www.themacleodfamily.org

We nearly made it to the end of the month without missing a day, but on Friday we didn’t have access to the internet all day, so it put us behind.

Today I am thankful that we are at the end of the month of being thankful. And I’m thankful that Alasdair has helped shoulder the load, as I definitely couldn’t have done 30 days on my own.

I’m thankful for romantic weekends away with my husband (we did take the camera so I’ll do an update sometime this week with pictures), and for Marriott hotels, and also for coming home again to our house. And I am thankful that we do not live in London and never will again.

And I am thankful for the Young Women in our ward who did a wonderful sacrament meeting presentation today, and for their supportive parents, and that I managed to give an entire sacrament meeting talk without unintentionally using any vulgar terms or otherwise making a fool of myself.

Yesterday I was especially thankful for a wife who plans trips for us. We had a lovely trip up to London this weekend but I will leave it to Melissa to tell about in detail.

Summary:

Stayed at the Marriot Grosvenor house (good old priceline)

Saw Eddie Izzard on Thurdsday night, we were a whole 6 feet from the stage.

Saw Runrig on Friday night (great show)

Saw we will rock you before coming home today.

I have had some amazing holidays this year and I have hardly had to plan any of it.

Melissa planned almost all of the Egypt trip

She planned Matthew and Marlas visit in June (I just had to have some input on the Normandy D-day sights)

Matthew planned the Alaska trip

And Melissa planned this weekend.

Very thankful for this one of many ways that she raises the quality of my life.

Today, I am thankful for Thanksgiving.

I think the British are a little jealous of Thanksgiving. Whenever I am asked about it, there is always a tone of disbelief from the enquirer — as if we can’t really have a holiday that is just about getting together with family, eating good food, and being grateful for what we have. Surely it’s just a lazy day off of work, or there has to be some stress around buying gifts, abundant commercialization and media hype, or at least patriotic and/or religious connotations to create alienation and tension?

Nope. It’s just a day to enjoy the very best things life has to offer. And I love it.

Today I am thankful for being a Scot

A jock

A sweaty

A kilt wearing, caber tossing, haggis eating Scot.

Geography, climate and genetics seem to have combined with history, oppression and hard times to produce a unique race of people.

They rival the Germans as engineers

They are as funny as the Irish

As passionate as the Italians

As hard working as any other nation

As loving as can be imagined.

And of course suitably humble.

It also astounds me the number of English people I work with who know little or nothing about Scotland other than haggis, drizzle and the old firm. They seem to think it is just an extension of Northern England and totally fail to grasp that Scotland is a separate nation and culture with their own values and ideals.

Similar to England but marked most by the differences.

Tonight I am thankful and homesick, if I had known in 1999 how long this temporary sojourn south would be I am sure I would have decided differently.

On cold nights like tonight, I am thankful for (in no particular order):

• brick walls
• a sturdy roof
• central heating
• double-glazed windows
• coal effect gas fires
• fleece pajamas
• hot baths
• soft beds
• warm duvets
• cuddly husbands

Today I am thankful for having been brought up in the country.

No matter how long I spend in big towns and cities I will never feel relaxed, I can feel happy and enjoy them but I am lacking an inner calm I know I have when I am in the quiet of the country.

Not good for me, that littlest bit of tension gradually builds up over time and if I don’t get a regular chance to be outdoors I get grumpy and miserable.

Unfortunately here in the UK the urban life is so pervasive, I have a good job, but it is impossible for us to afford a house near an urban centre that was actually in the country.

Hopefully in the US where they have more space we can afford a house in a small town, with a bit of land round it but close enough to a city that I can stick with my current line of work.

So thankful that I am a country soul rather than a city one.

Today, and every day without exception, I am thankful for my mom.

Until I had grown up and moved out, I never really knew my mom as a person. She gave herself selflessly to the role of mother and hid her own needs from us. I never remember my mother making me guilty or trying to play on my sympathies, she never played mind games at all with us, as I have seen so many other mothers do. She was never critical and always, always supportive. She has never tried to force her will on me–I chose my extracurricular activities, my clothes, my studies. Even when it came time to plan my wedding, she gave me a lot of advice, but in the end, let me make all the decisions without interference.

I have so many memories with my mother; most of them centered around horses. My mom always loved horses growing up (she couldn’t understand why they couldn’t keep a pony in their backyard) so she decided she would have them when she was an adult. She knew next to nothing when she started, but she worked hard and learned as she went. She made all of us take riding lessons and participate in Horse 4-H, but all of my other siblings lost interest around age 12 or 13. I didn’t. I loved them as much as she did and thus the two of us spent every summer for nine years dragging a horse trailer around the western United States.

My mom came to every lesson and every show, with very few exceptions. At the time, it seemed like it was just the way things were (isn’t that what moms do?) — now that I am older, I realize the enormous effort and sacrifice required. She was always the one who was up early loading the trailer, and the one who was last into the house at night after unloading. She was the one who clipped the horses, pulled their manes, administered their meds. She arranged their winter quarters, made sure there was always hay in the shed, and arranged the visits to the vet. She kept the schedule of lessons and shows, made sure I had the equipment I needed, and made the contacts we needed to advance my “career.” She was the one who kept a clear head when things went wrong — when Honey got her two front legs stuck in the manger of the trailer, when Joe decided to walk through our barbed wire fence (and keep on walking with it wrapped around his foot), when Ari punctured his femural artery. And on top of all that, she managed to raise five other children, run our house, and keep my dad’s books.

