Happiness- Day 6

Today, as part of my 30 day blog challenge, I am supposed to show a picture of something that makes me happy... so here are two...

Yup, kids make me happy.

I realize you cannot see the faces on these kiddos which makes them far less cute. However, I have a strict no kids pictures on the blog rule- so this is the closest to breaking it I am going to come.

You may be surprised to hear that kids make me happy, since they are much more frequently making me annoyed, stressed-out and often a total crazy person. However, I recently read a really amazing description of the effect of children on happiness in The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. She was referring specifically to the effect of a child on their parents happiness, but I found it related to how my students affect my happiness...

She was discussing the fact that while most people state that their children are a major source of happiness, one study that watched a women's emotions during their daily activities found that "child care" was only slightly more pleasant than commuting. Hmmm...

Gretchen says, "In many ways, the happiness of having children falls into the kind of happiness that could be called fog happiness. Fog is elusive. Fog surrounds you and transforms the atmosphere, but when you try to examine it, it vanishes. Fog happiness is the kind of happiness you get from activities that, closely examined, don't really seem to bring much happiness at all- yet somehow they do."

Other examples of fog happiness include hosting a party (preparing, cooking, managing everyone, cleaning up afterward- hmm why is this fun?), running a race (waking up early to train? waking up even earlier to run wait to run the race? running up hills? point made...), even cooking a nice meal can be fog happiness when you are running around like a crazy person trying to get the timing of it all right.

Teaching is fog happiness.

On any given day, it involves arriving at school in the dark, trying to plan activities that will engage the kids while also meeting the academic needs of 21 very different children while also balancing the ridiculous standards set by people who are not teachers and don't know my kids, setting up said activities which always include an absurd number of materials... this is all before 8 am. After that, things get even more fun... I try to actually teach planned lessons while battling bathroom accidents, attention seeking behaviors, inability to sit still, "developing" social skills, and general lack of caring for any adult authority. Just when I think it's all over, I usually have to attend some kind of pointless meeting in which some equally pointless work will be assigned. And don't get me started on parent e-mails...

When closely examined, there is no happiness here, only stress, anxiety, anger, frustration and a seemingly endless supply of work to do. But when you look at the big picture, that I have helped teach 101 children how to read, that I have shared in the happy experiences of 101 kids, that I have hopefully made some of the bad experiences a little better, that I have received thousands of cute notes written in "kindergarten spelling," that I have the power to make (and hopefully not break) a child's day... well, it's kind of cool. Plus there is just nothing more amazing than seeing the world from the eyes of a kid...

This brings me no closer to wanting the fog happiness of parenthood... or hosting a party haha.

What brings you fog happiness?