Day 8

I've now been at this happy project for a week and I've learned a few things.

First of all, I've learned that choosing to be happy every day really works. When you wake up in the morning determined to look for all the happy things in your day, it really does change your attitude. I'm paying more attention to all the little happy things in my day and I'm more grateful for them.

But second, as far as the photo project goes, I'm doing it wrong! My mistake is that I'm doing it fairly early in the day. And then later in the day something happens that makes me happy and I'm bummed that I already did my happy project for the day because  I found an even better happy moment that I wish I had done instead.

So today I'm going to blog another happy moment from yesterday, which I realize is a cheat again, but tomorrow I'm going to start doing this later in the day and avoid the problem.

I would have skipped this one, but it's relevant to this blog and I thought the people who originally came to my blog for our adoption story would enjoy it.

Yesterday afternoon Clarissa was cranky. She had preschool in the morning, which she loves, but sometimes she has so much fun that she comes home and crashes. That was the case yesterday. After lunch she was upset about something, which I'm not still clear on, and she was sitting on the floor in a puddle of tears. Her afternoon was just not going the way she wanted it to for some reason. I tried to discuss it with her, but she very dramatically could not speak, lol.

So not knowing what else to do with her I said "Clarissa, do you just need a hug?" And she nodded, wiped her sad eyes, grabbed a blanket, crawled into my lap and promptly fell asleep. Sometimes you just need a nap to reset your day.

My first thought was to move her off of me once she was asleep and have some quiet mommy time, but I didn't want to risk waking her up and restarting her dramatically sad afternoon, and second, she's kind of great to snuggle with.

So we snuggled, and it was kind of a nice, quiet afternoon. I share this because in moments like that I often think back to before we brought her home, when I just so desperately wanted her here with us and I couldn't wait until the day when I could pick her up and hug her and she would be really ours.

So quiet moments like yesterday, when she was happily asleep in my arms, I always have a moment where I'm just incredibly grateful that she's here and that she's part of our family. We waited for her for so long and anyone who has been reading my blog since the beginning will remember how hard that wait was. There were times I thought I couldn't stand it for one more minute.

Four and a half years later I'm still incredibly grateful for the whole adotiption process and for my sweet Clarissa. I'm grateful to her birth mother and to the Korean government and to everyone who was a part of the whole process. And I'm grateful that I can finally pick her up and hug her and know that she's ours forever.