What makes you happy?

I love my girlfriends, I truly do. Of all the riches God has blessed me with, I do consider my group of girlfriends one of the greatest blessings of my life (right up there with family and my health). They make me laugh, confide in me - and me unto them, and make me think. They are some of the smartest people I know - and they're not all engineers, LOL - and our conversations are never dull. Whether it's a discussion about trivial, utterly useless information, like The Bachelor, or our more meaningful discussions regarding our struggles as mommies with little kids, I always enjoy talking with my friends.

Last night at Supper Club, we girls were chatting about what makes us happy. Specifically, Molly was telling us about "The Happiness Project" she's been following. And she proposed the question to the group, "What makes you happy?"

What was most striking to me was that, while of our answers varied a little, every single one of us had one answer in common: maintaining order/productivity in our lives. And we all agreed that our husbands would never list that as something that makes them happy...

Makes me wonder...are moms, especially stay-at-home-moms who live where they work, overly obsessed with order, keeping things in a "just-right" way? I am happier when my house is clean, things are put away, kids are getting tucked into beds with nice, fresh linens, and I do feel lighter on my feet when I've marked off several items on my "to-do" list before it's noon on a given day, but could I be even happier if I let that stuff go?

In other words, am I letting the "urgent" take over what's "important"? Our pastor mentioned this idea a few months back in a sermon...how easy it is to get sidetracked because we focus on what's urgent rather than what's important. And I think it's so true. We feel a need to make sure emails are checked frequently, we drift toward updating our Facebook statuses before we update our medicine cabinets, and sometimes we feel like we can't sit on our dirty floor and play with our kids until that floor is cleaner...

And we get to stressed because we feel like we're running around all day, tending to what's urgent, but losing focus on what's really important.

I dunno...it's been on my mind though, today. If you're curious, my other answers to the girls' question, "What makes you happy?" was my friends/enjoying events with my friends and my kids. Of course my husband and kids...

So on that note, of things that make me happy, onto a little update:

Weight Watchers meeting today: slightly frustrating. After last week's loss of 0.6, I was hoping for a bigger loss. Not so...today I registered a loss of 0.4 - ugh ;-(

A loss is a loss, and I am grateful for that, but my two weeks' records before that, just to show you why I'm frustrated was -3.2, and -2.6. Two weeks of substantial loss, followed by two weeks of tiny loss.

But the meeting was very helpful and encouraging for me. Everyone there had been in my shoes at some point, and our leader pointed out that the closer you get to your "range" of an ideal weight for you age and height, the harder it is to loose the weight. And I realized this, but I was just on such a "hot streak" you could say, it still was a hard pill to swallow. Especially after all the hard workouts I've put in this week. But, it's still a loss, and the shorts I'm currently wearing are a size below what I've been able to wear in the past year and a half...so woo-hoo for that! I'm just gonna' keep on keepin' on ;-)