This year I’ve thought a lot about choosing happiness. I named it as my big resolution for the year and used it as the theme for a group writing project. Back in October, several pieces fell into place as I figured out how to choose happiness and why choosing it can seem so hard.

One more piece fell into place this week.

So back in October, I pointed out that

Choosing to be happy does not mean that we will automatically be happy all the time. It doesn’t mean we always choose whatever might make us happy right this second.

Choosing happiness means we choose the things we know are most important for our long term happiness. . . .

Choosing happiness means doing what I may not want to do most right now—it means choosing the thing that I know is right for me, what’s important in the long run.

The rest of my realization might not seem like much of an epiphany, but I think the last piece fell into place this week. I had my first true “White Christmas” this year—but it’s really not exciting. Yeah, I know I live in Utah, but I am already tired of the snow. It seems like it came to stay a lot earlier than normal (and I can’t ski this year, so there doesn’t seem to be an upside, either).

For Christmas Eve, however, I decided that one fun family thing we could do was to play in the snow (and the snow has been here basically all month, but we’ve never played in it, unless shoveling counts). So bundling up is a hassle, and you get cold and wet pretty fast, but I thought this would be a fun thing for all of us.

Of course, Ryan came down with a cold and Rebecca needed a nap, so it ended up just being me and Hayden tromping through the backyard, digging in the partially-refrozen snow, and throwing snowballs. (My very first one hit Hayden in the forehead and burst. He didn’t know what hit him!)

After about half an hour, I decided I’d had enough and brought us back in. After stripping out of our wet winter gear, I had Hayden help me put the cookie dough onto cookie sheets.

Sounds pretty idyllic, doesn’t it? For the most part, it was—there were fewer fits and screaming and begging and yelling during those hours than most of the ones of the previous week—the hours I spent worrying about getting shopping and packing and work done, and the time I spent on the computer procrastinating dealing with those things. It was a time I could spend enjoying him and enjoying being his mom.

The realization that hit me? Choosing happiness means choosing my children. It doesn’t mean that I am completely subjugated or I have to ignore all my own needs—but when I take the time to really work at being a mom, the whole family is happier—including me.

What do you think? What does choosing happiness mean for you?

Photo by Grant MacDonald

Enjoy your holidays!

This year, I wanted to get my kids involved in the spirit of Christmas, and not just by having them pick out gifts for cousins or telling the Christmas story every. Single. Night. So I looked for service opportunities in our area, things that the kids could do and maybe even see the people they were helping as they performed their service. (At 3 and 1, they’re still a little young for that, but I wanted to do what they could).

One place that I found great opportunities in our community was the local United Way website. in the volunteering section, you could even search for opportunities by age group—as young as 5. (Five is like three, right?)

I found one that I particularly liked—preparing stockings for underprivileged and homeless families in our area. We bought the stuff and Hayden helped me stuff the stockings. I made sure to take him with me when we dropped them off. We also took some other things they needed for homeless families being placed into housing.

Now, you know I’m not normally one to pass these along, but a few days ago, I got a press release in my email. They pretty much had me the subject line: “Five ways for parents to teach children the true spirit of the holidays.” Here are their suggestions:

1. As a family, select a charitable organization you’d like to support. Use online tools like Charity Navigator to find an organization that you trust. Give your children a budget and encourage them to decide how your family will donate to that organization this holiday.

2. Cherish the stories of your family. Have your children talk to their grandparents and write down the stories of their past. Create a book to share with the entire family or record it online through Story Corps.

3. Consider do-it-yourself gifts, like no-sew fleece blankets, that you can make with your children. Donate those blankets to a local homeless shelter. Find other homemade gift ideas at About.com’s Family Crafts page.

4. Work with your children to create a coupon book for your neighbors that might need an extra hand this year. Coupons could include shoveling their sidewalk, watching their children, or providing a meal.

5. Bake cookies or sweets with your children and deliver them to your local nursing home or school-in-need. Get started with this list of holiday recipes.

(It feels like cheating if I don’t mention the company the press release was supposed to be touting: World Vision’s Gift Catalog, which lets you make a gift purchase—in the name of a friend/family member/whoever—ranging from clothing, shelter and food to education for families in the US and abroad.)

Finally, if you’re looking to make an impact, one non-profit I can recommend is SainTerre. I know it’s not glamorous to discuss, basic sanitation (yeah, potties) is something 2.6 million people live without—not even pit latrines. SainTerre is working to provide the people of West Africa with environmentally-friendly composting toilets, through its non-profit (okay, the business structure is a lot more complicated than that, but you can just stick to that side of it). My cousin was one of the founders, and you can contact him, Ammon Franklin, for information on how to donate.

