When times become challenging, it is often hard to find moments of gratitude. It can be easier to dwell on the negatives and lose sight of the positive moments in your day. The year 2018 began with an unexpected deployment for our family. Knowing not every day would be easy, we ended each day reflecting on the moments we were grateful for. This nighttime activity led to a family project called A Post-it A Day While Daddy’s Away.
As a family, we started using post-it notes to chronicle the daily moments we are grateful for. Every night before bed, we come together and talk about our day. Then we write out each of our special moments and put it on our kitchen pantry door. Having the notes displayed in our kitchen is a visible reminder to our family that there is always something to be grateful for, even during the hard or sad times without our daddy home.
These moments have ranged from family dance parties and playing with friends, to acing a math test, losing a tooth or solo grocery store visits. Others include a phone call from daddy across the world, walking the dog around the neighborhood, a trip to the zoo or even cereal for our dinner. We have also been grateful for the many family and friends who visited us during this deployment. In fact, we have even included them in our post-it note project!
This in turn led our project to expand on the concept of gratitude. We started asking our visitors what they were grateful for during the day. Their answers included the smell of jasmine during a walk, a splash in our community pool or sitting on the ground and playing dolls with us.
Our family is currently on round two of our project as we endure another deployment, and it has expanded. We enjoyed capturing these moments so much the first time around that we decided we had to do it again. This time we are not only putting our post-it notes on our pantry door but we have also gone social!
Knowing the positive influence of social media, we decided to take the post-it notes to Instagram! We created A Post-it A Day to reinforce our family’s mantra that we can truly always find something to be grateful for, even through our hardest days. Our hope is sharing our family’s joy will inspire others to find the good in their day.
‘A Post-it A Day While Daddy’s Away’ has been a bright spot in an otherwise challenging year for our family. Taking time to reflect on the good in our days has really opened our eyes to what we need as a family to feel joy and happiness. We do not need extravagant moments. Rather, most of our moments of gratitude come when we are just spending time together. Our days are full of many little moments that we often overlook as just that: little moments.
But, when we stop and reflect, many times those little moments are the ones we are most grateful for, the ones that outshine all the negatives.
What are you grateful for today? Share your moments with Kari and family on Instagram at A Post-it A Day.
