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What I Learned in My Fourth Year of Marriage That Changed My Life
My fourth anniversary was on Thanksgiving this year. I hadn’t known that was possible because I thought Thanksgiving was always the last Thursday of the month, and my anniversary, November 22nd, is more than seven days from the end of the month. We All Have Problems Last year on Thanksgiving I decided I would ignore all my marriage problems for the next year to see if they went away because maybe they were in my head. My husband had been deployed to Afghanistan when his dad died at the end of November. He came home on the first of December. At the end of the trip to lay his father…
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Gifts for the Athlete in Your Life
As an intentional gift giver, every year I search for gift guides to help spark ideas for gifts for the people on my list. Athletes, gym rats, fitness buffs kind of have the same MO; they need the same stuff. Browse this list for ideas for the fit people in your life! This post contains affiliate links! I may be compensated if you make a purchase through the link. Thanks! Water Bottle Gym Heads are always trying to drink more water. Support your friend’s hydration goals by gifting a handy, (but admittedly obtrusive in some settings) gallon sized water bottle. Does carrying around a gallon of water seem completely ridiculous? Camelbak’s…
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How to Give Gifts People Want
The Lord loves a cheerful giver. I’m usually a cheerful giver. My hyper-analytical nature usually enables me to come up with thoughtful gifts. But I do feel stressed when I don’t know someone well enough to give them the quality of gift I would want. This post will show you a process for selecting thoughtful gifts in an organized way so that gift giving isn’t stressful as it tends to be. One of the principles I live by is not to bring clutter into this house. My aversion to clutter is complicated by my guilt about throwing things away. As a result, I often decline free stuff, other than candy,…
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3 Ways to Practice Gratitude
How many Thanksgiving dinners have I attended where the family members were made to state something they were grateful for? Enough to know we all could use a little help to experience gratitude more often in our lives so that we aren’t grasping at straws. The answers always range from surface level- an xbox, to practical– job, to sincere– grandma still being with us. Not inherently bad answers, but would those be our answers if we were inclined toward identifying things that we are thankful for? What if we didn’t have to think of things that we use often or that people in worse situations don’t have? What if we…
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Pumpkin Spiced Latte Macarons and Why You Should Make Them
I started baking on a whim. I threw together some cake mix cookies before work because I had been non-committal about attending a coworker’s baby shower on my lunch. I was new to the team and didn’t know her, so I couldn’t genuinely celebrate with them. (I could now.) Actually, I remember that someone asked if I was okay. Surprisingly, everyone loved the cookies. I ended up making them again by request and gaining the confidence to try other things and ultimately took on the the fabled macaron. Macarons Macarons look fancy, which signifies the level of skill they demand. There are hundreds of articles, videos, and blog posts about…