How have you gotten you children into the spirit of giving this Christmas season?

Photo credits: toddler hands—McBeth; giving rice—Kris

A few months ago, we looked a how to sign up for and use Amazon Associates, an affiliate marketing program that gives you a small percentage of any sales you generate for Amazon. Now Blogger is making it even easier to use Amazon’s program—without ever leaving your post window.

You may have noticed the Monetize tab Blogger added back in April. Up until yesterday, only Google ads (AdSense) for your site and feed appeared here. Now you can also find your Amazon Associates information there, too.

To start, go to Monetize > Amazon Associates. Here you can either enter your Associates ID if you already have one, or start the sign up process (and again, we have a step-by-step walk-through on signing up for Amazon)

Once you’re finished with that step, you have the option to add the Amazon Product Finder to your Edit/Compose New Post page. I say go for it, and I’ll show you why.

The Product Finder is a widget that lives on the Compose New/Edit Post page. When you’re working on a post and you want to include a product link to Amazon, just type in part of the name or highlight the title in your post (you can also search by category with the pull-down menu where it says “Amazon.com”).

Once you find the product you want, you can choose the link type to insert into your post—text, image or both. In my example, I went for both:

There are lots of other ways to use Amazon on your blog—so get started!

Today’s quick blogging tip is mostly for WordPress users, WordPress.com and self-hosted. Have you ever worked so hard on perfecting your latest post, putting in the most awesome images to go along with it, carefully centering them and aligning them left and right until it looks perfect? I know I have. And then the post comes up in my feed reader and it looks like this:

What happened to all that careful work?

Well, to get technical, website incompatibilities. The latest version of WordPress adds a special code to align images using the design coded into WP sites with cascading style sheets (CSS). However, when that post with that special code goes out to other sites, like Bloglines and Google Reader, those sites don’t have the same CSS, so they can’t understand the code.

What to do?

Well, the answer is a little bit technical—but admit it, you’ve always wanted to learn a little HTML and CSS and feel cool, right?

The fix

As normal, upload your image and select your alignment.

When you return to your post window, find the HTML tab at the top of the post box and click on it. This changes your view of the post to see the code behind it.

Find the code for your image. It will look something like this:

<img title="image align" src="Your File Path on your site/2009/12/image-align.png" alt="image align" width="500" height="249" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1695" />

The green part is the WordPress CSS code that puts the image where you want it (center/right/left).

To fix it, you will add a little snippet of code to this section, before the /> :

align="left" (or right or center)

Save your draft and it should show up right in feed readers now! (You can also switch back to the Visual tab now.)

Technical note 1: the align element is “deprecated,” meaning that it’s outdated and at some future date, it may not work anymore. However, this is just a quick fix; it doesn’t have to work forever because you have the other WordPress code in place. If you want the “real” code to make it work, the “permanent” solution (the currently acceptable HTML/CSS code for this) is style="float:left;" . If you can remember that, great. If not, don’t sweat it.

Technical note 2: this method also works to align your images if your template doesn’t have the special WordPress code in the CSS, but you can also add this to your style.css file (found under Appearance>Editor):

.aligncenter {display: block;margin-left: auto;margin-right: auto;}
.alignleft {float: left;}
.alignright {float: right;}

However, feed readers will still need the help until they get with the program, I guess.

Sorry about the long silence, folks—between travel and the time-honored family travel tradition (it’s not a vacation until everyone pukes!), we’ve been a little busy.

How many times do we say what we really mean? Probably not as often as we’d like—and much of the time, that’s because we’re not really thinking about the things we say.

This is one of those words that we use all the time, but I doubt many of us think about what it means. When I catch myself using it—in two phrases in particular—I realize what I’ve said and how empty and unkind it suddenly sounds.

The word is but. In English, this conjunction signals a reversal in a sentence. We establish something in the first clause, but we’re going to say something contrary to that in the same breath.

So when I hear myself saying I love you, but . . . or I’m sorry, but . . ., especially to my children, I mentally flinch. Did I really mean to take back the first part of that sentence? Am I trying to tell them that I don’t love him as much because he hit his sister, or that I’m not really that sorry I yelled at him, since he really deserved it?

Of course not. So when I catch these phrases on their say to my lips, I stop myself. I end the sentence (and the mental paragraph) with “I love you.” Pause. Then I explain the rest of what I need to say. Because no matter what they do, I still love them, and I can still feel sorry for anything I’ve done to hurt them. My feelings for them are not predicated on their actions.

