Butterflies and Pickles: The Dinner Ritual That Fills Our Gratitude Jar

BLUF: Every night at dinner we do "butterflies and pickles," our version of highs and lows, and then turn our butterfly into a gratitude. It goes on a slip and into the jar. During the day, the kids add more to a gratitude jar app on our fridge tablet. When the jar fills up, we open it together and read every note out loud. There's a free printable kit below so you can start your own jar tonight.

Butterflies and pickles

Lots of families do "roses and thorns" at dinner: your best moment of the day and your worst. That's where we started too. Then the roses turned into butterflies, and the thorns became prickles, which, as kids will do, quickly became pickles. Now it's butterflies and pickles, and nobody at our table would dream of calling it anything else.

A while back we added one more step at the end: we turn our butterfly into a gratitude. Who made it happen? What are we glad we had? Everyone writes theirs on a slip and drops it in the jar before we clear the table. That's how we started, with no screens at the table.

Start your own jar. The free printable kit has gratitude slips, a jar label, a prompt card and a keepsake page.

Get the free printable ↓

Can't think of a butterfly? The free butterflies and pickles prompts give everyone at the table somewhere to start, matched to the kind of day they had.

The jar on our fridge tablet

Gratitude doesn't only happen at dinner, so we keep a second jar on the tablet that hangs on our fridge. Whenever something good happens during the day, whoever's nearby taps it in.

• Add a note
  Tap your picture, type a short note, and watch it drop into the jar as a little folded slip in your color. Stuck? Tap a prompt like "Someone who helped you today." Some of them are about the people and pets in our world, like a grandparent who lives far away or the dog.
• A thank-you mission for everyone
  Each morning everyone gets one small thank-you to do, like calling a grandparent or making a card for a teacher. It knows who lives too far for a hug. Doing it drops a slip in the jar.
• Dinner mode (we're still testing this one)
  The tablet goes around the table: butterfly, pickle, then turn your butterfly into a gratitude, and it lands in the jar. Stuck? A big button opens the free butterflies and pickles prompts. Some nights we use paper slips, some nights the tablet, and we're still working out what we like.
• Watch it fill
  The jar fills up on screen as the notes come in, a few at a time. Ours holds 50 before it's time to open it.
• Open the jar
  Each jar gets a name, and the lid counts down to the date you pick to open it. When it's full, or on that date, the notes come out one at a time, big on the screen, so you can pass the tablet around and read them out loud.
• Keep the old jars
  Every opened jar goes on a shelf of past jars, so you can go back and reread last summer's butterflies.

The jar on our fridge tablet, and a past jar with every note and who wrote it.

How I built it

I'm not a developer. I built the Gratitude Jar in Base44, a tool where you describe the app you want in plain English and it builds it for you. Then you keep talking to it to fix and tweak things until it works the way your family works.

It started as the simplest of the family apps I've built: one screen, one list, and a satisfying little animation. If you've never built an app before, that first version is a good one to start with.

Later I added dinner mode, a name and an open-on date for each jar, and prompts and thank-you missions about our own people, the same ones that come in the Gratitude Jar Maker. Testing turned up a "Stuck?" button so small you could barely see it, and a jar that never moved to the shelf after we opened it. One short fix prompt each sorted them out.

Like all our family apps, it lives on the tablet that hangs on our fridge. It's not an app you download from an app store. It's a web page that works like an app, and you just save a shortcut to it on the tablet's home screen so it opens with one tap.

Build time: Eight minutes for the first version and about twenty all in, or about how long it takes to get everyone's shoes on and out the door.

See exactly how I did it. The exact prompt I used for the Gratitude Jar, plus five more family apps and what each one cost to build, is in my Base44 build log →

Want to build your own? Try Base44 free →
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Get the free printable

The Gratitude Jar printable turns any glass jar, or even a tissue box, into the real thing: gratitude slips with and without prompts (plus draw-it slips for kids who can't write yet), a jar label and lid tag, a "Stuck?" prompt card to stand next to the jar, and a Past Jars keepsake page that becomes a family book over the years. Drop your email and I'll send it over.