Rules to Live By

I have been reading a book called The Happiness Project lately. (Hey, I can't underline the title! Improper!) I love this lady's easy, conversational style and some of the tips she discovers in her year-long project are very helpful. She comes up with some rules or "commandments" as she calls them and I thought it was a great idea. I've been coming up with some rules of my own.

1. Be Debbie
This one is total rip-off of her first commandment. I like it though. It gives me permission to be myself. I don't like crowds. I don't like loud music in dark places. I'm not sporty. I find new hairstyles really entertaining. And it's all okay. It's good to be me.

2. Don't put off fun.
I am totally guilty of this. When Paul gets something new, like a shirt or shoes or whatever, he uses it right away. When I get something new, I save it. I tuck it away for a special occasion. What on earth am I waiting for? So we inherited a trampoline a few weeks ago. (Long story) I put it in the shed and kept telling the kids "Not yet." Why? I was worried our yard wasn't big enough, Paul thought the grass would die, I was afraid our neighbor would get pissed. But you know what? Don't put off fun! So we put it up, went over some rules, and none of the bad things we anticipated have come to pass. In the meantime, my children are having a blast and playing actively outside way more often. Awesome! Don't put off fun!

3. If you can do it in less than a minute/Full-in, full-out
These are my clean-up commandment. The first one means that if a task can be done in less than a minute, like putting the crockpot in the basement or throwing something away, then do it! It's great to keep those nagging little chores down. Full-in, full-out is a restaurant term Paul found that essentially means if you are leaving a room, pick up as much as you can to put away in the other room. It works!

4.Relax!
After much turmoil of late, Paul and I have realized that life is not meant to be stressed and worried over. So we stopped. We can still do lots of stuff, be we don't need to do it so aggressivley, so competitively, so do-it-perfectly-or die-trying -ly. Just live! If there is too much to do, dump something! We don't have to do it all! What we do, can be done in a relaxed manner. We want to be closer to the Savior's ideals for us, not the world's. The prophets have counseled us to chill out more (I'm paraphrasing here) and it's time we listened.

5. Prettier is better.
This is perhaps a rather vain commandment, but remember my first commandment of "Be Debbie" so it's okay because it's true for me. If I look like crap all day, it effects the quality of my day. I could live the exact same day twice and if I felt like I looked prettier on one of the days (good outfit, make-up done, hair styled) I would feel like that day was better. I could eat the same meal two different days and if the table was set well and looking lovely, I would say that dinner was better. I like pretty things, as simpering and silly as that may sound, so prettier is better.

So five big commandments here. Well, it's baby steps for sure, but they do make a difference to me. I'm sure I will come up with more, but for now those are helpful to me and it's enough