Director Mireille authors our final At Home With Gratitude piece with a reflection on this unique time and the many feelings that she has experienced herself and through our Little Wonders community.
By Mireille McKee
This has indeed been a challenging couple of months as we traveled paths with no road maps, and still much uncertainty remains. Parents like you are navigating many twisted and bumpy paths while at home with children, working, cooking, cleaning, and finding time to care for yourselves. Many of us are desperate to move on, get back to work, send kids back to daycare/school (or at the very least play with friends), and we yearn for our adult friends and social activities again. As parents, we strive to make things normal for our little ones, and for now normalcy remains unattainable. All of this has created feelings of anxiety, exhaustion, frustration, lack of control, worry and fear in our community.
Yet I've also felt our community’s tremendous compassion, creativity, patience, forgiveness and above all gratitude. Gratitude that has been expressed by households displaying hearts as appreciation for those still working, and by our neighbor’s preschool kids painting beautiful rocks of appreciation. Gratitude has filled our lives and helped us through this crisis. The silver lining in this crisis may be that we realize how grateful we are for this special time to slow down and spend together. I hope that we can continue to model to our children (and everyone) being caring and sharing gratitude in our lives as we navigate all of the unknowns.
So as we close this school year with our Little Wonders community I would like my last words to be those of gratitude and appreciation:
I am eternally grateful to our tiny but mighty staff, to our volunteer board and to all the families who have stood by us, and allowed Little Wonders to continue offering support and gratitude through these last few months. We know that together we can weather this and emerge happier and healthier families. I heard this quote recently and it seems to fit here..."It is great to be uncomfortable, because through that you realize how great you can truly be." I know we will all be stronger and more resilient (and hopefully more grateful) because of this.