The one thing that I think is so amazing about my mom is that, through all the normal childrearing stuff plus the high-effort horse stuff, I don’t have any memories of her complaining. I am sure she didn’t love every minute, but yet she never let us know that. I can’t emphasize how much of an impact I think that made on me, to feel so unquestionably loved that it never occurred to me that there was a question that could be asked. And it goes far beyond the mom stuff–when I think about her years of work for my dad, her church callings, her community obligations. She set such an unwavering example of just going and doing (for example, I didn’t know that not going to church on Sunday was an option until I went to BYU).

I admire my mom in so many ways. She works so hard and is constantly striving to do what is right — it’s like a compulsion for her. She doesn’t procrastinate, she doesn’t shirk responsibility, she sees what she should be doing at every moment and just does it. And she is supremely honest–she would never tell someone something was “in the mail” or fudge on the details of a story to make it sound better. One of the things I love the most about my mom is one of the same things I love about Alasdair — their ability to make those around them feel comfortable. I think it’s impossible to make other people happy or even make them like you, but it is possible to make them feel comfortable around you, and my mom does that, no matter who you are.

I love talking to my mom about everything; we could talk for hours and hours on end (and do). It doesn’t matter what’s on my mind, she is always willing to talk about it. She doesn’t just listen, she completely engages, sharing her own experience and commisserating. She’ll always talk as long as I want, about whatever I want. No matter what the situation, she always knows the right thing to say to make me feel better or feels even happier for me than I feel for myself (every time I experience something new or amazing, I can’t wait to tell my mom!). And she treats me as a true friend, sharing whatever is on her mind as well. I love being able to be her friend.

I can remember not getting along very well with my mom at times during my teenage years, but I can never remember being embarrassed by her or wishing I had someone else’s mom. And now that I am “grown up,” I just freaking love her. I don’t just love her because she’s my mom; I love her because she’s herself and she’s my friend. The mom thing just happens to be my greatest blessing.

Today I am thankful for my wife, extraordinarily thankful.

Aside from her obvious beauty and elegance

She loves me even when I am a grump, and my potential for grumpiness is extreme.

She looks after me when I need it

She makes my house a home

She picks up after me (Mum, I think you two can bond over that if you haven’t already)

She has been very patient with me over the years.

Most of all today, she is the Christmas pixie that visits my house each year, if it were down to me I would be grabbing some tinsel and a mangy tree on about Dec 20th and dashing to the shops to buy gifts.

Melissa has already done a solid 90% of the gift shopping and today she spent the day making personalised Christmas crackers for her family. There is no such thing as a Christmas cracker in the US so whenever we can’t be there for crimbo we send some, this year everyone is getting an extra special one.

Once thanksgiving is over she will “get out Christmas” properly, decorations, tree, tinsel, the whole lot. Our house will resound to every Christmas song from slade to MoTab.

The weekend before Christmas we will spend the whole weekend baking and making confectionary, then delivering platefuls to friends around town.

There are a great many reasons to love her, but this one is uniquely Melissa.

However I am certain that by mid December I will be praying for a change to the music.

Today I am thankful for online grocery shopping and home delivery, which I honestly think has saved my marriage.

You can measure the phases of our married life by our grocery shopping.

Phase One: We are honeymooning. As newlyweds, we enjoy spending time together no matter what, so grocery shopping is just another fun thing to do together. The shiny newness of married life keeps the unpleasantness of doing the weekly shop from rearing its ugly head. There is peace, but for how long?

Phase Two: Alasdair is working shifts. His pattern is two 12-hour days, then two 12-hour nights, then four days off. With so much time off at once, and the ability to get to the shops to leisurely browse the aisles while other people are working/sleeping, Alasdair takes care of all of the weekly grocery shopping. Peace prevails throughout the land.

Phase Three: Alasdair goes back to the standard workweek. His time off now coincides with everyone else’s in the world, and he can no longer do leisurely shops during weekdays when the shops are less busy. We now have to fit the shopping in on evenings or Saturdays, and as a compromise, we decide to do them together. Without fail, the weekly trip ends in argument. I hate grocery shopping. I can’t stand the pressure of figuring out what I will want for the next week and finding it in such a short space of time. And if we get separated, we can never find each other again, and good grief, the people! Where do all these people come from?! I freely admit that my inability to cope feeds most of the tension, but hey, it takes two to tango, right? We are in a state of war, with Tesco serving as the weekly battleground.

Phase Four: We discover online grocery shopping. We no longer waste hours of our lives wandering up and down the aisles, getting crabbier and crabbier. We simply browse to our standard shopping list, make a few additions and deletions, select a two-hour delivery slot, and move on with our lives. Peace is restored.

Today I am thankful for modern medicine

I had my 4th immunisation in 2 weeks so am going to hide under the duvet and sleep, I think a decent percentage of my body is making antibodies, my bones hurt and I feel like I have been punched in both shoulders by someone that really knows how to hit.

Tally so far

MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) despite the fact I have had mumps and Rubella is a problem really for pregnant women.

Hepatitis B (Topping of the course I had before travelling in 98)

Pneumonia

Flu shot

But I am thankful I had the opportunity and the choice to be vaccinated today, in my teenage years and as a child. My Mum had 3 kids, they all made it to adulthood, my mother in law raised 6.

In other countries now and in times not long past in our own countries that would have been next to impossible, my grandfather was one of several siblings and not all of them survived to adulthood. That is only 2 generations removed from me.

So I am grateful that medicine has made more advances in the 100 years since his birth than it probably did in the 200 before it.

There is now an excellent chance of anyone born after 1980 in the west surviving to be 100, that will be a lot of telegrams when the current youth get there.

I personally reckon if things continue like this there is a good chance of my grandchildren hitting 200.