Bandaids

Every night when it is time for bed our routine includes reading the scriptures as a family and then we each go around and say one thing that we are thankful for, then as a family we kneel and have family prayer. We started this many, many years ago when Sari and Ashlie were still small and learning how to say prayers. We found that it was just complete repetition every night that they said the prayer. So as a way to help them find different things to say we started "Thankful Things". We used to keep a notebook and each night we would write down what each person said, and the rule was that you couldn't say the same thing until we turned a new page in the notebook. That helped to not keep repeating thankful things. The notebook has vanished from sight quite some time ago but we do try to make sure that we don't use the same thankful thing over and over. However, Tyler has become the exception to that rule. He has been thankful for Thomas (the train) for probably about a year now. Every single night he is thankful for Thomas. Sometimes we get brave and try to encourage two thankful things from him so that Thomas is still included but also something else, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. So last night, completely out of the blue he says, "I'm thankful for bandaids!" Wow!!! Even the girls were like, "What!!!" We tried to quickly get them quiet and not draw attention to the fact that he willingly changed his thankful thing for the first time in over a year. I'm not sure if this is a growth in maturity or simply a fluke thing, we will find out tonight!