secrets to happiness.

It feels so, so good to be back home.

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Traveling to see family for Thanksgiving was wonderful -- but it is definitely nice to be back home to normalcy. Poor little L is one tired baby after a day of flying (sleeping anywhere other than her crib basically doesn't happen, so she went from  6am to 7pm yesterday with only 1.5 hours of napping total, poor thing), so we're going to need a few days to recover.

In the few minutes she was asleep on the plane, I was thinking about the kind act I had just witnessed: two people giving up their seats so that a mother and child could sit by each other (an older grandfather type and a twenty-something woman, of course -- the businessmen buried their faces in their iPhones and pretended not to hear the request from the flight attendants). It made me think of one of the fixtures of my parents' house that gets the most comments from visitors: the happiness list.

For as long as I can remember, a homely little printout of "28 Secrets to Happiness" has been taped in front of the toilet in our bathroom (yep, only one bathroom in my parents' house -- the horror!) so that you can't help but read it every. single. time you are in there. I could recite the list for you by heart, but here are some of the suggestions: "Be on time." "Be humble." "Read a favorite book." "Understand and accept that life isn't always fair." (You can see the whole list here.) I love that my parents didn't lecture us about these things, but instead left us a gentle reminder in an unexpected place.

I was thinking I could add a few things to the list, but "giving up your seat on the airplane" is basically like #16 and "let that busy person at the grocery store go first even when she has a full cart and you have two things" is #18. But I guess I would add "tell your loved ones how much you care about them" because you never know when you might not get the chance to do that again.

I'm off to catch up on all the blogs I missed in the past week -- and to check off a few things on my happiness list. Hope you have a day filled with happiness, too!