Saturday Snapshot -- Love

Join West Metro Mommy for this weekly meme of photos people have taken and share on their blogs.
Of course, everyone is celebrating Valentine's Day, but when you're two, love is a much simpler concept.
This week, I babysat for my  nieces and I took them suckers -- Tootsie Pops, to be precise.
Little Regan was thrilled with her orange Tootsie Pop.
"I love my sucker!" she said as she hugged it to her.

Ah, if only love were as simple as it is with a two-year-old.

Happy is Boring

Yesterday it struck me that I am really happy. I have pretty much everything I want in life. Then this morning I received my sitemeter report and saw that the number of my blog readers has dropped this month. That's why I decided that happy doesn't make good reading. That's why artists must suffer.
Rebellious children, cheating husbands, floods, locusts...they all make good reading.
Happiness...not so much.
On our drive down to Florida, we listened to The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. One of the characters in the book is studying a kind of science that determines that thoughts have mass, that they carry a kind of gravity that helps make things happen. Sound familiar? Yes, similar to the philosophy of the book The Secret.
That's when it struck me that last year, or was it the year before, during our runs we talked about intentions and whether our thoughts could affect our lives.
Two things I focused on increasing our income and going to France.
Hello. I just did our taxes and we made more money this year. And I'm going to France in two weeks. My intentions, my wishes, have come true.
That makes me feel powerful. Who knows what else I can accomplish? The tooth with the infected gum, the one the dentist said may need an implant, I began picturing little guys in there fixing the tooth, rebuilding bone. Now the gum isn't red and inflamed any more.
I've put behind my worries about college expenses, and since then I've been asked to sub for classes twice this week and had a call from a researcher at Vanderbilt who is going to pay me $20 to fill out a survey about the results of my knee surgery 7 years ago.
Of course, staying optimistic is especially easy when the weather reaches the 80s, the birds sing and I get to whiz along on my bike to work.
Oh, that's another thing. On Easter Sunday, at my sister-in-law's house, they pulled a bike off the wall of the garage and gave it to me. Now I have a bike to replace the one that was stolen last fall.
As I walked around campus yesterday with my bike helmet attached to my backpack, people kept commenting, "Did you ride your bike?" Traffic is awful near campus and parking is worse. So, I just smiled, so glad that I lived where I could ride my bike, so happy that the weather cooperated.
I can't help it. I'm just happy right now.