047: Stop the Holiday Insanity, Part 3 – The 3 Best Gifts You Can Give Your Kids

Today, we finish up our three-part series about the three best gifts you can give your children; we also finish out the year, so best wishes for 2016 to you and your family!

In December's Just You and Me episodes, we've been Stopping the Holiday Insanity by focusing on gifts we can give our children, one episode per gift.

The first two, Your Time and Ritual/Routine, help make family life run more smoothly and also bring lots of enjoyment – to both you and your kids.

Today's gift, though, does more than bring enjoyment and a smooth schedule.

Today's gift, Gratitude, could be the most elusive – but it could also be the most important one.

Starting in early January 2015, I write down (if I can't write that day because of tendon issues, I say out loud) five things I'm grateful for each night before I go to bed. It doesn't seem like much, I know, but it's one of the most important micro-changes I made this year; these tiny changes have made a huge positive impact on my health. It's as if focusing on what I'm grateful for shows me all the good things in my life! In fact in today's episode I read from a favorite book of mine, The Slight Edge, about a happiness researcher named Sean Achor and the impact of gratitude that Sean has found in his research (if you want to see a great Ted talk, here is Sean's… you'll laugh and learn all the same time.)

I want to share something I'm so grateful for, which is… You.

The joy of connecting with you, helping you worry less and enjoy more in your parenting, well, all that's helping me! 2015 has been a tumultuous year – the year in which I got to ski in Colorado, for the first time since spending the winter of 2011 unable to walk more than a few steps, and not only did I ski but I skied with my parents and my children. It was the year in which we adopted dogs, and five weeks later needed to give them up because I had a relapse in my tendon condition; the year in which I won the first story slam I ever entered; the year in which Ben helped me get this podcast off the ground (and the year in which I conceived of it in the first place.)

A year full of ups and downs. But one of the biggest ups is the way that this podcast was received; when you contact me by email, or instagram, or Facebook or twitter to ask a question or say thanks, that's when I feel the most gratitude.

Thank you SO much for listening, commenting, questioning – I look forward to lots more of all the above in the new year.

Here's to a great 2016!

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