Tag Archives: family

Making gratitude a habit

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My wife is a pretty awesome human being. I have so many reasons to feel lucky that she said ‘Yes’ when I proposed to her on a beach in Ucluelet many years ago.

One thing that I often marvel at is how generous she is in showing appreciation to others. She labours and worries about giving just the right gift. And she writes more thank you notes than anyone I’ve ever met.

Me? Not so much. But I’m learning. The hard part is that sometimes I’m a slow learner. I get stuck in between the knowing/doing gap. I know that there is a big difference between being appreciative and showing appreciation, and yet I don’t always show my appreciation and gratitude.

And with that I thank you, dear reader. Thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts with you. Thank you for giving me a tiny part of your day. Thank you for the comments and likes on my Daily-Ink social media posts as well as on my blog. And thank you for the in-person comments about reading my blog.

Those small interactions are part of my own personal growth and recognition that these moments of appreciation we share enrich our lives.

Thank you!

Final countdown

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Two more days until the winter break. Tonight I’ll be at school until 9:30pm or so, because we have a school dance I’ll be supervising. Tomorrow will be a lot shorter, then we have a 2-week holiday. I’ve never been one to countdown, but this has already been a long week and I am really looking forward to the break.

The next countdown is Christmas Day, and I’m cooking a turkey for the first time in years. Then there is the countdown to a trip to Whistler for a couple nights, to new years’s eve, and then to a trip to Victoria for a couple nights.

I’m excited for the two trips because my mom is coming with us and she has never been to Whistler or Victoria. It will be great showing her around, and I’m glad my daughters will have done time with her too.

But first I’ve got to get to the break. Two more school days, one sleep, and the countdown is over. I hope everyone has a wonderful break.

Festive feelings

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Yesterday I went to two different social gatherings, a breakfast and an after work event. The day before I was at a big Christmas dinner. It’s that time of year when we get together to celebrate, socialize, and fill our bellies with food. This past weekend I wrapped presents and stockings. Although my daughters are in their 20’s, they still get stockings to open on Christmas Day.

It’s wonderful to gather and spend time with family and friends. It makes me feel blessed to work in an environment where I feel helpful, useful, and productive. I feel blessed to be in a loving family that actually likes spending time together. And I enjoy the festivities that we hold this time of year.

Gathering with people you care about and enjoy being with is special, and it reminds me how important it is to find the time to connect and to be social. It makes me wonder why I don’t make more of an effort to do so when it’s not for a special occasion. There are good reasons to connect all year, we don’t need to wait until a holiday, or year’s end to feel festive and to gather with friends… we can be festive any time of year.

Left unsaid

I was having a conversation with my daughter yesterday and I mentioned a podcast I was listening to with Dr. Daniel Amen. The point I shared with her was how Dr. Amen talks about killing ANTs… Automatic Negative Thoughts. My daughter liked that idea and added something she has been working on, which is, “Don’t let a positive thought go unsaid.”

I really like this idea and think I’m going to work on the same.

How often do we complain about bad customer service, but we just appreciate good customer service, yet leave those thoughts unsaid?

How often do we get frustrated with a loved one or a coworker who doesn’t do what we expect them to do, but don’t really value them when they do a little extra?

How often do we focus on ANTs, but leave our positive thoughts unsaid?

Family, fun, and fitness

I am in a tiny hotel gym near the Toronto airport, dictating this while on an elliptical. It’s 9:30 PM and we head home to Vancouver tomorrow morning just after 6 AM. It has been a whirlwind week for us. Leaving our home 2:30 in the morning last week Friday to come here for a memorial celebration of the passing of my dad.

We spent a wonderful few days up at BlueMountain, near Collingwood, with my mom, her four kids, and seven of eight grandkids. Unfortunately, the eighth grandkid was hit with Covid and didn’t recover in time to join us. Still, it was so wonderful to have our family together for the first time in over a decade with all 4 kids and that many grandkids m being present. My dad would have loved it.

My wife, kids, and mom spent the last couple nights in downtown Toronto, went shoe shopping for my mom, visited the Aquarium, and saw a musical, ‘In Dreams’. The play features Roy Orbison music and my mom loved it. We all did. I was worried when it started with a side story of a woman losing her husband, but that wasn’t the focus of the show and didn’t ruin the mood despite the recency of my fathers passing.

Today we went back to my mom’s place, hung out and ordered Caribbean style Doubles from a roti shop. I really wish I could find some good West Indian takeout in Coquitlam, and since I can’t, I always make sure I get some when in Toronto.

I probably should be getting to bed right now with a 3:30 AM wake up call, but I hadn’t had any exercise other than walking at my moms pace for three days now, and I’m not sure what I’ll feel like doing tomorrow after a long day of travel. So, I am using speech to text and panting slightly, unsure of how much editing I will need to do when I get off this machine.

I remember hearing that by the time you’re 18 you have spent roughly 95% of the total time you’ll ever spend with your parents. Losing my dad has really made me put this statistic into perspective. I think about my daughters at 21 and 23, and I’m actually grateful that one still lives with us, and I already see how hard it is to plan to get together with the older one who lives an hours drive and an hour and a half ferry ride away from us.

