Welcome to Friday – has this been a long week or what? I’m exhausted. I’ve got my workout program, my projects, my gardening and my household chores. To add insult to injury, I also got a cold this week. I haven’t been the happiest of campers. While most of the items on my to do list are pretty normal for a week, having a cold is not. I hate to be sick. I’m a lousy patient and I whine.
A lot.
My husband doesn’t like it when I’m sick either. He worries. He tries to offer me anything to help me feel better. He also harasses me to take it easy. It’s not unusual for us to argue when I’m sick – like having him bark at me to go lay down and take it easy and me shooting back a criticism that if I don’t do it, it won’t get done.
It really is a rather pointless little exercise in our communication skills, but it’s so regular a ritual after all these years that we’ve gotten downright perfunctory about it. There’s no heat in our words or our tones. In fact, when we did this last night – we both laughed. That’s how used to each other we’ve gotten and how we behave when we’re sick.
So, in honor of the fact that he can make me laugh even when I’m miserable, I want to take today to celebrate my spouse. How do you do that, you may ask? Well, I’m going to tell you and yes, you knew I likely had some half-baked plan up my sleeve. I love coming up with ideas.
Today’s appreciation exercise is called Celebrate Your Spouse – you can do it any time and you don’t need to wait for Valentine’s, a birthday or your Anniversary. Instead, you take out a sheet of notebook paper and cut it into five or six strips. You can make more if you like, but five or six will do for now.
On each strip of paper, using a different color pen, write down one attribute in your spouse that you celebrate. Try to make them one word or short sentence attributes and do not add any qualifiers to them. Remember, you are celebrating your spouse.
So my list might look something like this:
- Generous
- Optimistic
- Comedic
- Entertaining
- Creative
- Crafty
Now take each of these little strips of paper and if you have any construction paper handy get a few sheets of that. If not, just use some regular paper. Glue these down in the center of each blank piece of paper. Use a ruler and draw out four or five lines from that word to various points on the sheet of paper.
Now, write down an example of that attribute. Such as ‘always the first to volunteer to help out a friend’ for generous or ‘repaired the broken chair in five minutes with a bit of wood glue’ for crafty.
Make sure these are personal examples and that they have personal meaning for you. After you have all of these done, Staple them together and give them to your spouse. You can even put a cover sheet on it that says I celebrate you because … or something more creative.
So, what do you celebrate in your spouse today?