It is that time of year… (First off HAPPY HALLOWEEN. Costume pics and post will be up later this week.) November is probably my third favorite month. My first favorite month is February (cause that’s my birthday month, wherein I party all month long to celebrate.) My second favorite month is December because there’s lots of family, and hustle and bustle, presents, delicious food, obnoxiously great music…. You get the point. November is my third favorite month because I LOVE being thankful. I love being able to look at my life and find all of the things I am blessed to have and be grateful for. I’m especially excited for 2013 November because I have a new little McMaster to love and share and be thankful for.
This year I am doing what I did last year and finding something everyday to be thankful for and taking a picture of it. These pictures I will be posting on Instagram, so if you have an account you should follow along! If not, no worries, I will be posting each weeks pictures at the end of the week. I have also decided to follow written prompts from Inspired By Familia. I really want to be able to take a step back and look at all the amazing things in my life, ponder and reflect and just wallow and drown in thankfulness.
SOOOOO to start things off (I know it’s a bit early) I want to start by being so thankful and blessed for friends.
A year and some change ago I had the opportunity to forgive, and be forgiven. This is something that as Latter Day Saints we talk about all the time, the healing and power behind forgiveness. At the age of 25 I had had several opportunities to go through this process on occasion. However, none of them were as real or as meaningful as the experience I had last August.
When my family moved from Milwaukie to Beaverton I was apprehensive, frustrated, angry, upset… you get the idea. I was unsure of moving in the middle of my high school career, but I know that my parents made the right choice and did what was best for our family, and now I can see just how much I have benefited from the move. I have made some of the greatest friends I will ever (and always) have.
I met Erika at church before I realized we went to the same school. It wasn’t love at first sight ha ha. Erika was (and still is) incredibly outgoing, loud, funny, and odd At the time I was moody, grouchy, withdrawn, and negative. I didn’t want to be infected by Erika’s bubbly and positive outlook on life. It did not take long before I was. The more time I spent around or near Erika, the more I realized I wanted her attitude and positivity. I credit a lot of my “returning to Katieness” to Erika, which my parents were grateful for. The more time I spent with Erika, the more I grew to love and enjoy her company. As we became friends, we realized that we had a lot in common. And by a lot, I really do mean a lot. From silly trivial things like both of us playing the flute, to really deep and personal/spiritual things as well; we even took the time during one of our many slumber parties to make a list of all the things we have in common.
For the rest of high school we were the best of friends. We had our ups and downs as teenage girls do, but we overcame and moved on. When Daniel and I got married, Erika and I had the biggest down we’d ever had. My selfish attitude, my childish behavior, and my pettiness caused a falling out between Erika and I, a very long 5 year falling out. Over the five years we lost touch with each other, Erika got married and moved away, and our high school days became distant memories. Throughout the five years we would run into each other every so often when she would come home to visit her family, and I would be reminded of my bad attitude, and my unwillingness to forgive and forget. Every now and then I would get updates on her life from her mother. I remember at different times coming home from seeing her at church and just crying and wailing and going on and on to Daniel about how insincere and fake our relationship had become, and instead of doing something about it, I would just complain.
I truly believe that The Lord has a hand in our lives, and that he had probably watched long enough as I continued to dig my heels in; it was time for me to grow up and act like a lady. One night while facebooking I discovered that Erika and I were no longer friends on facebook, no real surprise, but in that moment I realized that I was no longer angry, I was just sad. I had spent 5 years of my life being catty, and I had missed out and lost out on so much, all by choice. It was in that moment that my phone glitched out and kicked my out of the facebook app. (Classic.) That night during my prayers I felt extremely impressed to write Erika a letter of apology and forgiveness, and so I did. I held on to that letter for a couple of days with every intention of mailing it…. Imagine my surprise a few days later when I received an email from Erika. When the facebook app had glitched out, it had apparently friend requested her at the same time. She wrote me explaining that she had written me a letter that she hadn’t mailed yet, and I wrote her back, flabbergasted, explaining that I had done the same thing. (This is pretty typical for us).
I remember sitting in the recliner at my parents house crying. We emailed back and forth, exchanged phone numbers, and spent the rest of the afternoon talking on the phone attempting to catch up for the last 5 years. Slowly we began to rebuild our friendship. Erika and I then discovered in November that we were both pregnant and due 2 weeks apart. We were able to share an experience I will never forget… 9 months of conversation about this and that and all things pregnancy and baby related. When Erika came up here for her brothers wedding it was as if nothing had ever happened. We picked up where we left off and over the months have watched as our friendship has grown stronger. We even had babies on the same day…
Throughout our lives we are given opportunities to become better than we were the day before. We are given people who push us and pull us and help shape who we are. Within my life I have watched as good people, GREAT people, have come into my life, changed who I am, given me wonderful memories, and left me a better person than I was before I met them. I don’t profess or claim to be the most amazing person (at least not all the time :)) and there are very few people who know the REAL me. People I can be my real and true self around. Which means a lot to me, because sometimes the real and true Katie isn’t all peaches and roses. Growing up I was never one to get along with girls, I tended to have more male friends, and it has been a learning experience to become and be the friend that I am today. (Having a baby tends to hinder my awesome friendness… There are times when I wish I could be hanging out with friends like planned, but then I think, here I am forging one of the greatest friendships, and then it’s all worth it.)
I am thankful for my friends. I am thankful to Jessica C. who has been an incredible force in my life. I am so proud to call her my friend. And I am currently doing the scholarship/internship/fellowship dance of my life so as please the Grad Program gods into letting her move back home. I am thankful to Erika for putting up with my crappy behavior/attitude and learning to love me still. I am blessed to have gone through 9 months with you, and all that we learned together I pray that someday I will live next to you too!!! I am thankful for my beautiful cousins Jessica and Megan. Even though you both live far away, I am glad that I will forever be sandwiched between the two of you on the Poff Family side. You are both the sisters I never had I am thankful for Rachel S. who understands good retail/food therapy. I am grateful for our biweekly get togethers… They’re just too much fun. I am thankful to Heather and am SO glad that they moved into our ward. I am glad that we met and that we are friends, because I think you are just fantastic. I am also grateful that we too got to spend time together pregnant. Those are memories I will cherish. Jenne! I miss you so much! I am so excited that you are having a little girl, and that our little girls can be friends. (One more baby friend to add to Ruby’s growing friends pool). I hope that you and I get to live close together again someday too. I am so glad you are in my life, however far away you may be. I am thankful to Sami, who has always (and hopefully always will) loved me no matter what. We have been through SO MUCH together. You are incredible, and I love you. Golshad, Julia, thank you for understanding and being fellow shoe addicts. I adore you ladies, and I love the opportunities we have to get together!
If you didn’t get a personal shout-out please don’t be offended. There are just so many of you that I would be at this all afternoon and probably into the early hours of the morning, and I have to go be a parent (which means putting my daughter in her Halloween costume and torturing her by taking pictures.)
