30 Days of Thankfulness, Days Nine through Thirteen

Oh, don't act all surprised. We all knew that I wouldn't stick with the one post every single day for a month thing. So, let's play catch-up, shall we? I'll keep this short and sweet, and save the rambling posts of gratitude for single blog posts, and also for days when I'm not posting at 1:16 in the morning.

#9: I am thankful for Great Value brand French vanilla cappuccino, which is both cheap and delicious and makes me feel like I'm an actual adult who drinks coffee, when the truth is that I really only like the smell and have to have copious amounts of flavoring before I can stand the stuff.

#10: I am thankful that at least one of my children loves books as much as I do, and I'm still holding out hope for the other one, even though she clearly received her father's video game gene. If I were independently wealthy and into the whole "designer babies" thing, that particular gene would have been the first to go. Also, maybe just one of my children would have gotten their father's dimples. Not that I'm bitter about that or anything.

#11: I am thankful for my smart phone. There, I said it. Look, I was behind the times - I've only had one since March, and no, the novelty has not yet worn off. It's a hateful little thing that randomly locks into desk cradle mode and will barely make a phone call sometimes, but it allows me to text, read on my Kindle, find cheap gas, use all kinds of nifty coupons, and waste all sorts of time playing ridiculously addictive games like Flow Free, which you should absolutely go and download right now if you've never played.

#12: I am thankful for my washing machine, because the notion of beating my laundry against a rock in the stream is just not appealing.

#13: I am thankful for my public library, even though I pay them enough in overdue fines that there should truly be a plaque with my name on it somewhere in the building. I just love being able to walk into a building, wave a card, and walk out with an armload of books without paying a single red cent for them. (Aforementioned child in #10 has gotten hooked on a series and gone into the library and cleared off an entire shelf. One of the proudest days of my life.)

And that will do for tonight. More (and more serious) gratitude coming...eventually.

Randomness!

I have just discovered the Thursday 13, which is "a weekly meme with a simple theme: each Thursday you blog a list of 13 things. What kind of things? Any kind! Just come up with a list theme and run with it."

Hey, I can come up with 13 things! I'm not very good with coming up with a theme for them off the top of my head, but I shall work on that for next week. Meanwhile, please enjoy 13 very random thoughts...and then go post 13 of your own.

1) The word "random" makes me think immediately of random dancing from iCarly, which is the current (and long-standing) favorite "whole family" show in our house. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Carly is a teenage girl who airs a live webshow with her two best friends. It's all very techy, and occasionally a voice will announce "RANDOM...DANCING!" and everyone must stop what they're doing and dance. It's all very random. And fun. Life would be more fun if there was random dancing everywhere.

2) Neither my husband nor my older daughter are able to find things on their own. Even if I tell them, "please get the blue hairbrush off of the bathroom counter," and if the blue hairbrush is indeed lying on the bathroom counter, in plain view, with no clutter around it...they will not be able to see the blue hairbrush. This must be a genetic defect. Thankfully, Milly does

not suffer from this particular chromosomal abnormality.

3) My husband is currently sitting beside me on the couch watching a movie on his laptop. This is very annoying because a) it's nothing that I would ever choose to watch (ie, I'm not interested), b) he has to listen to it at max volume, and c) the children are playing outside, so the house would be nice and quiet if not for him.

4) After being snipped at and asked to turn it down to just half-past blasting, he has now donned headphones. Victory is mine.

5) Rachael is obsessed with tree frogs. I have no idea from whence this obsession came. We were in Dollar Tree last night when she spotted a book with a tree frog on the cover, and it simply had to come home with us. (She has learned that I will rarely turn down pleas for a book - especially a cheap book.)

6) There will be a brand new giveaway posted right here tomorrow. Uh-huh, that one crept up on ya, didn't it? I'm pretty excited about it. Check back to see what's up, especially if you have a little girl too.

7) I've spent far too much time today stalking Facebook for updates from Scentsy's annual convention in Forth Worth. (I didn't even consider going this year, once I found out where it would be held. Texas in the summer? I don't think so. It's a bazillion degrees in Virginia; I'd absolutely melt in Texas.) Anyway, there are tons of new things coming out in September, and I want them all.

8) Plastic bags make great parachutes for stuffed animals. Combine with an open floor plan so that stuffed animals may be tossed from upstairs to downstairs, and you have a toy that will occupy two children for an entire week. I kid you not.

9) I swore that I would never be "that mom" who succumbs to second-child syndrome - you know, where you have exactly one framed photo of the baby in your living room, but 22 of your older child. (Why my friend Cathy thinks that I fault her for not being quick to hang pictures of baby number four is beyond me.) Anyway, I have at least scrapbooked lots and lots of pictures of Milly...those just aren't readily apparent when you walk into my house.

