Ok you guys, I have a LOT of things to complain about. For example, the pellet stove quit working again today and I had to disassemble it and clean it out. It's four days post-hysterectomy for me, and my first full day back at work. My mom/maid/entertainment committee just left me, Dagny won't quit making me throw her giant squeaky tennis ball, and I need a shower. My four little incisions hurt, and my whole body aches because I decided to try to do my SPED kid's physical therapy routine with him and it was a little too soon after surgery. I had a headache all weekend trying to hack into my ever-so-absent husband's bank accounts to pay bills because the blessed bank we use changed their entire online banking system THIS WEEKEND and rendered all of his passwords null and void. My kids are crabby as hell. I am gliding dangerously close to the glowing embers of mild pre-holiday feuds in my family and friend circles that threaten to find me even with my head deep in the sand, singing Christmas carols to myself in rebellion to cultural stigmas of time appropriateness. The very mention of feuds and carols will bring a cascading avalanche of worry down around my psyche, causing me to jump at every text tone and email ding. And I didn't lose 37 pounds in surgery. Rude.

Since it's November, I am forcing my kids to update their Facebook statuses with thankful thoughts every day. Just to be mean, since their lives are clearly quite difficult.

And as for me, in spite of all of the things I have to complain about, I am so stinking grateful. So grateful for my good, smart, funny friends and dear, weird, quirky, opinionated family. I am so thankful for surgery and, after four days, being THAT much better. I am so thankful for disgusting vegetable juice that makes me feel like a million bucks, and sometimes exhausting work with special ed kids, and macaroni and cheese made from a box by a ten year old for dinner, and apples in the dehydrator and piles of clean laundry on my bedroom floor for the dogs to sleep in, and a space heater by the bathroom to keep the toilet seat warm, and an iPad since my computer broke, and four badly behaved and utterly bizarre dogs. I am so grateful for a devoted husband who is getting yelled at in boot camp like a reprobate and folding shirts with tweezers and scrubbing stairs with toothbrushes. I am so grateful for insurance that feels just like magic, and a doctor who looks just like Santa Clause and enough money to pay the bills, and enough pellets to stay warm, and enough chocolate cake to stay fat (for a minute). I'm thankful that running The Mile with the kids in PE actually sounded tempting today, and that nobody had terrible gas during class. I'm thankful that sweatpants are cute and sexy in my head, so that my self esteem is regenerated every night on the couch. I'm grateful that Aspen slept with me for two nights and never once kicked me in my stitched up abdomen throughout the duration of her nightly run-in-place-sideways marathons. I am so very thankful for my house. Slightly cleaner now, after Mom's visit, and slightly warmer with the cleaned out pellet stove, the apple dryer running and my absolute inability to get my body's thermostat to function properly. I love my quirky, unfinished, violated by dogs, and kids, and lack of organizational skills, house. I am thankful for grumpy, ungrateful kids, who try hard like me, and fail, like me, and get up and go again. Kids who are smart and gorgeous, and teachers who give hugs instead of yellow slips when someone accidentally throws a fit, or a 1x4, in wood shop. I'm grateful for friends around us who are far from ideal and far from awful. They are just like us, right in the middle of humanness. I am thankful.

To add the icing to the cake, I am attaching the poem my good buddy wrote for me, or more appropriately, for my dearly departed uterus. It is priceless, like she is ( my friend, not my uterus).

THIS UTERUS

by Tam Smith

This uterus was good to us,

She really was, you see,

She did her job, a job well done,

And now Liv has set her free.

She stretched and shrunk, she shed and bled,

Pro lapsing and relapsing,

She carried on instead.

The liver and kidneys hated her so,

The bladder thought worse of her too,

How could they know, her time had come,

Her job in this body was through.

4 babies she carried so well, with such care,

No troubles, no worries, no fear.

Liv's uterus was good to us,

And now she's no longer here.

Let's raise our wine to this organs' past time,

To say adios, hip hooray and cheers.

For if she weren't so, then how would we know,

Life with those four little dears.

Couldn't have said it better myself, George. Lum!!!

Most of all, I am thankful for a cryptic, terrible letter from Josh. And I am thankful that I miss him to the moon and back.