Anticipation..........

I've been thinking a lot lately about patience.  We are a world full of instant gratification to be sure, and for the most part, we have lost the art of waiting.  The ability to delay gratification.  The feeling of anticipation as a good thing, rather than an irritating one.

I'm a bit of an odd one here, because I have always been the kind of person that would much prefer a birthday party to look forward to versus a surprise one.  I LOVE waiting for things, looking forward to them, mulling them over in my head, getting excited.

And this month, I have a real whopper to look forward to!  My husband and I are taking our three daughters to Africa.  This is one that I have been planning for, well, 16 years, which was roughly when we last traveled to Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa.  This year, our youngest is finally old enough that she won't be mistaken for prey (!), and will hopefully remember the trip when she is older.  Five different safari camps in Tanzania will be our destination, and with 3 little girls in tow, the trip will be quite different from our last one, but every bit as worthy of my obsessive excitement. 

I will be sure to find some spectacular gemstones and I will be taking it all in as inspiration for jewelry, tile and fabric collections to come.  But what I am most excited about, is to experience such a magical place through the eyes of my children.  That, surely is worth the wait.

So for the next few weeks, I will happily enjoy the anticipation of the trip, and pile on top of that a big, heaping dose of gratitude that I feel for the journey that awaits.  

And likely, upon return, my next post will be about... gratitude!