10) While cleaning off our overflowing homeschool shelf this morning, I realized that we hadn't read the last three chapters of last year's history book. So we did. I learned that the Roman emperor's sister, Honoria, betrothed to a man she detested, actually wrote a letter to Attila the Hun promising to marry him if he would just come and rescue her from her miserable life. Yeah, it must really stink being sister to the emperor. (It didn't work, by the way.)

11) I have read 20 books since June 1 - a combined total of 5,918 pages, which averages out to 295.9 pages per book. That doesn't include newspaper and magazine articles, blogs, anything read on my Kindle, or the pages already read in the four books I'm reading simultaneously at the moment. (I'm such a multi-tasker.) I only started keeping up with them because of our library's summer reading program, but it's so much fun logging them all at Shelfari that I think I'll keep it up.

12) Last night, I knocked a pitcher of tea out of the fridge. It landed upside on the floor and made a huge mess. I'm glad no one else was awake to witness that.

13) I'm trying hard to resist the urge to wander into the kitchen and whip up a batch of peanut butter cookies. I'm obviously not allowed to bake anything without two little pairs of hands "helping" (which I usually don't mind, but it's been a long day) and then they'd want to stay up to have cookies. It's way too close to bedtime for that mess - they'd never go to sleep. Maybe some celebratory It's-Friday cookies tomorrow...even though "Friday" really doesn't mean much in our house any more. Saturday is the new Friday, and the weekend was shortened by a day. (Thanks, Utz!)

Wow, thirteen items of randomness was a tad more difficult than I thought...suggestions are welcome for a theme for next Thursday!

The Happiness Project

A trip to the beach (even with both children and no other adult to help supervise/wrangle/referee) would not be complete without packing ample beach reading. I brought no fewer than five actual books, plus my Kindle, which is loaded down with more books than I could possibly finish if I lived to be 108.

I finished two of the books, and my Kindle was claimed by Rachael when she ran out of literature of her own. Thank goodness I had downloaded several age-appropriate books for her as well.

At any rate, the book I am currently reading is The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.

LOTS and lots of food for thought in this book. The author and I don't have a lot in common - she's an attorney-turned-writer living in New York City, and I just get the impression that we might not have a lot to talk about. But she does have a husband and two daughters and a desire to maximize happiness in their lives as well as her own, so we're not complete opposites.

Whatever our differences or similarities, her concept is interesting. She identified twelve areas of her own life that could use improvement in some way to increase her family's overall happiness. Then she assigned each one to a month and spent an entire year on her "happiness project."

The twelve items she chose to focus on were vitality, marriage, work, parenthood, leisure, friendship, money, eternity, books, mindfulness, attitude, happiness (which I'm assuming was just her year-end wrap-up, since the whole project was about happiness. But I haven't finished the book yet.)

Those topics all sound pretty good to me, although I imagine they'd be slightly different for everyone. I would probably forego "work" in favor of something else, since she's more career-minded than I. And I would reorganize the list a bit too - eternity and attitude up, money and leisure down.

I'm only four months (chapters) into the book, but much of what I've read has resonated with me. Like her, I am blessed and I know it. I have a great husband, two amazing children, a home, reasonably good health, money for the things we need. I'm not unhappy. But neither is my happiness level through the roof, by any stretch of the imagination. Who couldn't use a little more happy?

I tend to be a bit "down" by nature, I suppose. I've never been Suzy Sunshine, but neither am I too miserable to participate in polite society. I have days that are happier than others, and moments that are pure joy. But my feelings are hurt easily. I sulk (usually inwardly.) I have a short fuse.

The author repeats a theory that she read elsewhere, that people have a "happiness threshold." It's not possible, the theory says, to "get happier" so much that we live in a state of constant bliss. Rather, we get used to new, happier situations until they become commonplace, less happy-inducing. So the theory maintains that each person has a range of happy, so to speak...you can be at the tippy top of your happiness level, riding the middle, or at the bottom, just barely happy.

Wouldn't it be nice to be at max-happy?

On page 66 of the book, the author explains her own goals thus:

"To be happy, I needed to generate more positive emotions, so that I increased the amount of joy, pleasure, enthusiasm, gratitude, intimacy, and friendship in my life. That wasn't hard to understand. I also needed to remove sources of bad feelings, so that I suffered less guilt, remorse, shame, anger, envy, boredom, and irritation. Also easy to understand.

And apart from feeling more 'good' and feeling less 'bad', I saw that I also needed to consider feeling right. 'Feeling right' was a trickier concept: it was the feeling that I'm living the life I'm supposed to lead...in occupation, location, marital status, and so on. It's also about virtue: doing your duty, living up to the expectations you set for yourself."

All worthy goals, I think. I would certainly do well to weed out a few "sources of bad feelings" myself. I'm not sure if I'll dedicate a whole year to my own happiness project, but it's definitely something I'll be considering in the coming days and weeks.

