The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

I did some amateur medical diagnosis. Eliza is allowed to watch cartoons in the morning until Eleanor comes to the kitchen (I know, I shouldn’t let her, but I do), so I sent her to the TV and left Eleanor singing to herself in her crib while I checked Internet health sites. I poked around until I assured myself that this was probably nothing serious.
    By then, Eleanor was roaring “Up, up! Mama!” so I went in to rescue her. She pointed to her diaper and said, “Hurts.”
    When I took off her diaper, I discovered an angry diaper rash. I also discovered that we had only one lone baby wipe left in the entire apartment. As I changed her diaper, using every inch of the sole wipe, Eliza, still in her favorite cherry-printed nightgown, came charging in.
    “It’s 7:18, and I haven’t even eaten breakfast!” she wailed in accusation. Eliza hates to be late; in fact, she hates to be on time; she likes to be early. “I’m supposed to be done eating and getting dressed by 7:20! We’re going to be late!”
    Did I burst into cheering song? Did I laugh in a merry but comforting way? Did I murmur reassuringly, “Don’t worry, sweetheart, we have plenty of time”?
    No. I snarled in my most menacing voice, “Wait a minute!” She backed off and started sobbing.
    It took every ounce of my willpower not to keep yelling more, but after that first terrible moment, I managed to hold back. I gave Eliza a quick hug and said, “You go get dressed while I make breakfast. We still have plenty of time until school starts.” (“Make breakfast” in this case meant spreading crunchy peanut butter on toast.) We did in fact have plenty of time. Because of Eliza’s concern for promptness, our mornings have a sizable cushion—especially since January, when I began doing theevening tidy-up. Even after the commotion, we managed to make an on-time departure.
    The effort to stop yelling taxed my self-control to the uttermost, but as we walked to school, I realize how much more pleasant our morning had been than it would have been had I kept yelling. As we walked down the street, I started singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” until an embarrassed Eliza hushed me up.
    The most effective way to lighten up—but also the most difficult, because a whining child sucks every particle of humor out of my head—is to make a joke. One morning when Eliza whined, “ Why do I have to go to class today? I don’t want to go to tae kwon do,” I wanted to snap back, “You always say you don’t want to go, but then you have fun,” or “I don’t like to hear all this grumbling.” Instead, even though it wasn’t easy, I sang out, “‘I don’t want to go to tae kwon do ’—you’re a poet and you don’t know it! ” After a minute I added, “I don’t give a snap about going to tap. ”
    Eliza answered, “I want to stop going to hip-hop. ”
    I hate every kind of bathroom humor, but she loves it, so I whispered, “I don’t give a fart about going to art. ”
    She thought this was hilarious, then added, “I’d rather pass gas than to go to science class. ” We laughed until our stomachs hurt, and she didn’t mention tae kwon do again. This technique worked better than telling her to buck up, and it was certainly more fun.
    I hit on another rather Pollyannaish strategy that, to my astonishment, really worked to keep me in a “Sing in the morning” frame of mind, all day long: I “reframed” a particular chore by deciding that I enjoyed doing it.
    For example, as Eleanor’s birthday approached, I dreaded doing all the little errands—ordering the Baskin-Robbins ice cream cake (a Rubin family tradition), taking the girls to the party store to choose paper plates, buying presents, and making invitations for our family birthday party. I begrudged the time I spent on it. Then I told myself, “I love makingplans for Eleanor’s birthday! How fun! I’ll never have a baby this young again!” And…it really did change my attitude. I also reframed by imagining that someone had offered to take over the task from me. Would I let someone else plan Eleanor’s party? Nope. That realization also changed my attitude toward the task.
    A friend of mine told me that when his sons were five and three years old, they woke up at six every morning. On the weekends, week after week, he and his wife tried to persuade them to go back to sleep or to play quietly—with no success.
    So finally he gave up. He’d let his wife stay in bed, and