Do my kids realize this? No. They’re 3 and 1. But I want to be careful about what messages I send to my children, even now.

What do you think? What things do you find yourself wishing you didn’t say to your children?

Photo by Brittany Greene

I’m thankful to be a mother because of my children. I love seeing their personalities emerge. I love seeing them discover new things and put together the pieces. I love helping them learn and grow. I love their hugs and kisses and the way their eyes light up when they see me.

Why are you thankful to be a mother?

Photo by Br Lawrence Lew, O.P.

How much of our time do we spend thinking about what it would take to make us happy? If we just had a little more money, if we just had more time off, if the kids would just go take a nap, if I could just accomplish this far-off goal . . .

Of course, I wouldn’t argue that we don’t need at least some of each of these things—but sometimes, as an OK Go song says, “If wanting ever taught you anything, it’s wanting more, (and more and more and more!)”

Agented author Natalie Whipple, whose blog I read, posted about this same phenomenon. On the one hand, she’s reached a major milestone in publishing—she’s gotten an agent. On the other hand, she has to still work on her writing and revisions and still has a long way to go to get published—and even then, the work will continue. She’s enjoying a modicum of success now, but it’s still so easy to fixate on what she wants out of the future (emphasis added).

But here’s the thing—my friends’ successes have not changed how they act or feel. Getting an agent didn’t transform them all into happy, perfect writers. Getting book deals didn’t stop them from worrying about the quality of their work. In fact, in some ways there is even more pressure to deliver perfection. . . .

Of course we’ve all had our low points and struggles—hard times are unavoidable. But it’s all about your attitude. If you aren’t happy now, getting an agent or book deal or whatever isn’t going to change that in the long run. You’ll just Want something else and withhold your happiness until you get that.

So for now, while I could always use a little more money, a little more free time, and a future goal to work toward, I think what I’m going to try to want most is to be content and grateful for what I have.

And that seems like an appropriate thing this week, don’t you think?

How do you focus on being happy with what you have instead of always wanting more?

Photo by James Jordan

Blogging isn’t always as easy as it looks. Now in my fourth year of blogging, things are a little different (as I’m sure many of you “old timers” can attest).

I still get a lot of ideas for posts. Sometimes, they’re thoughts that come out of the blue, and sometimes they’re good enough that I can just hang onto them until I’m ready to write them (I did that with yesterday’s post on hard work for about a week and a half). Some are inspired by others’ posts, others by my every day life or pictures I’ve taken of the kids.

Once I get a good idea, especially if it’s inspired by another post, I write up a little draft of it. Sometimes it’ll be nothing more than a phrase or a link.

And usually, that’s about where they stay, sometimes even after I write the post on that topic. So right now, I have over 100 unfinished blog post drafts.

On the one hand, hooray! I have so much stuff to write about! On the other hand, boo! I don’t want to go through 100 posts looking for something I feel like writing about today (especially not if I have to read something first!).

So today I realized, that’s where I get stuck blogging—taking it from idea/draft to post. (And it’s not like my every post is a masterpiece that I spend days crafting.)

Confession: I wrote this post a couple days ago and thought I posted it. I was all sad because I didn’t get any comments. Then I was checking something on the site and discovered . . . I never hit Publish. What a great illustration of this, LOL!

So today I’m turning it over to you for a little help. How can I take more drafts to posts? Where do you get stuck blogging? What blogging questions do you have?

Photo by Shovelling Son

Once upon a time, there was a mystique to working one’s own land. Owning a farm was considered by a large part of society to be the pinnacle of achievement—you’d “arrived” once you obtained acreage. Hard work was a virtue, and an aspiration.

I doubt that I have to tell you that isn’t the mentality today. Most of us have learned to work just enough to get by. Even in motherhood, sometimes it’s easy to let the “okay” (PBS) supplant the “good” (playing with your kids).

There’s no way around it: motherhood—maintaining the home, providing meals, rearing children to become productive adults, sometimes even providing income for the family—is hard work. Even if we do just enough to get by, sometimes the work of motherhood is emotionally and physically exhausting.

So sometimes motherhood gets a bad rap. But you know what? I think we had it right centuries ago—though it’s often not fun or even interesting, hard work is good for us. It makes us grow and makes us stronger.

And, honestly, I have to hope that anything that requires this much effort can only be worth every ounce of myself that I put into it.

What do you think? What have you learned from the hard work of motherhood? How have you grown as a mother?

Photo by Sasha Wolff