Start Each Day With a Grateful Heart

When I started thinking about what I would write about Grateful, for our June Word of the Month Challenge, I first thought about my daily gratitude practice. But when I sat at the keyboard I just couldn’t think of what to say beyond the fact that it has been beneficial to me. I kept thinking maybe there is something bigger I should write about. After pondering this over my morning coffee, I realized that I was very grateful for our Sisterhood blog in so many different and some surprising ways.

Every Boat Needs an Anchor

When both your parents have passed away, the world changes. The best way I can describe it is that it feels like you are in a boat without an anchor. The people who have been there since day one, who you knew you could count on no matter how far you drift, are no longer with us. And now, as the elders of the family, the responsibility passes to you and your siblings. When this happened in our family, I worried that it would be easy for we children, to drift apart without the touchstone of our parents bringing us together.

Enter Big Sis who had the idea to walk a 5k in every province and territory as a memorial to our parents, and to tentatively plan some vacations together. With some convincing, Little Sis and I were on board with the idea and Senior Athletic Adventure Canada was born. After much discussion, when my senior brain just would not let me remember this name, it morphed into the Sisterhood of the Travelling Shoes and after a little bit of persistent and relentless arm twisting on my part, included a blog to document our progress. After all, how hard could it be to start a blog?

Our fabulous and ambitious idea remained just that…. an idea. We talked often about moving forward but it was a visit to a San Francisco bar and a bartender named Alicia who provided us with the impetus to just do it! During a conversation with her we stretched the truth a tiny bit and told her that we were writing a blog and would include her in our next post. She understandably asked the name of the blog and we were caught out! We managed to escape that one unscathed by beating a hasty retreat (after paying the bill of course) when she was fortuitously distracted by her boss. Lesson learned and we vowed to fulfill our pledge.

The Blog is Real

After swallowing hard once we realized that we knew virtually nothing about doing a blog, we googled everything we could find about blogs and Big Sis came to the rescue when she found Crispin, our amazing IT guy. He was a godsend! My son also helped us with creating and linking an Instagram account, displaying incredible patience during the process. To this day, he is still listed as a participant on our Facetime calls, mostly because we can’t figure out how to delete him and he doesn’t seem to mind. We are so grateful for our social media wizards!

It should also be mentioned here how grateful we are to Auntie Lana, who is our most faithful reader and commenter. She never fails to offer us positive encouragement and keeps us motivated to continue.

Although our original idea was to write about our experiences doing 5k races, we quickly realized that we would run out of things to say in no time if we stuck to that topic alone. So we set up a weekly schedule and started posting about our other adventures, vacations and topics near and dear to our hearts. I don’t think I am speaking out of turn when I say that we three sisters are grateful (and astonished) that we were able to get the blog up and running. Fast forward to today when we are publishing our 62nd post. Not bad for three tech challenged “older” women!

Sisterhood Saturdays

But, for me the bigger thing that has come out of the blog is that I feel like I have an anchor again in my sisters, and I am so grateful for that. Despite the fact that we have not been able to physically get together in over a year and haven’t done any 5k races or taken vacations together since 2019, through doing the blog we have learned so much more about each others’ day to day lives. We have given each other advice and support, shared lots of laughs, reminisced about our parents and just generally enjoyed each other’s company.

I look forward every week to our Saturday morning “Sisterhood blog call” which as we get more proficient at the actual blog is tending more to things like solving Little Sis work dilemmas, discussing COVID, listening to Big Sis’ latest political rant and Big and Little Sis wondering if I am ever going to get dressed before the call or just keep showing up in my housecoat (spoiler alert: the housecoat is staying for the foreseeable future).

We’re Kind of Tired…