Every year as Thanksgiving approached, I skipped over the traditional lessons on Native Americans and Pilgrims for my preschoolers. We were still working on the time concepts of today and yesterday and tomorrow, let alone something that happened hundreds of years ago. Instead I focused on the functional and meaningful skills and messages of the holiday of working together, sharing, and celebrating what we have. So every year I taught my kids how to cook soup from a stone. We used the book Stone Soup, usually a newer version as I disliked the soldiers in the original version, and engaged in a multitude of activities that required working together. The best, and favorite, was cooking our own stone soup. It began with a stone that I had boiled for atleast an hour at home the night before, and some vegetable stock. Then each child brought in an ingredient the day before our feast. The children used plastic or safe butter knives to cut up the vegetables for the soup with assistance as needed and then added them to the pot one by one. Due to cultural, diet, and other issues we stayed with a vegetable soup that could easily be pureed. I then took the soup home that night and cooked it until the vegetables were soft. The morning of our Stone Soup feast, I decorated the classroom with Christmas lights over the tables and paper lanterns, and tablecloths for the children to decorate, and special "fancy" place settings. The soup sat on the counter staying warm in a crock pot. We then made biscuits, cut up fruit, and prepared pitchers of juice to set out at our feast table. The focus was on how we could not do this alone, but when we each added something important we had the perfect soup and the perfect feast. My kids really seemed to understand this and were excited to see "my carrots" and "Lucy's potatos", and they were enchanted by how we managed to make soup from a stone. Each child got a "magic soup stone" in a decorative bag to take home at the end of the feast so they could make Stone Soup with their families.
My life is a lot like that stone soup that I made with my little ones. It started out two years ago with something ugly and jagged and seemingly worthless, a rock of illness and disability. I cleaned off the rock and did what I could with it, but it was still a rock. Then one by one incredible people: family, friends, and people who became friends came forward and offered gifts that only they could give. They gave me hope, they gave me understanding, they gave me laughter on days when I wanted to just cry, they gave me reassurance, they gave me a sense of belonging, they gave me courage, they gave me back my sense of self, they gave me love, they gave me joy. On my own I can not make it, but with all of the unique gifts that my friends and family have given to me something wonderful and unexpected has been created, something nourishing and sustaining and greater than the sum of its parts. Thank you for being part of my community, thank you for bringing what you do and adding to my stone soup. Two years later I give thanks that what was once just a ragged, jagged, ugly rock is now surrounded by blessings and lessons and hope. I give thanks for you.