Cupcakes & Pink Eye

I am proud to be an American, but it sounds very unpatriotic for me to confess that Thanksgiving is not my favorite holiday. It just isn't, but mostly it is because I don't like Thanksgiving food. 

Last year when my mother-in-law asked my mom what my favorite Thanksgiving dish was (in preparation for me spending my first Thanksgiving with my in-laws), my mom sweetly replied, "Salad." So, this year when I told my mom that I was bringing not one, but TWO salads to Thanksgiving with David's side of the family, she wasn't surprised.

My other non-traditional offering to the Thanksgiving feast is cupcakes! 

There are going to be tons of kids at Thanksgiving tomorrow, and Millicent (my grandmother-in-law) thought cupcakes would be a good, less messy idea for the kids to enjoy. Of course I offered to bring them (because who doesn't love to bake cupcakes?), but I had to take it a step further since kids are involved. 

 Tomorrow, or possibly later tonight, the cupcakes will be decorated to look like little turkeys. : ) I'm so excited. Cupcakes and salads... I suppose it will give the extended family members whom I haven't met yet a good reflection of who I am. (And if you know me, you know just what I mean.)

In other news, we've been dealing with pink eye... 

Our sweet little munchkin, Sperry, has double pink eye, and as a result, has now lost all of his toys.

I felt like the mother in the Velveteen Rabbit who threw all of the toys away, which made me feel like a very terrible pet parent even though my intentions were good.

Our gracious Lord reminded me in that moment that there are a lot of times when He does the same thing to us. There might be people, or jobs, or opportunities, or situations that we would like to have in our life, and for reasons we cannot understand, God takes them away. 

Sperry will never understand where his toys went or why they're gone. Likewise, I might never understand why God let's certain things happen, but I know one thing about God that supersedes everything I don't know... His love never fails. (1 Corinthians 13:8)

So, whether it's a relationship that ended, the job I didn't get/or lost, the illness I come down with, etc, I know that God sees the bigger picture, His hand is in my life, and that He loves me more than I can comprehend. And I am just like Sperry, wearing a cone that only allows me to see a portion of my world, trusting in someone bigger than me.

....

We're so grateful that Sperry's eyes are starting to clear up, and we were more than relieved to learn that humans can't catch pink eye from dogs. Sperry hated his cone at first, but even more so hated getting his eye drops. Now, he's come to accept the cone (which hopefully will come off on Friday), and he let's me put his drops in without giving me too much trouble. (Thank goodness for dried duck jerky.. Sperry loves it, and will do almost anything for it, even sit still for an eye drop or two.)