Counting Our Blessings

A lot has been going on, even since my last post!

On Friday we made applesauce at school. Each student brought an apple and then we cut them up, added cinnamon and sugar, and cooked them in my crock pot for 6 hours. Then we all enjoyed it at the end of the day! It smelled soooo good in my room all day long. The applesauce was fun, but Friday was a rough day. All of my kids were really testing me. We ended the day with a discussion of our Tribes agreements and examples of how we were/were not upholding them; we talked about the reasons that they are important and how we can make this right. Hopefully, this will be a better week.

Then after work on Friday I left for the Ladies' retreat with my church friends. It was down in Glen Rose at this little retreat center. I actually started to dread it on Friday, since all I wanted to do at the end of last week was come home, go to bed, and hide out until Monday. But then I was SO, SO, SO GLAD that I went!

The focus of the weekend was laughter and how it can help us physically and emotionally. This was so appropriate for me, because I always try to make the best out of situations at work and turn them into something funny. Things just seem so much more manageable when you can laugh at them. However, toward the end of this week I was a little beaten down and I had lost my sense of humor about things a little. The retreat really focused my heart back to where it should be! Here are some interesting things about laughter that made an impression on me:

1. If you laugh just 100 times a day, it's like riding an exercise bike for 15 minutes.
2. Little kids laugh on average 400 times a day!
3. Laughing has so many known health bebefits.
4. Making people laugh makes them feel good about themselves, and thus they relate feeling good about themselves to being with you! Then you become a more likeable person :)
5. The MOST interesting: A study was done in which people were shown a three dimensional figure on a piece of paper. Their minds interpreted it as, of course, a 3 dimensional figure. Then they were made to laugh for just 10 seconds. Real, genuine laughter. When they were once again presented with the same figure, their minds interpreted it differently: as a 2 dimensional figure! This is so interesting because it shows that things are perceived as less complex after laughing. I feel that this can be applied to all different situations and challenges. Things are more manageable and less challenging with laughter in your life.

I have know this for a long time, but it was good to learn about actually studies and research supporting it. I hope that you laugh multiple times a day like I do. I hope that you can put things into a perspective where you can see the humor in them, because life is much more fun that way :)

So now, I will wake up in the morning and go teach my precious Sunday School class full of infants, then head off to school on Monday morning to greet my first graders with a great, refreshed perspective on things. God in amazing in the way that He gives us exactly what we need when we put our faith in Him. I was so close to not attending the retreat because it was such a long, difficult week. But I went anyway, and it was precisely the encouragement and message that I needed after the week that I had. I am so blessed :)

Have a happy Sunday!