Thankful thoughts

It’s officially Autumn now and there’s a definite pity party happening in the household at the moment… I’m fed up of it and everyone around us must be as well. We have an amazing life so to try and head it off I wanted to write down just some of the things I’m grateful for.

There are many things I could start this list with but I’ll start with the sappiest one and say my husband. I often sit and marvel that I’ve been blessed with such a beautiful man inside and out. I appreciate more and more the wonder of finding someone who wants the same things for our future and will bust his butt to get them for us. I asked him the other night what inspired him to do what he did (it was a question I’d struggled to answer that day when asked in work) and he said providing for me. He is motivated because we want our future goals to come to fruition ❤️. How often would you find a man who’s willing to run the same budget numbers with you every night just because it keeps you focused?!

The next thing I’m supremely grateful for is my friends. At 30 I have best friends, actual movie style best friends, who aren’t just my family. It’s something I haven’t had since I was 15 and it’s odd and great! It’s been a whole learning experience for me. Two of my closest female friends do me the very great honour of allowing me to call myself Aunty to their babies. They let me bug the life out of them by hanging out at their house and drinking tea and playing with my beautiful niece and nephew for hours on end. I’ve now been asked to be Godmother to a gorgeous new Godson who will arrive in January. I don’t know if I can describe how humbled and amazed it makes me feel to have both these ‘titles’ for these tiny humans. I love them unconditionally and it is a phenomenal thing for me. It also means I have people who are at the same point in life as me and who I can talk to or even bitch too when I am having a bit of a crap day. To have people understand or just listen is great. They are there to just text or go and see and sometimes I just have to remind myself that that isn’t an inconvenience for them, they actually don’t find me that boring! They’re also the ones who have been there every day when I’ve been honest and said I can’t afford to do something. Instead of just avoiding hanging out with me they’ve happily spent time doing free stuff with me. They’ve also put up with the fact I haven’t even been able to get them a birthday present this year or indeed buy anything for them (the absolute hardest thing for me!).

I was also asked this year to be bridesmaid to one of my other friends. A complete surprise and a wonderful one. This is the first time I’ve been bridesmaid for someone who wasn’t family. It makes my heart happy that someone would want me to be up there, right next to them, on such an momentous occasion. All of these things just make me sit and think wow. These beautiful beings could have chosen anyone for these things but they chose me (or got stuck with me in the case of the babies 😂). I honestly just feel so lucky to have such caring people surrounding me.

I also have more friends than I know what to do with to be truly honest. I’m not a great socialiser at all, I like who I like and would do anything for them but that tends to be a very small number. Thanks to my job I find myself surrounded by amazing and interesting and funny people. They all seem to be willing to have me as a friend and actually want to talk to me and meet up with me. It’s been really difficult the fact that I’ve had no frivolous money to go out for tea and cake with these new friends but we’ve made it work.

I’m also really grateful for husband and I’s jobs. There are so many people we’ve read about, going through the debt journey, and they’re biggest problem is their income. I have a job which I love and that has been able to double my hours since the start of the year. This is through the generosity of my managers and it has obviously made an immense difference in our ability to clear down the debt. I also love what I do, I spent years in jobs I didn’t enjoy but now I get to love going into work every day. I’m working from 4pm till 2am today and I honestly can’t wait for it! I know that not a lot of people can say that about their jobs.

My family are the other area where I’m filled with love and blessings. I have a fantastic family. They drive me up the wall a lot of the time but that’s what family are for. I have been blessed from the second I was born with my family and I doubled down on it when I got married and had another amazing family take me in and call me their own.

Lastly I’m grateful for all the opportunities we’ve been given. No matter what we need God always seems to give us a way of getting it. No matter how badly we’ve screwed up or when we’ve got sick and tired of budgeting etc etc, we always seem to be able to get back on track. I’m so grateful for all the times that this has happened. We are blessed with a life of abundance and that’s what we need to focus on just now instead of the few small things that we’re griping about. This autumn is definitely a season of big change.

 

 

 

Old skills, new skills, lost skills…

This year I’ve been dwelling on skills that I would like to have that I don’t. Now that encompasses a very wide array- from metal working to speaking another language- there’s loads of things I would like to be able to do. My problem is always just picking one thing. When I get in the mood to learn something new then I start trying to do it all! As you can imagine this very quickly descends into me learning nothing.

