For about one year, I’ve been doing 8 simple things that make me feel happy and calm. I gleaned these, of course, from several different books and these activities have literally changed my life.

Here they are:

(1) Sunshine: Get 20 minutes of bright light every day. Light activates Vitamin D which is essential for your body, especially skin. If you don’t live in California like me, there are special lights you can get that give you the same result. Our skin and bodies get all kinds of cues from light. Getting light regularly will make you sleep better and make you happier. I don’t know exactly why it works but it does.

(2) Vitamins: Fish oil is my favorite but I also take a multi vitamin, vitamin D, and C. My skin is glowing, seriously. It looks better than it ever has and I’m 43. By the way, I used to think vitamins were a waste of money and never took them before last year.

(3) Walk: You don’t need hardcore exercise. Don’t walk to lose weight or look better. Do it for your mental health, 45 minutes a day. (If you do live in California or somewhere else sunny or its the right season, you can kill two birds with one stone getting your light this way.)

(4) Sleep: Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. An hour before sleep, dim your lights only do things that relax you. Don’t do anything that might stress you out once your quiet time starts (difficult conversations, checking email etc.) I think making sleep a priority is maybe the most important change I’ve made, and also why my skin glows: )

(5) Social interaction: If you’re introspective like me, it may be hard to get yourself out there. If you’re a mom with little kids and introspective, you may not realize you need to be around people. You do. Every day, not your kids. It doesn’t even matter who so much. When you socialize, just be careful not to use other people to ruminate with (see “don’t ruminate” below.)

(6) Engaging activity: What do you do that makes you lose track of time completely? Do it! Ideally, this engaging activity has something to do with your work but it doesn’t have to.

(7) Meditate: This activity trains you to stay in your body, not your head. I meditate ever morning.

(8) Don’t ruminate: This was the hardest activity for me to stop. I thought that ruminating was insightful and key to my personality, and if I stopped, I’d be the hole in the doughnut. What convinced me to risk trying is that I realized I could always go back to obsessive thinking if I wanted to. Here’s what I learned: if you’re going to get to an insight, it happens in the first 10 minutes or so. The rest of the time, you’re just stuck. Here’s another incredible surprise: happiness is insightful.

Speaking of happiness,  I was inspired to write this list out after reading an excellent post a friend of mine put on Facebook, 15 Powerful Things Happy People Do Differently. Check it out here.

Reel Girl will not be posting until next week because it’s  Spring Break and we’re headed to Tahoe in a storm. Eek.

Maybe we’ll try out snowskating. Have you heard of this? It’s like skateboarding on snow. Apparently, the snowskate was initially created as a toy for kids.

I’m playing hooky today, packing and sneaking off to “The Hunger Games” with my sister. I may try to get out one last post on the movie before I go.

New book recs are coming when I get back including the amazing Super Tool Lula. So fantastic!

See you next week!

Margot

I saw the link to Devon Cornmeal’s HuffPo post “It Will Get Better” on Lisa Belkin’s FB page. This is such a great post. Every new mom should read it. And moms of older kids should read it, too, just to feel grateful, because who really knew that breast-feeding would be 24/7? Or had any idea how great and essential sleep was before it all got taken away? Or, as Cornmeal writes, that your sheets would be literally soaked with sweat every night?

In her post, Cornmeal promises new moms that their babies will stop staring vacantly at the ceiling and actually smile at them one day.

Every night, years later, I still appreciate my sleep. I thought my gratitude for something so basic would pass, that I would start to take it for granted again. But it hasn’t. Not in the least. When I get in my bed, I feel so lucky. I just lie there for a minute and think “Wow:” Most likely I  will get to sleep through the whole night, peacefully, in quiet, relaxed and then I will wake up feeling rested. It’s so amazing. Thank you, God.

My youngest child just turned three and a mom at the birthday party asked me how I was taking it. I told her that I’m excited and happy. Having babies was wonderful in many, many ways, but even better is watching my kids grow, talking to them, and hearing what they think. I love that. So far, I’m not nostalgic about the very early years, or pregnancy or breast feeding at all.

I seriously cannot wait to be done with diapers.

We live in a Victorian built in 1911. I love my house but space is limited, all three girls share a room. Desperate for space, we decided to get the most out of the bay window landing on the stairs. The glass reaches too low to build a window seat, our the first idea. So we lined it with cushions, put in a carpet, painted it, and squeezed the piano in. Love, love, love, it’s like another room!

After thinking about these feminist fairytales that I love so, I am going to add another letter to Reel Girl’s rating system. And the letter is…T, for Traditional. If Reel Girl assigns a book, movie, or product a T, it means that the subject in question confronts a traditional theme of girls or women in fantasy world (beauty, marriage, passivity etc) in an original, insightful way. I think the T is important because we live in the society we do with thousands of years of cultural mythology to wade through. Though I personally adore when writers and movie makers say fuck it, I’m just going to create a world where genders are equal, I want to give a shout out to those who consciously twist conventions in order to show the heroine triumph.

I think of a T as sort of similar to PG meaning parental guidance suggested. If your child is reading a book, watching a show, or playing with a toy that has a T, your kid may get the most out of the experience if you ask her some questions or dialogue with her about the traditional themes presented here.

Reel Girl will continue to assign the dreaded S, Double S, and Triple S.

Reel Girl logged 70,000 page views in January! Not bad for a one-woman blog. I couldn’t be happier that so many people are excited about imagining gender equality in the fantasy world.

When I started blogging, two years ago, a thoughtful reader secured the Reel Girl name for me, and I’ve finally started moving towards changing my blog’s address to www.reelgirl.com. I’ll keep you posted on when I actually complete the process so you’ll know the correct address. Hopefully, it will all be so streamlined, you won’t have to change anything yourself.

To subscribers: I apologize for typos! I blog very fast in my free time (or when I’m procrastinating when I ought to be writing my book!)  I often go back to posts and edit them, so please try to read posts on the blog, not on your email. I know I should wait until they are perfect before I post, but I wouldn’t get half the output that way; they would stay in perpetual draft mode. Besides, its a blog, right? Let me know if it’s annoying when you receive multiple emails (do you?) when I post a few times in a day. I tried to figure out how to bundle posts but remain unenlightened.

Let me know if there are movies, books, TV shows, or toys you’d like Reel Girl to review.

If you haven’t read the best comment ever that I got from Reel Girl reader, please do; it’s why I started Reel Girl.

Thank you again visiting.

Margot