Truth be told, part of the reason that I was so eager to get to the beach was for the peaceful, reflective atmosphere...which I get to enjoy from the hotel balcony after the girls are asleep, but still. It's good enough for me. I so needed the calming influence of the ocean in my life right now. (I'm just not sure that a week is going to be long enough.) I had every intention of coming here to think...about things that need to be changed, things that need more focus, things that need to take up less of my time and attention.

I literally stopped by the library on our way out of town to pick up The Happiness Project, a hold that had just arrived. Turns out that it fits in quite well with my personal, meditative goal for the week.

Maybe 32 is the year for an overhaul.

We're off to a slow start.

Major changes don't always happen on January 1st. Sometimes they take a little time to get warmed up.

To begin with, 2011 rolled in during a weekend this year - and weekends are always a little chaotic around our house. With Daddy home from work on the weekends, all vestiges of my girls' usual routine is flung out the window. So we enjoyed an alternately crazy and lazy weekend, and I looked forward to the return of normalcy on Monday morning.

However, Monday wasn't quite typical either. We decided to take one more week off from school, to put the house back together after the holidays, enjoy the news, and just recoup from the insanity of the past few weeks. Very slowly, things are being picked up, put away, washed, swept, vacuumed. Only one ungodly task remains for the week: de-junking the junk room and moving one little girl down the hall.

Yes, as of this weekend, my girls will have their own separate bedrooms. I would prefer to leave them in the same room, but bedtime fights have become the norm, and they've been getting on each others' nerves more and more during daytime hours as well. Ever the sensitive one, I detect the slightest bit of jealousy toward her little sister from Rachael...and think that having her own space may help alleviate a bit of that. It's not all because of Rachael, though - Milly is a little hothead, and needs some private "cool down" room quite frequently as well. So, we're cleaning and throwing out and giving away, and moving the bunk beds down the hall to create a room that's just Milly's. (Rachael will be the proud new owner of a queen-sized bed from her Gramma - she's super excited, and I hope she still loves the idea when she sees how the floor space in her room will be diminished with the larger bed. However, I grew up with a queen bed in the very same bedroom, and managed just fine.)

I am under no delusions whatsoever that it will be an easy transition. In fact, I'll be surprised if they don't wind up in bed together, in one room or the other, more often than not. As much as they fight, and as crazy as they make me, they really do love each other.

So cleaning and rearranging are the theme of my week...I had even entertained notions of taking down the Christmas decorations this weekend, but only after the bedroom situation has been resolved.

How about those goals for 2011? Well, I've blogged a little, and still have that giveaway that I need to get posted this week. I've scrapped one more page for my nephew's album, and have a good idea for the next one. I've Facebooked less, but could check in less still. And I spent the first Sunday of the new year at the church where I feel most at home, albeit with only Rachael accompanying me, and even visited a new Sunday School class that I'm looking forward to visiting again soon.

Oh. I've also learned that I can walk a 20-minute mile on the treadmill and not fall over dead. I know, a 20-minute mile is hardly bragworthy - but it's more than I've done in quite some time, and it's a start. Actually, it's an improvement, as the mile took me 30 minutes on Monday, 25 minutes on Tuesday and only 20 today. I wish I could say with confidence that I'll make it in only 15 tomorrow, but I rather doubt it. Baby steps! But steps nonetheless.

I'm reading a great book (on my new Kindle, which I love) that's helping keep me motivated to hit the treadmill - it's called Half-Assed: A Weight Loss Memoir, by Jennette Fulda. Jennette began her journey at 372 pounds and lost 186 of them - on her own, by diet and exercise. Her story is amazing, but she's still so very real...and so many of her comments could have come from my own mouth. (In fact, I may have to share a couple of them before long, but that's a different post.) I only learned after buying the book that she's a blogger as well, at Pastaqueen.com - which makes me very happy, since I'll still have her blog to read once I finish her book. It's one of those reads that's so good that you start feeling sad about halfway through, knowing that it's going to end too soon and leave you wanting more.

Anyway...life will really shift back to "normal" mode next week, when we resume homeschooling and Gene starts a new semester as well. Once again, there will be two full days (consecutive days, at that) where it will be just me and the girls until well past their bedtime. I wish one of the days weren't Wednesday, as that messes up my church night (Milly will NOT stay in her class at church, and taking her into my own class is just too distracting for everyone) but it's only for the semester...maybe he won't be in school on Wednesdays next time. We also have the first Girl Scout meeting of the new year next week, so I'll be receiving a healthy dose of reality in a hurry...best to chill a bit and prepare for it this week.

(Speaking of Girl Scouts...it's cookie time! Have you ordered yours yet?! Yeah yeah, I know...but hey, a troop leader feels the cookie pressure like no other. We have 14 girls and minimal funds - we need your support so we can keep doing fun things!)

Coming up next...that giveaway. Who wants some nifty Snapware? Stay tuned. :)