Enough with the complaining!

In light of recent financial crises of the domestic kind, I think it's high time I talk about happy stuff for a change. For the last few days I've been mired in self doubt and hysteria and fear, and even this blog is starting to feel a bit depressing. Therefore, I've decided to make this post all about five totally ridiculous things which are making me very happy right now.

1) On Saturday afternoon, we all lolled about the house reading the paper, listening to books on CD, and in my case, indulging in a two hour Nana nap. What bliss - ! - to crawl into bed at 4 in the afternoon and 'rest my eyes' not worrying about kids or husbands or jobs or money. I eventually tore myself away from the best bed in the world to eat home made pizza, watch a movie and celebrate Earth Hour with my family. I don't think that afternoon could have been any better.

2) The TV show "Farmer Wants A Wife." I hated the whole bachelor and bachelorette series, and in general I'm pretty anti "meat market" television shows. I can handle competition reality TV like Top Chef and Project Runway, but hate the shows which seek to humiliate or embarass (like Real Housewives or Biggest Loser or Survivor). Farmer Wants a Wife, while technically a meat market...is just so... Australian. And so honest. I find myself cheering and swearing and talking to the television like a nutcase - which is okay since DH is there doing the same thing.

3) Clean undies...not that I generally have grotty ones, I just love having plenty of clean ones in my drawer. In a family of five, laundry isn't so much a chore as a lifestyle. The machine runs almost all day, every day - and yet it seems I am always shouting out to DH, "Have you seen any of my undies?! I *never* have any undies! Where the #^*&@# are my undies? Fer cripes' sake, is it so hard to get a pair of clean undies around here?" I am a total undie-holic in so far as I sometimes change twice a day (madness, I know.) Today (and for the past couple of days), I've had a whole stack of clean, nicely folded undies in my drawer. I open the closet in the morning and I smile at them - yes, they make me that happy.

4) Meal planning. For a very long while we would meal plan our weeks - on Sunday night I'd sit down and decide what we were going to have for dinner for the coming week. I'd decide based on whatever I felt like, whatever we had already in the fridge or freezer, or whatever new recipes I came across. Then for a(long) while we lost our meal planning mojo, and every night became an annoying quest of "what the heck do I cook now?" I was getting mighty sick of the same 5 dishes recycled round and round again - so I reitroduced meal plans, but now I do it on a 3 week basis, and involve the kids and DH. We've saved a stack of money, don't go market shopping a billion times a week, and the kids are much more enthusiastic to try new things and help cook and be involved in the process. Plus I think in the last 9 weeks or so no single meal has actually been repeated, so I'm never bored.

5) My son is good at basketball. Now I realise this may sound like another round of me saying "aren't my kids just bloody fabulous" but this one is particularly important to me. Here's the thing. My Dad is over 6 feet tall, my brother is 6'5", I am a hair shy of 6" and my DH is about 6'1"...and so on and so forth. All my life I've been around tall people...and with the exception of my brother in law, I've never known any one of us tall folk to play basketball. What a waste of inches, I know! My poor not-so-little brother has always felt like he needs a t-shirt which says, "NO, I don't play basketball!" So it's kinda cool to me that we finally have someone in the family who plays this sport, and is defying all Jewish convention by actually having some hand/eye coordination. I love watching him play (even if it means being up early on a Sunday morning.) This past Sunday I turned into psycho basketball Mum and shouted encouragement from the sidelines. Seriously, people, I'm very close to getting some pom poms.

That's it. Five simple things which are reminding me to smile. Crisis, shmises, the finale of Farmer Wants A Wife is on Wednesday night!