My Happiness Project - Contradictions

It's Happiness Monday!  I love My Happiness Project, where I decided to spend a year "finding" happiness with the help of Gretchen Rubin and her awesome book.  Check out her website for more information.  And buy the book!  It's never too late to start your own Happiness Project.  

One area the book explores - the contradictions you find in happiness.  For example, in my own life, the tug-of-war between "work hard every day, marking things off my to-do list" and "take time to enjoy life."  

This past week gave me a good study in that.  If you didn't notice from three different posts, we had a birthday last week.  Oldest turned 8 and much of the week was spent doing celebratory things with her:

1. piano recital Tuesday night
2. cooking with her class Wednesday afternoon
3. wrapping presents and baking her cake wednesday night
4. family time thursday afternoon and evening
5. a dinner and dance Friday night
6. family coming to spend the day and evening Saturday

And we had fun.  Lots and lots of fun.  The kind of fun where you say, "we need to have more fun like this."  The kids were great with each other, it was wonderful to spend time with family, baking the cake with Oldest rather than buying it was so much more memorable, cooking with her class gave me insight into what a wonderful class she has, etc, etc.  

Now it's Monday, and guess what my to-do list looks like?  Well, I'm not really sure because I haven't even made it yet!  It is going to be L-O-N-G, to say the least.  Combine that with our pending spring break trip and this week is a recipe for little, if any, down time.  

And you know what?  That's OK.  Really.  As much as I say getting my to do list accomplished every day is a major source of my happiness (and it most certainly is), I wouldn't have taken away one thing from last week. We loved it, we all connected deeply and we strengthened our family bond as we head into what can sometimes be a tough month for our family  - the 30 days leading up to tax day (Husband is a CPA).  

And celebrating birthdays makes us all really happy.  It's that person's special day and they deserve to be honored.  

What about you?  How do you celebrate birthdays?  Do you do the week long celebration like us?