I’m also fairly terrible at teaching myself anything. I’m not one of these glorious people who can turn their hand to anything. In fact I’ve yet to find a single thing in my life that I have been able to quickly pick up. Anything I learn is hard won and normally encompasses endless hours of extra practice compared to anyone else and a book or five on the subject to understand the theory of what I’m doing. This means that when I’m trying to pick up something I have to try and find a teacher. For me a YouTube tutorial just won’t cut it, I need someone there to hold my hand.

Now that’s not to say that I’m stupid or that I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be doing. However in reality I like to be able to ask many many incessant questions and write notes (on paper as well, I don’t do well with typed notes) on the steps I should be taking. As well as being able to watch them do the thing first and then copy it.

This is in complete contrast to the wonderful husband. I have never met someone more hands on and practically minded than he is. Also he is one of these blessedly annoying people who picks everything up quickly and makes it look damn easy doing it! In fact this idea of him is so ingrained in me that I now find it difficult to believe if I ask him to do something practical and he tells me he can’t. (On occasion I do think this is just because he doesn’t want to do what I’m asking…). This is a man who taught himself to wire our house, plumb in our bathroom and heating system, has built garages and kit cars and many other jobs mainly by watching a couple of videos on it and then getting started. It’s a skill I envy and admire and one that I definitely do not have!

I’ve also found that the older I get the more I feel I should have a certain skill level. I can do the basics of life: cook, clean, washing etc but I want to be able to do more.

Based on all that, I wanted to pick a skill for this year to get to grips with. To me, out of my long list, the most useful skill I could acquire was how to use a sewing machine. This is a totally foreign area to me. I was ill for most of my childhood so I didn’t do home economics classes and have never been near a sewing machine in my house either. I do however love the idea of being able to make and alter things. The opportunity to take it up seemed like a good choice when I saw a Singer machine on offer in the local supermarket. So I bought it and went from there.

Now for the teaching part. As I said I can’t teach myself so I needed to rope someone in to teach me the basics. That’s where my mother in law comes in. I’m extremely lucky and I get along really well with my MIL. I’m also lucky that she has all the skills of a perfect 1950’s housewife and is willing to pass them onto me! So we’ve currently started lessons- just basic using my machine, threading it, different stitches, adjusting tension etc. I was duped by her into making a cushion cover as well. (This was stressful as it’s to go in her room, I thought I was working on a practice one with spare material, it turned out that it was the good one- not impressed!). It’s now time for me to try and make an actual legitimate item from start to end though…

Yesterday was a day of shopping. For the first time I bought a pattern and fabric- yay. This was a myriad of complications though that I didn’t know about. For a start I didn’t realise that you look through a pattern book and then take a number up to the counter to actually get the pattern. I had assumed that you would just have all the patterns hanging on a wall and pick from there. That’s not the case I see! Then there’s all the numbers on the pattern- I still don’t know what they mean. Due to my MIL knowledge we seem to have come away with the right pattern but who knows?! I also got far too overexcited in the fabric shop. I’m just making a basic pair of jogging bottoms but that involves boring coloured, plain jersey fabric. Whereas what I actually want to make clothes out off is all the material with tiny pirates, fabric that is super soft and looks like dragon scales or is off a completely lurid pattern involving giant flowers or little stars…  I got dark grey jersey material though as is appropriate for the moment! So now I just have to get on and make it. I’ll keep you updated on how it’s going once I get started.

When I was looking at skills though it did make me think a lot about the potential for skills to be lost. I don’t know many people my age who can use a sewing machine, knit, make jam, make home remedies, grow their own food or re-purpose and re-use what they own. It could be that I just don’t know the right subset of people for this but I do have a broad range of friends. To them I am viewed as a practical person and someone who can do a lot and has a lot of ‘old’ housewife-esque skills. This is blatantly untrue but it’s because they buy everything and would never consider making their own. It makes me even more determined to master what skills I start, I want to help carry these on for new generations. Hopefully that’ll give me enough incentive to learn new things each year.

Are there any skills that are in danger of dying that you know? I’d love to hear about them.

Kimmy x