Thankful on Tuesday

I think these pictures are from a few weeks ago.  But, I figure I'm still thankful for these things... so I'm still going to post!

A few weeks back Ben took a day off work and we went to the Children's Museum.  I'm so thankful for Ben and the fact that he loves being with our family as much as I do.  We had a great time playing together!
A fun Halloween week!  More pictures to come on this, but we had lots of fun dressing up, doing Halloween crafts, eating Halloween food and trick or treating!

Pig tails. Enough said.

Our church's hunger challenge.  My friend Heather just posted about this and does a great job explaining all the details, but the challenge that most moved me was to eat rice and beans for a week.  I think something like 28% of the world's population eat rice and beans as their only meal, one time per day.  We were challenged to not only eat similarly for a week (although we were "allowed" to eat it three times per day) but also to donate any money we saved from our grocery budget for that week.  This was tough.  I mean really tough.  I was constantly hungry, constantly tired, and so sick of rice and beans after the first day - but so eye opening.  I'm not sure what it looks like for me to begin to change the way things are in this world, but I do know that no one should have to go hungry in a world where most people, especially most americans have way more than they need.  I also realized two other major things: 1. I complain (whether outloud or in my head) about a lot of stupid, pointless stuff.  When you are hungry, you don't care about anything besides when your next meal is coming.  I challenged Ben (and myself) to just say "rice and beans" to me whenever I start to complain or whine about something.  I hope I never forget how trivial most of my problems are given that three billion people are starving.  2. I need to be more thankful for EVERYTHING.  Even the ability, energy, capacity to work out.  Something I would normally complain about doing, I realized is actually a major gift.  I have enough food/provisions in my life to go leisurely burn off calories/energy.  Three billion people barely have enough calories to survive.  Wow.