 13 was great fun this week. Check out some of the links under the post if you get a chance. There were some really positive things out there this week. I have met so many nice people getting involved with this. Hope everyone is looking forward to the upcoming Holiday (my favorite). I hope to get some good recipes posted. (I grew up in Amish country) I have lots of great recipes! …….Life IS Good!

I would like to ask all of you to pray for our son-in-law’s mother. She has been having some health problems lately. She had a stress test last week, which she passed, but they wanted to do another. Yesterday she went for the second one. This time they did a nuclear test and ended up taking her to the hospital for a heart cath. It turns out she has 100 percent blockage in two arteries (they left the heart cath in) They are going to do surgery tommorrow morning. They are trying to get her diabetes under control first. This is a very scary and stressful situation for our Bob and Mindy. After doing some testing the doctors have said she has had a heart attack at some point in the last year. There is already some damage to the heart, that they will not be able to repair. Please pray for her and her family. Thanks!

I am Thankful today for the beautiful weather. We had a few light showers but missed out on most of the rain. Who can believe it is November and we still are having weather in the 60’s. I found a real interesting site last night bookrags it is a research site. I love to read biographies and this site has tons. I was watching PBS last night, They were awarding the Mark Twain prize to Billy Crystal. When that was over they had a program on about vaudeville to radio to tv. Now I love old time radio and tv so I was sucked right in until 11:30. When they were talking about Burns and Allen they said Gracie Allen was not at all in real life how she appeared on the show. They said how intelligent she really was. I wanted to know more so I googled and found the bookrags site. I enjoyed the show and also the reading I did at bookrags. Have a great day!

Sometimes it is hard to be Thankful. I have to force myself to think of good things. Some of you know, we have been in a little bit of a mess with Sweeties youngest daughter. She is involved with someone who has been involved in some shady activities. We have made our position known. Last spring there was some violence attached to this situation and Sweetie almost came unglued. He let his position be well known. He then recieved a phone call from the boyfriend telling him to stay out of their lives etc, etc. Sweetie could hear his daughter in the background telling her friend what to say to her father. Sweetie was devastated. Since then we have stayed out of the way. Well, yesterday was daughters birthday. We sent a card with a nice “love you, thinking about you” note attached. I guess that was not the right thing to do. I recieved a phone call at 10 pm from daughters mother(ex-wife of 20 years) She was on quite a rant because she thought Sweetie should be calling daughter. Now, daughter is 26 yrs old she is not 16. Sweetie has been told in no uncertain terms to stay out of their (daughter, 2 grandchildren, boyfriend) lives. It is very hard to be thankful for this situation. It seems to me that less drama is better. I let ex-wife rant then she hung up on me. She is not interested in finding a solution to this problem, she just wants her opinion heard. Well I heard it ,I don’t agree with it ,but I heard it and kept my cool. Then ex-wife called sweetie and did the same to him. Sweetie and I talked about it last night and decided to do nothing. It brings to mind, what I often say is one of my favorite Bible verses…A little out of context, but it still helps me. “If They Want To Be Ignorant, Let Them Be Ignorant” I figure the Lord is trying to show us something here, but I am not quite sure what it is. Maybe it is His long suffering toward us. I only know it is not good to be at odds with your children. But, what do you do? We keep praying about it. We love daughter and her children. We have tried to help without giving our consent to this lifestyle. We have done for the children, we have bought furniture and groceries, we have done what we know to do. I am sure some of you will have some wisdom about this. Please fill me in. What would you do? I will be thankful for all your input.