Friday's Favorite Five

This week has been a hard one for me. I have woken up each morning dreading to have to go and do the things I have to do, especially go to work. I notice when I have trouble with one thing in my life, it takes the balance out of all of the rest of my life. So I thought for my list I would use this opportunity to bring to my attention things I know I have in my life to be grateful for.

1) My clients at work are all developmentally delayed and all have special challenges that for the people that give daily care to them, can be very taxing. Some days are especially hard and no matter how much we love and care for our clients we all sometimes watch the clock, have our jacket on and car keys in hand to run out the door with what is left of our patience and get as far away as we can and closer to the sanctuary of our homes as fast as we can. We all work together as a team and bounce our difficulties and trials off of each other so I am grateful for the clients who continually test me and my limits and the staff who hold me up.

2) Somedays I get home from days such as above and have not managed to process the day before bringing it into the home. I am grateful for my hubby who makes me a cup of tea, clears a spot in his day and gives me undivided attention and listens to the remnants of my day. He helps me put it all into perspective and see the silver linings.

3) Sometimes I feel like I am running close to empty and don't have much left to share with people. It always happens at those times my energy is at its lowest that a challenge appears to shake me out of myself and encourage me to make a choice to step up. My hubby likes to bring home "strays" as we sometimes call them. For years we fostered Level 3 behaviorial teenagers, those kind with lots of letters behind thier names, such as FAS, ADHD etc. We were one of the last of the line for these kids and although we could not save them all, one or two made it all worthwhile. We have been out of fostering for a while, buy hubby still works with teens and now and then has to bring them home until he can find homes, jobs etc for them. So on my worst day this week at work, he brought home a teen to stay at the house. So it shows me that as much as I think my circumstances are rotten at any given time, there is always someone who has much worse states than I am in at any time. Gives me back some humility.

4) I have to put a couple of things on this list that are not so depressed sounding!! So here goes! Chocolate Dipped Strawberries. I am going to make these for hubby for Valentine's Day. Along with a dinner to share before dessert of course. I watched a cooking show that showed how to do this, so am going to make this for my Valentine!!

5) Love Hearts! I bought a bag of these to photograph them for a photo contest I entered last weekend, and I have been eating the sweet things since.

To see other's posts for Friday's Favorite Five, please go to visit http://susannesspace.blogspot.com/

Lists

Continuing on from my last post and a few posts back where I posted my 25 random things about me list. We did this at our last staff meeting the other day and had everyone post 10 Random facts about themselves, and then read them out to the rest of the participants. I specifically said nothing negative in the lists and it still managed to sneak its way into the odd list in one form or another. Something like I hate the snow. Instead of putting down something like making angels in the snow is a lot of fun. Anyways everyone laboured long and hard on thier lists, grumbling about how tough it was and what could they write about themselves. Some folded them up in the end and tryed to hide them away. Shyly when it was their turn to read their list they quietly and quickly tryed to speed through their list fast enough that the others just might not hear. We all learned something about each other that day, not only by what was on each other's lists but also about the ways we went about filling out or trying to not fill out our lists. And everyone also agreed that it is harder to write positive things about ourselves and takes longer to complete than it would of if we were writing negative things. In fact some of us filled in our blank spots with negative things when we couldn't come up with any more positive thoughts.
My original reason for giving this exercise to my staff to do was so that they might learn a thing or two about their fellow staff members and in end of this exercise I ended up learning a thing or two about me too.
Funny how that happens!!