I love the photo of Heni above in which she looks like she is playing the harp! It was taken when we celebrated her 8th birthday...almost 13 years ago. We had a garden party, food, friends in fun hats, a balloon release and even a harpist, who played us beautiful music to chill out to... and we were even favoured with fantastic weather. It was one of those times where you "mark the occasion"....making something memorable happen... a memory to look back on with fondness.
Because of Heni's diagnosis of Edwards Syndrome we have never really known how long she would be around; we have experienced multiple roller coaster rides where she (and we) hit the bottom and thought that it was the end of the ride....and we never ever expected that she would still be there with us back then at the party.
.....Even now all these years later, I never expected to be sitting here writing about her while she is fast asleep (having her routine afternoon nap after college)....AND In just five more months will hopefully be celebrating her 21st birthday!
When I am on form I can make good solid decisions but when I am feeling a bit low or stressed my decision making capacity reduces substantially. At these stressful times I am tempted to just not make decisions at all.... which if you think about it (and also hubby says) deciding not to decide is a decision in and of itself! So I guess we are constantly making decision to do this or that or not do this or that ....as the case may be.
Today I am in a "not sure what job to do first" mood... I have lots of things that I could be doing and perhaps should be doing but I am struggling to decide.....
A few days ago I came across a tweet with an article by Time magazine called "The four rituals that will make you happy according to neuroscience" and it shed a little light on decision making and a few other things. These four ritual behaviours that we can do, will stimulate and effect parts of our brain to create the effect of happiness.
Number one ritual was Ask a question... The example they gave was to ask the question "What am I grateful for? ....guess what my last post was on? You got it Journalling and gratitude.....
It was raining and miserable outside and I was feeling pretty miserable and ugh inside too.... so I sat down a little earlier for a few minutes and decided to get out my gratitude journal and take a peek at what I had previously written.
I tend to go in phases at writing in my journal and the last entries I made were around March at the beginning of this year.
It was lovely to read page after page of all of the things that I had written ..... the experiences, the things, the acts of service and the people in my life that I am thankful for.
I had forgotten that in January I had also started a "52 weeks of journaling" challenge with the "365 questions" by Tami Taylor... that I had downloaded from Pinterest.
Normally I would just write a list of ten or more things for which I am thankful for on that particular day but I thought that the question prompts may add variety to my thinking and give me a wider variety of topics and subjects to be grateful for.
I found it fun to read the answers that I had put down on paper to some of the questions.... such as.....
Twenty years ago today we were waiting anxiously... wondering if we would ever get to meet our little Henibean....alive.... as we had been warned by doctors that trisomy 18 (Edwards Syndrome) was incompatible with life.
Today we have been celebrating Heni's 20th birthday...
We never would have imagined at the beginning of those 20 years that she would be here right now and that she would still be gracing our lives with her presence.
Today my post is a tribute and a birthday wish to our little Henibean....
