H is for happiness

I was pondering this today as I was thinking about the instagram  challenge for December, and today's challenge was "happiness is...". I spent a lot of the morning trying to decide what it was that I should take a picture of, and really it's no big deal if I don't come up with something. It just seemed like a good day to participate. I thought of a lot of things that happiness isn't as we tried to make our way through the day.

Then, we decided to get out of the house for a while. One of the stops being a bookstore. I love bookstores, and we will often go just to get out of the house for something different. I didn't realize until we were sitting at the bookstore reading that my grumpiness was starting to melt away which led me to thinking about how happy going to the bookstore made me. There it was! "My happiness is..." picture!

Thankfully I had my ipad with me to snap a few shots. We read some fun books, the older kids would bring some interesting books by and look at them for a bit, then they'd go find something different.. Bookstores are fun because they have a lot of new books that libraries don't have. But, oh darn, you have to sit there and read them (because they are pretty expensive!)

It's not always easy to find your happiness, especially day to day.  It got me to thinking tonight about what exactly is happiness? And, where do you find it?

For me a lot of my happiness is just finding joy in what's right in front of me. Not always easy, and maybe sometimes not even doable, or so it seems. At the beginning of this week I was kind of bummed about the lack of activities on our calendar. I was wishing it were a week of family and fun festivities. But, no. I had a week with practically nothing written on my calendar. I let that get me down at the start of the week. But, today I realized that there must be a reason for it. I need to slow down, and this must be a blessing, and I need to be happy with what's in front of me. As soon as I started to turn that around I was happy about it. Then, I realized we will have our fun family gatherings starting on Christmas day, and we'll have Daddy home for a whole week.

Happiness really does come in the simple things in life. Through the simple moments. Especially when we slow down enough to see and enjoy them. I didn't think, we should go to the bookstore because that's my happiness. The thought never crossed my mind. But, when I got there and I saw the special moments we were having, it brought me happiness.

I am blogging through the alphabet with Through the calm and through the storm