I feel like this thought process is a bit cliche at this point, but when thinking about my childhood and how much I took for granted, I want to try my hardest to teach my children about appreciating every experience (good and bad), about valuing time spent with friends and family (not material things) and living at a pace that makes recognizing all of these things possible. By no means am I saying that I wasn’t taught these lessons, it just took me WAY too long to find the appreciation. I believe my pace of life, filling every waking moment with an activity or task, took away from quiet moments to reflect and be thankful.

I started this blog before the Texas Winter Storm of 2021, where we were tested again. Who thinks about not having electricity, water, and food? Who would have thought that they could freeze in their own home? Appreciating the most basic things that will keep us alive is all we should be focused on most of the time, and yet we are so easily pulled into worrying about trivial things that ultimately do not matter. Things you will either forget about in a year, throw away, or buy and not use at all. I have continued to find myself doing this even though we are trying to minimize. I justify it by saying it will make life easier (and with two small children and a puppy making things easier is something I think about a lot), but should I be making life easier, or just focus on slowing down, and making things work with less?

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