Thankfulness Thursdays/ Week Five

So glad you could join me for week five of Thankfulness Thursdays! Ashley at Domestic Fashionista started this link-up as a way to spend one day a week focusing on how we are blessed in the months leading up to Thanksgiving (which is not as far off as it seems.)

This week I am thankful for our parents. Both my parents and my husband's parents have been such an amazing gift to our family. I am grateful to my own parents for raising me in a loving home and giving me every opportunity to succeed and be happy. I am thankful that my parents-in-law brought up my husband to be a good man and a loving husband and father.

Throughout our lives, our parents teach us what we want to be like (or not be like at times), they help us discover our own personal values and beliefs, and they help form the people we become. Now, as a mother to my own little ones, I see what a heavy weight that is, and it makes me wish I would have given my own parents a little slack sometimes. But of course, that's part of the process that doesn't come around until later for most of us. My parents taught me how to love and be loved, and that might be the most important thing they gave me. To instill that love in my own family is a daily priority. If nothing else, I hope and pray that my kids will always know that I love them unconditionally.

I've always had a great relationship with my mother and father-in-law. The first year that my husband and I were dating, I was planning to go back to Colorado for Christmas with my family. Two days before my flight home, it started snowing and by the day of my flight, the Denver airport was basically closed. The earliest flight I could schedule was five days later, departing the morning after Christmas. At 26 years old, this would be the first time I wasn't with my family on Christmas morning. I was devastated, but without even batting an eye, my then-boyfriend told me that obviously I would spend Christmas with him and his family. When we arrived at their house, they welcomed me with open arms and included me in all the festivities. They even had presents for me on Christmas morning. Before this trip, I had met his parents once.

I feel very fortunate that both my parents and my in-laws are such incredible people. They set the tone for the life we live now and for the family we started together.