I’m actually thankful for covid in that it was the reason my siblings and mom started a group chat and that has increased my communication with my mom and sisters. Seeing my sisters’ now grown up kids has been wonderful too, and I really question where the time has gone. It occurred to me that my oldest nephew is older than I was when I had my first kid. That seems so hard to grasp. I am now the generation that I think my parents should be. Looking at old photographs, I find pictures of my parents as adults when they were younger than I am now, and yet in my mind I’m still just a kid… Their kid.

Cardio is done, I’ve edited my voice-to-text writing above and it’s time to put on Enya and do my stretches. I’ll keep thinking and reflecting on my time with family, and then I’ll crank the music and get a little bit of strength exercise in. I like doing a variety of exercises at hotels, using machines I don’t get to use in my simple home gym.

Tomorrow, I travel home then start to worry about catching up at work. It’s going to be a bit painful, but I’m glad to have had this time, and it know how much it meant to my mom… and to me!

Sushi and pizza

We had our Thanksgiving dinner last night. 15 of us enjoyed a wonderful sushi feast.

When my family lived in Dalian, China we didn’t have an oven. Both Christmas days that we were there we had Pizza Hut for our Christmas dinner.

Most families have traditional meals like turkey, roasted ham, or other holiday foods that they want year after year. Our family went out for Harvey’s hamburgers today for our American family that miss this fast food burger joint, living south of the border.

Earlier this week my sister made a Caribbean peas and rice dish, a family favourite, for us. Also, I made an Asian stir fry rice dish, and we also went for Beaver Tails, because my mom was craving them.

Our family are not big on traditional foods, but we really enjoy large meals with more food than we need. I think that’s why I love leftovers so much. We don’t need turkey, and we don’t need fine dining. Just give us sushi and pizza, and a holiday or family event as an excuse to get together.

Heading home

Tomorrow I leave for Toronto for my dad’s memorial. It will be the first time in over 10 years that my parent’s grandchildren will all be together. All 8 cousins under the same roof. Growing up I got to spend a lot of time with my cousins, but my kids have not had that opportunity. Now they are all young adults, the last time they were together as a full group they were kids. It’s amazing how time flies.

It’s hard to say goodbye to a parent, but getting together as a family makes it a bit easier. In the end our children are our greatest legacy, and so are their kids. My grandfather used to call us, his grandkids, his ‘second crop’. He’d frequently say about his second crop, “If I knew they were going to be this much fun, I would have had them first.” 😂

In the coming days my parent’s first and second crops will all be together. I’m really looking forward to this celebration of life, and legacy.

Closing the gap

There are people, both friends and family, for whom time between connections always seems small. You don’t see a friend for months, even years, and when you finally reconnect the distance that has passed disappears.

More lines on our faces, more grey in our hair or less hair, but the same person, the same relationship, the same bond remains. Time moves more slowly when the bond between friends is strong. It is as if the time between meeting is somehow time-shifted. Just as Einstein’s theory of relativity explains how traveling faster slows time down, it seems that gaps of time between friends meeting has a relativity to it.

The time gap travels closer to the speed of light. All other experiences between visits race by in the blink of an eye, and the time between visits disappears. Friendships have a relative time that closes the gap between visits. And when friends meet again it is as if the gap between visits was nothing but a passing moment.

There is a general relativity of friendship, and rooted within it friendship is timeless.

What’s cooking?

My sister was in town helping my aunt settle in after her move from Toronto Ontario to Richmond BC. This created an opportunity for a family gathering with my cousin and his family, and my nephew who also recently moved here.

I made 3 of my favourite dishes to make for guests, a rice stir fry, steak, and salmon cooked on the bbq on a cedar plank.

Two out of those 3 dishes posed a problem because they are both recipes that require a considerable amount of cilantro and my sister hates cilantro… so I sort of made 5 dishes, duplicating these two dishes with basil replacing cilantro.

It would have made sense to just make them with basil and skip the cilantro altogether, but I love cilantro and it’s not like I couldn’t just duplicate steps when it was time to add this wonderful herb that some people think tastes like soap, (these poor people really miss out!)

The food was wonderful if I do say so myself. My wife also made a couple yummy salads and our guests brought delicious chicken wings and cheesecake. We all ate to our heart’s content with generous portions of leftovers to be enjoyed at a later date.

The only thing better than the food was the company. I hadn’t seen one of my cousin’s daughter’s in close to a decade, which is a bit embarrassing when you consider how close we live. We could have had leftover pizza and it still would have been a great gathering… but sometimes it’s wonderful to cook up a feast, and share it with family.

(And yes, my cousin looks like he could be my brother!)

The photograph

Five unruly cousins on a park bench. Our uncle taking the photo. No chance of us all sitting quietly and smiling at the same time.

“Ok, here’s the deal,” my uncle says. “Pose for one nice one then I’ll let you do anything you want for the next picture.”

Here we are about 45 years later and only one of those pictures survived. Only one mattered enough to be blown up and framed. The smiles long faded to distant memory… but ‘anything you want’ was exactly want we wanted, and what we still want.

It’s amazing what you get when you let kids be kids.