Thankful Thursday: Our Happy Jar

Everyone knows, or has read, or has heard it preached to them, that counting your blessings makes you feel happier. ("White Christmas," anyone?) And we all say Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I should count my blessings… whatever. Go away.

Well, thanks to Pinterest (of course) I found a fun and easy way to count our blessings. Get a decent-looking glass jar (my mom found this one for us at Garden Ridge in Phoenix*), then every time something makes you happy write it down on a little piece of paper and drop it in the jar, all year long.

My vision is that my husband, son and I spend Christmas Eve by the fire unfolding every piece of paper and smiling at each other, feeling blessed. A more realistic vision is probably one or both of us chasing Johnny around trying to keep him from doing a Kamikaze dive off a table or picking up Cheerios off the floor and eating them while the other attempts to read the notes aloud.

At first my husband made fun of it (of course – he has to poo-poo my nonstop attempts at positivity), so he wrote “Beer” on a piece of paper and dropped it in the jar. Later I caught him writing something he wouldn’t show me, and that’s really the whole point.

I don’t want to know what he writes, and I don’t want him to know what I write. But just like my Hundred Happy Days, this makes us conscious of the little things that make us feel good during the day-to-day grind. Life is hard. Work is hard; commuting is hard; parenting is hard; finding time to appreciate your significant other is hard. The list goes on and on. Finding idle moments to write on a piece of paper and put it in my silly jar is hard! But if we can do it every once in a while, hopefully our jar is filled to the brim by Christmas.

Like all my other attempts to bring positivity into our lives, this will take a little bit of work. But when I think about it, really, how hard is it for me to jot something down while Johnny munches food in his highchair? Sure, he yells at me for not paying attention to him, but when I (theoretically) put all these lovely memories into a scrapbook, he just might be glad that I did.**

If you have any tips for focusing on the positive things in life, please share them with me!

*See, again, how my mom makes my pipe dreams come to fruition and basically helps me function in life.

*Or perhaps my vision of teenage Johnny sitting on the sofa beside me looking through scrapbooks is also a little off. He will probably be calling me lame and making me call him John by then. He might laugh at his dad's "Beer" entry.