Today I don’t complain or bemoan my lack of natural mommie-skills.  Today, exactly one week from Christmas Eve, I will be thankful.  I am healthy.  (An amazing miracle all on its own).  When they told me I had Leukemia when I was 16 I thought briefly of that episode of Degrassi High where the girl had cancer and then died.  But then I thought, that could never happen to me.  This is just going to put a crimp in my plans, and give me something to write about when I’m older.  When I was diagnosed a second time and got shipped off to Toronto Sick Kids for a bone marrow transplant I thought, well if I’m going to die anyway I hope I get smucked by a bus before we get there.  Wouldn’t want to go to all that trouble if I wasn’t going to make it anyway.  But, amazingly, miraculously, I did make it.  Am still ‘making it’ just fine twenty years later.  I digress.  I talk about a lot of ‘small’ miracles if there are such a thing as ‘small’ miracles but me being here, just here on my computer in my pajama’s, drinking tea and eating cookies, that’s a HUGE miracle.

My family is healthy.  We don’t think about it but we abound in small miracles every day.  Einstein said there was only one way to live, one as if EVERYTHING is a miracle, and another as if nothing is.  I choose to live in recognition of the thousands of miracles that surround us every day.  I’m alive and healthy, my family is alive and healthy.  I have a warm place to sleep, the ability to give my child what she needs to not only survive but thrive.  There are millions who can’t claim that particular miracle for their little ones.  I was born and raised in a beautiful, free country, and when I married a wonderful man from another country, I got to move to another beautiful, free country.  These countries are places I can raise my daughter and know she will be just as encouraged on the soccer field as she is in math class.  Places she can grow up and literally be anything she wants, from an astronaut to a fighter pilot to the president of the United States.  I’m so grateful I can encourage any darn dream she has and know it is possible, and it may not even be that difficult, at least, not more difficult just because she is female.  I’ve got money in my pocket, enough to pay the bills.  I don’t have to work right now, I can stay home and soak up these young years with her and we are ok.  Another miracle.
Bill and I have one more try on the IVF roulette wheel, a chance at yet another miracle.  I have so many miracles in my life sometimes I worry about when the other shoe will drop.  I also worry that I’m not giving back enough to this world I have been given a second chance at.  Wait, how did my ‘thankful’ day turn into a worry day again?  I’m eerily good at that.
So, thankful we have another chance to expand our little family when we are ready.  And if we don’t get lucky a second time, I am thankful we had the chance in the first place.  Lastly, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t also say I am very thankful for mom’s double layer chocolate cake, sappy Hallmark movies, smutty romances, and a good glass of smooth red wine.  Oh, and very thankful my very good friend Sarah is pregnant right now!  Maybe you’ll have a boy!  Maybe he’ll fall in love with my Ellie!  Maybe they’ll get married and live happily ever after and we’ll be mothers-in-law together!  So fun!  Thank you world!  (Both the fantasy one I live in, and the real one I visit from time to time.)