Here are the things that made me happy the last two weeks:

An adult coloring book.

My mom got me one, along with a set of colored pencils, and it's one of my favorite gifts that I received. You know how when you're watching TV and you idly pick up your phone and 20 minutes later you just feel gross due to your lack of focus and how you let yourself get sucked into so much b.s.? I realized the coloring book fixes my urge to multitask but in a much more soothing way. For awhile I'd been thinking about "knitting--but not"--an activity to keep my hands busy that doesn't involve learning a new skill that I don't really want to learn anyway. I think this scratches that itch.

Making a Murderer: Steve and I gave this a shot and became addicted pretty quickly. It can be very depressing in a lot of ways but it's a fascinating story well-told. Also, I never would have thought I had a thing for numerous shots of abandoned cars but apparently I do. In the vein of the The Jinx or the first season of Serial it will be interesting to see if the wider exposure will have any affect on the case.

Finishing my running streak. I took one day off (the day after I had the stomach flu) but otherwise I ran at least a mile every day between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day (and actually ran on 1/2 just to make up for that lost day.) I really enjoyed the automation of it -- I woke up every day knowing what my workout would be -- and that it could be as basic as running around the block three times. In the end I ran about 82 miles total over 38 days.

Little Royal Two socks. I got sent these as a promotional item because it was hard to resist a pitch along the lines of "Hey do you want to write something about little fat baby feet and socks that won't stay on?" I have a thing for baby feet. If I could make a keychain with a baby foot instead of a rabbit foot I'd consider it. I got all these cute socks for Paul (and then James) and the tragedy was, they never stayed on. They always end up looking like this:

Little Royal Two socks--which are also totally cute--actually stay on, no matter how obese your baby may be:

If you have a baby who kicks his or her socks off, or if you want to send a thoughtful little gift to somebody who's having or who recently had a baby, I would totally order a few pairs.

The day after Christmas. After all the effort of making Christmas magical for Paul, it manifested itself in a lot of stress on everyone's part. Even though he was old enough to get what Christmas is, I don't think he could handle all the buildup from us and at school, and he definitely didn't get the correlation that good behavior = Santa gifts (and to be honest he's a pretty good kid most of the time and when we tried that "Santa's watching you!" stuff, it was as a last resort, so naturally it didn't work.) We were all sick around Christmas too, which put us in crap moods (he told me I was a "bad Mommy" on Christmas Eve; I told him "You're being such a brat!" on Christmas Day.) The day after Christmas finally felt like we could exhale--no pressure to be anywhere, behave, dress up, be grateful. We could just loll around, and that was when it felt like for the first time in weeks we had a really nice day together as a family, as opposed to a stressful day with nice moments.