Happiness

Hey guys, hope all is well! Everything on my end is going pretty dang awesome. :) I honestly have had the best month and a half of my life! Mitch and I have really got our routine down, and are just really enjoying marriage and the phase of life we are in. As cheesy as it sounds marriage really is 10x better than you ever imagine it will be. Also, I am 22 weeks!

As happy as I've been the last few weeks, though, I do still have the tiny tiniest of stress clouds hanging over my shoulder all the time just encouraging me to freak out about finances when the baby comes because we both decided that when Baby comes I will leave my job and focus on motherhood full time. Which, I do have to say I am so, so grateful that Mitch is on the same page as me with this and 100% supports my desire to be a stay-at-home mom. Even, though, I'm super excited to give my baby my full attention and time, that little stress cloud I mentioned earlier, just drives me to waste time imagining how nice life will be when we have x things or when Mitch is done with school and makes x amount of money, or how easy things will be when x things happen. 

If any of you follow me on Instagram, though, you'll know I recently started reading "Be Happy" by Hank Smith (one of my former seminary teachers, holla). Anyway, so far, and I'm not very far, I've learned that only 10 percent of our happiness comes from our circumstances. Only TEN! I don't know if that's blowing your minds as much as it blew mine, but I was super surprised. I feel like it's almost human tendency to think that our circumstances and what happens to us impacts more like 90 percent of our happiness.

Anyway, I wish I could share the whole book with you guys but since I can't I'll share this quote with you, "People who believe all their happiness depends on circumstances fall into a dangerous trap. They think that happiness will be in the next place, with the next job, with the next partner, and so on. You'll chase it your entire life and never catch it because it wasn't ever there in the first place. And until you give up on the idea that happiness is somewhere else, it will never be where you are." WOWZA, am I right?

That paragraph from the book really got me thinking about how that sounds a lot like the family goal Mitch and I set for ourselves to enjoy the phase of life we are in instead of wasting time wishing for the next one. And it gave me a big old wake up call to focus on the present and finding happiness in my life as it is and will be in the next few months!

So to conclude I guess I just want to encourage all of us to really focus on the present, finding our happiness, and not letting our circumstances determine our level of joy! Oh and just as a side-note, I can feel Baby moving now and it's gotten me so, so excited!

Much love!