Let's Get Happy

The six years before Jude entered our lives I'd changed a lot. "Change" should be the theme of my married life. When David and I got married I was 20 years old and left my parent's home for my new married home. I had been out of high school for a year and a half. Now, I've always been an old soul and a little more mature in some ways than others. But suddenly living with someone I'd never lived with before was new, and hard in a lot of ways. And it wasn't the living together that was hard. It was sharing money. It was deciding how to spend that money. It was figuring out our time together. It was figuring out how to decide things together and for me to remain calm during those decisions, and for David to realize that I have a strong opinion about everything. In our first two years of marriage we moved a few times (new jobs, flooding houses and living with siblings had big effects on us). Anyway, we had some work to do. I. I had some work to do. I loved David and I wanted to have an awesome marriage. (Once in an email he sent me right after we were married he told me, "I want for us to be able to look at each other and have nothing to say but, 'It's good!'"  But I had to be really happy by myself first. And I was most of the time. Just sometimes I was negative. I was negative a lot, actually.
David finally told me. Do you want to be happy? You can be happy all the time. Even if things are bad. Even if people are mean or we don't have any money or things are hard. You get to decide how YOU feel. No one else tells you how to feel.  So I worked on it. I prayed every day to my Heavenly Father, "Please help me be happy today." And I got happy. I changed a lot. It was hard, but it worked.
Jude has done the same thing for me. Once I had him in my life I thought, "He sees every single thing I do. He hears every word I say. I can't be negative. Everything I do is teaching him how to be. I have to be happy. I have to not yell. I have to be positive." So I got happier.
My dad is a really honest person. He says what he thinks (with tact). He told me he saw a change in my when I had Jude. That I was happier. That made me happy.
So I have two men to thank on this momentous day where a little man came into our lives. Thank you for giving me another reason to be happy. I've always said I like boys better than girls, and now I have two that I get to spend every day with. Boys are sensible and my boys give me every reason to be happy. They've turned me into a better version of myself.