We are thankful for being thankful

I don’t know if you have seen the show “Quints by Surprise”. Well if you haven’t, it is a show on TLC about a family who has a 6 year old daughter and almost 2 year old quintuplets. No! It is nothing like “Jon and Kate Plus 8”. This family is easy to love, easy to watch and strangely enough, easy to relate to even if you don’t have multiples. They are from Texas, and I love my Texans! Casey Jones, is such a great mom with more patience than I ever thought possible in a single human being. And Ethan Jones, is an awesome Dad, who loves his kids so much and just goes with the flow. Mike and I discovered the Joneses when Kamryn was about 3 months old. They had a special on TLC that showed their first year with the quints. It showed the struggles emotionally, physically and financially. Their story just stuck with me for some reason. The back story of this couple reminded me SO much of Mike and I. Up until the quints of course! I don’t think it helped that Casey is blonde and Ethan has dark hair with almost the same exact haircut as Mike. LOL! I kept talking with Mike about it every time Kamryn would do something, whether it was a cranky day, time to feed her or even just diaper changes. “Imagine if we had 5!!!”, I would say. Soon after we saw the special I found the Joneses blog and found an email address to get in touch with them. For some reason I had a moment and turned into my Dad and wrote to them. (My dad ALWAYS writes letters good or bad when something bothers him or stands out to him in a good way.) I never thought I’d ever hear back and thought they would probably never read it, but I wrote anyways. I told them how amazed I was by them and how much we related. It sounds crazy because how could we relate to a couple that has 6 kids and we have one? But we did! On the show they talked about how they couldn’t get pregnant on their own and felt when they found out they were going to have 5 babies and it brought me right back to how Mike and I felt when we found out we were going to have a baby. Because we weren’t married yet and only 22 and 23 years old it wasn’t the excited “HONEY I’M PREGNANT!!” moment that you hear about. There were lots of tears, lots of “Oh $#@+! what are we going to do??”, lots of questions, lots of can we do this?, lots of confusion and to be honest we were just plain old scared. This show brought me back to that moment. It brought me back to those days of wonder, confusion, unknown and is this really happening to us? This family, whom I’ve never met in person and only know through the television, touched me in a way I cannot even explain. I stopped and thought, how could we have even questioned it. Why did we even have a hard time with it? Some people aren’t as lucky as us to even have a baby. So I wrote to them about it, all of it! Ethan, quickly wrote back to me, thanked me for the support and talked to me about how they felt during their time of the unknown. He even encouraged me that no pregnancy is an accident and explained their story to me in a little more depth. Since then we have emailed back and forth quite a few times. We are now facebook friends and I follow their blog religiously!

And you are probably wondering why I am talking about them….

This family is a true inspiration to me! They might not be to everyone who watches their show. I’m sure some people, maybe even you, might of watched the show and quickly turned the channel because you didn’t like it and thats okay. For some reason, and this has never ever happened before, but they’ve inspired me. This Thanksgiving Ethan made a blog post called “Thankful for Being Thankful”. Once again I was inspired. (If you get a chance to peak through their blog, do so!) While reading, I just realized that we should be happy to have something to be thankful for. Whatever that may be. Mike and I are so extremely lucky to have a beautiful, healthy, extremely happy daughter, who brings more joy than we ever thought possible. We are lucky to have each other to love and to fight with occasionally too! So what if we don’t have a house right now! We are extremely lucky that we can afford to live on our own with our daughter and aren’t all crammed into my childhood bedroom. We have food on the table every night and clothes to keep us warm. Do we want more than what we have? I’d be lying if I said we didn’t sometimes but for the first time ever I stopped and realized that all that doesn’t matter. We are happy, healthy, taken care of just fine and our hearts are filled to the brim with love! We have awesome families! Kamryn has 4 Grandfathers and 3 Grandmothers who love her more than anyone could! Her Uncles and Auntie Lexi are so proud to be in her life, and love her so much. We are EXTREMELY thankful Kamryn has Great-Grandparents and we get to see them on a regular basis. That is just SO special and means more to me than anything!! We have a huge extended family full of some awesome people, whom we love! Amazing friends who we would do anything for and we know they would do the same for us. What more could you possibly have to be thankful for? The rest is just materialistic, and materialistic things come and go. They will not help shape my daughter into the person she’s going to be, only Mike and I can do that. And I am SO thankful I have a life partner to help me shape Kamryn into a good grounded person who hopefully learns to be thankful for what she has. It might take her until shes 24 like me, but she’ll get it…eventually!

No matter how hard some days seem we are so lucky to have so much to be thankful for! It’s strange how a family on TV has touched me so much, not once, but many times over!! So I am also thankful for that.

We hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. We are coming up to a busy time of the year. With Christmas, New Years and of course Kamryn’s 1st birthday! We will keep you all posted on the busy month of December ahead of us!!