Day 8 of My Month of Gratitude

So this is the next thing that comes to me every single time I think about what I am grateful for, I’m just going to put a single umbrella name on it for now…

1. My Husband
2. My Children
3. My Step-Children
4. My Step-Grandchildren
5. My Family
6. My Friends
7. My Home
8. Our Utilities

What I mean by our utilities is our heat, electricity and water.

I think that we all take it for granted. But we shouldn’t. A few times in the past year we have been put in a situation where we have been close to losing one or all of these, even temporarily, due to a weather situation like Storm Ophelia which hit Ireland quite badly, and was one of a number of weather events that happened recently. Also in our own house our gas boiler broke last year and we had to wait for it to be fixed. The guys fixing it kinda f**ked us around quite a bit and we were without our gas heating from February (with a three week old baby) until almost May (when the heatwave week was hitting!). During that time there were two sets of heavy snow. We were very lucky because my Dad had a couple of oil heaters that we were able to plug in and keep the house warm, but it was still a difficult few weeks – and an extremely worrying first night with the temperature in the house plummeting and no idea how we were going to heat it again (before we found out about Dad’s heaters!)

We have heat at the touch of a button, we have electricity and light at the press of a switch, we have running water by moving a tap, we have hot water whenever we want it, we have clean toilets time after time by just flushing. These simple things to us that we take completely for granted. These are luxuries to some people. Some of these were luxuries to me even growing up. We are so so lucky to be in a situation where we have all of these luxuries as standard in our homes.

I am so grateful that we are lucky enough to live in a house with all of these utilities, in a country where it is taken for granted that people have them.