Friday's Fave Fives - 9/6/23

Our host Susanne's introduction this week was just the reminder I needed.  She wrote,  "Welcome to Friday's Fave Five!  Our place of encouragement to intentionally practice looking for our blessings and develop hearts of gratitude to God for them.  Why do we do this?  Why after all these Fridays do I still keep posting this if nothing else?  Because gratitude must be developed and continued.  I can so easily fall out of the practice.  And when I do my eyes are no longer looking for the blessings but gravitate to what I don't have, what I feel I deserve, what I am missing, the cup half empty mindset sets in."

I can so easily fall into the cup half empty mindset, especially in a week that hasn't been particularly great.  But there are still blessings to be found, even when we have to look a little harder so here are mine.

1)  Well this is a 2 week list for me and the first one is easy - last week we were away from Monday to Friday with all our family - daughter, sons, wives and of course all the 6 grandchildren.  We stayed in 2 caravans on a holiday site and, although the weather wasn't great, it was wonderful to be with them all and see the pleasure the grandchildren get from being together.  We were on the east coast of England so we were able to walk to the beach a couple of times but it was too misty and windy to stay there for long.  But there were plenty of activities for the kids to do on the holiday site and they just love being together.

Hard to get a photo of all the little ones together - this was probably my best one.

We also celebrated Rory's 5th birthday while we were there too and one evening we took them all out for a meal which was fairly civilised lol.

2)  We had a fairly quiet weekend then Monday it was back to earth with a bump.  The blood test I had done recently as part of my annual blood pressure medication review has revealed I'm in the pre-diabetic range.  Not something to be thankful for but our GP practice provides access to a diabetes preventative programme which I've signed up for and that starts in a couple of weeks time.  So I am thankful that I've been able to sign up for that and it has given me the motivation to start making changes already.  I knew that, despite having fairly healthy meals, I was eating too many sweet things and definitely eating too much.  Thankfully Hubby has been on board about looking at portion control and the timing of our meals - we often eat late which is not a good thing.  I was also good at dropping quite a few things off our shopping delivery that don't fall into the healthy category.

The programme runs over a period of 9 months so hopefully over that time I can get the changes I need to make embedded into our routines and keep myself healthy.

3)  Of course exercise would be helpful but this week my back has been playing up again and affecting my hip.  Thankfully though our GP practice has a Physio on staff and I had an appointment with her this morning.  I now have a range of exercises to do to help strengthen my back and these are set up on an app that you can use to log when you've done the exercises.  Fortunately I quite like technology that tracks things and this should keep me motivated to do the exercises each day.  Again it's been a timely reminder that I need to look after myself more.  

4)  It hasn't been all doom and gloom though - the weather has been good this week - lots of sunshine and really warm.  

5)  Finally, 39 years ago I said "I do" to this lovely man.

and I'm still glad I did!

Oh and a bonus - we received the latest bill from our gas supplier which seemed really high and when I looked into it and got it sorted it was reduced by over £500!  Moral of that story was never trust their meter readers lol.

To find out more about the Friday Fave Fives visit Susanne's blog here.

Have a good weekend all and hopefully I'll get round to visiting blogs soon.  I've not been very present here in blogland this past week or so.