My Sister-in-Law Gwen

I'm pretty much always grateful for my sister-in-law Gwen.  I am fortunate that she married one of my sweetie's awesome brothers (way before I married my sweetie, by the way) so that I can know her.

She's awesome for a number of reasons.  Like she has the best cornbread recipe.  And she makes awesome soups.  And also I have come to really admire her parenting and hope to figure out how to be like her in a lot of those ways.  She's been my go-to person for a lot of things, and maybe she doesn't know this, but in many ways I've viewed her as a mentor.

But none of those awesome things are why I'm grateful for her today specifically.  That reason is that, as a baby shower gift (a year ago today!), she gave us some essential oils stuff for various baby needs. 

I won't claim to know much about essential oils.  Gwen does, though.  She's a total guru at it and actually has a business having to do with them.  I also can't claim to be all about oils.  I haven't done the research necessary to be all about them, for one thing.

But here's the thing:  today, after I got home from a baby shower, I discovered my little miss was running a fever.  A low-grade one.  And she definitely wasn't being herself.  She wasn't crying and she would babble and crawl around a bit.  But she was more snuggly and not at all excited about things like she usually is.  Just not her normal self.  So I knew she wasn't feeling well.  And maybe this is a mommy fail in some ways, but I have no baby Tylenol or anything of the sort in the house.  And I'm a little hesitant at times to automatically medicate.  But then my husband remembered that we got several things as baby gifts from Gwen.  I couldn't remember what all of them were (though we've now used all of them at some point in the last year, just not often enough for me to remember each one).  And tonight we finally used the fever reducer one -- that just gets rolled on the bottom of her feet. 

And I was so grateful for Gwen -- that she knows what she knows.  That she provided us with something we could use to try to help our little girl. 

Baby Girl is now sleeping soundly.  And in feeling her head before she went down for the night, I'm pretty sure it felt a little cooler (I didn't actually take her temperature, though, so I'm going by feel).  And so I'm going to say this was a success.  We've also used the diaper rash spray and the upset tummy roll-on too -- mostly back in the day when she had lots of gas troubles and fussed a lot.

Anyway, I just appreciate that I had something to use tonight...  And it was thanks to the thoughtfulness of Gwen.  And from my mommy heart, I can't help but be so grateful.

What are you grateful for today?