Continuing with the Happy theme...

I loved Christie's post from the other day where she decided to just 'call the whole thing happy'. Happy is good. I figure everyone else probably agrees that it's good. Strike that. Happy is great!! I'm generally a happy person. I've been known to smile and laugh even when nothing is funny. I just like it better that way and for the most part, I do feel that I can chose to be happy or chose to be sad. Granted, there are times in everyone's life - mine most definitely included - where sad, unfortunately, takes over. We lose friends, we lose family, we lose beloved pets, we lose jobs, we lose heart.
Loss is never easy, but with perserverance and determination and a little help from our friends, we can rise above.

I find that it helps to surround myself with things that make me smile. I'm happiest, for instance, when I'm surrounded by my kids and grandkids. Now granted, we only have one son but our daughter-in-law (who truly is a goddess) is like a daughter to us. and those babies - oh, how they make me smile. Here's a photo that makes me laugh every time I see it. It's of our youngest granddaughter, Hailey, 18 months, just chillin' and hangin' at Gramma and Grampa's after having some fun with a garden hose. Is that a look of smug contentment or what?


















Here's another photo of the older kids,
Kayla 8, Lane 3, and Blake 5 up at our
cabin in Minnesota. It's a little hard for
you to see but next to Blake, on the
ground at the lake shore is, with a little imagination, a summer shelter for the gnomes who live in the forest. There's a little shelter made out of rocks, a table made from a flat rock, a tiny campfire over which the kids built a tripod of sorts to hold a small copper kettle for the gnomes to cook their fish in. Sadly, a minnow from the bait bucket bought the farm on this one but the kids were all excited about the gnomes getting excited when they found their fish dinner. Oh - and that white thing that looks like a plastic container? Well,
it's a plastic container that Kayla used to make a swimming pool for the gnomes, complete with diving board because, well, they probably wouldn't want to swim in the lake, right? This photo makes me happy because searching for the gnomes made the little ones happy.

BTW - just in case you think gnomes aren't real, here's a photo of their permanent home up the hill from our cabin. Look close and you'll see the door set into the base of a large rock, several
little white quartz rocks (proof that it's a gnome house because gnomes love white quartz, don't you know), and a small garden of clover. Just because you can't see the gnomes (no one EVER sees a gnome) doesn't mean they don't exist. The other thing you can't see is that this little house is hidden deep in the forest, a towering white pine tree is rooted in the rock above the door and birch and aspen flank it on all sides. Again, this photo makes me smile because of all the time the little ones spend searching for white quartz to take to the gnomes as gifts, the blueberries they left behind when their picnic table is set up and because of the notes the Gnomes wrote on birch bark paper and left for the children, thanking them for being so thoughtful.

Here's another photo of all 4 kids on the little beach near the cabin. This picture also makes me happy because it makes me remember that when they weren't writing gnome notes or figuring out ways to sneak up on them and actually spy one, they were in the water or on the beach or roasting marshmallows and making memories.

Less astute readers might have decided by now that this post is really about my grand kids. Well, maybe it is, just a little, but truly it's about happiness. The happiness I find in their bright eyes and excited smiles and their imaginations as they swear they saw a gnome running through the woods or sailing off in a little boat, or saw smoke from a tiny campfire in the woods, or saw a princess standing on the turrets of the sandcastles they built and that Margaret, the Brittany, or Ernie, the Lab, invariably trampled in their excitement over finding the children on the beach.

So now it's your turn. What makes you happy? Be it big or small or somewhere in between, what never fails to take you to that happy place? And don't say it's laughing at me because I have the date screwed up on all of those photos :o(