cheers May 6, 2008 3:38 pm

Have I told you how much I love the Half Full Blog? This series is on happiness : and just reading it makes me happy. It makes me realize how I do need to take time out for myself. How what I say to my kids does matter and how training them to hug is going to make them happier people.

The older postings are great too- we’ve started having dinner together 5+ nights a week, the actual kind where you all sit down together and don’t jump up every 2 minutes and it’s been not just nice but fantastic. It was hard to get there. Very often my kids used to cry at my feet, try to climb up my legs as I was trying to get dinner together and I knew if they ate they would feel better. That would stress me out and the whole thing would spiral. We almost always got food in front of them before ourselves. Then by the time our dinner was on the table the boys would be off and running being sad because we wanted to sit down for 10 mins and they wanted us to play with them. Maybe it’s b/c they are older, but now they know I am making dinner, they ‘help’ set the table, we put everything we need on the table or counter and then we all sit down. We’ve even starting doing a ‘Cheers!’ and clinking glasses - which my kids get the biggest kick out of. Jackson even sometimes adds, ‘i love you’ and Harry chimes in too. Breaks my heart! We all eat and they have to asked to be excused. We’re working on this part, but then they take their dishes to the sink.

Which means you can see a plastic bowl flying up over the sink on any given evening