My Summer Happiness Project Cost $26

Before my 40th birthday (in 2012), I read Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project book because I wanted my 40th decade to be focused on Happiness! If I was healthy enough to live a full life, I should be grateful and happy doing it. I turned to Gretchen's New York Times #1 Bestseller to put some framework around my personal Happiness Project and got working.

One thing that has always made me very happy is the beach and all that comes with it - collecting seashells, walking in the waves, waves, water, seagulls, sand. I love all those things. So part of living in Evanston and getting Happy meant spending as much time as possible at the beach! I aimed to be at the beach daily, day or night, even if for just a short walk. And most days, I come close to visiting the beach everyday!

Summer time beach visits are somewhat tricky as during certain hours a pass is needed to access the beach, which has become MY beach. Had I not read the Happiness Project, I might have allowed the need to pay to access the beach to make me mad or annoyed, but instead I chose to be grateful for the pass. See my logic below.

Thank you Gretchen Rubin and your great work! I now fully realize that "Happiness is choice, not the result of how life treats you."

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I bought my beach token before June 14 and it cost me $26.

So far this summer, I have gone to the beach at least 20 times. Over the entire summer, I will visit the beach at least 40 times putting my approximate cost per visit at around .65 cents.

What does the beach look like? See below. (And I walk to the beach, so there is no transportation cost.)

This beach makes me very happy, so does living in Evanston and so does buying a beach token and so does writing this blog and so does dark chocolate and so does eating fresh fruit from my garden....

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Thank you for reading my blog Evanston Newbie, a blog dedicated to helping you too fall in love with Evanston, just like I did. If you have any questions or need to get in touch with me about this blog, Evanston, or anything else you can email me at thelisadshow@gmail.com. Also feel free to send me announcements about upcoming Evanston events and I will promote them here!

Mom, this doesn’t feel like home.

After a three week vacation in Northern California staying with their grandparents, aunt, uncles and cousins, my boys return home today. This is the second summer in a row where “coming home” means coming to Evanston and not El Paso. Despite the year living here, I worry it still won’t feel like home because as the title of this blog notes, my boys frequently tell me “Mom, this doesn’t feel like home”.

Although I totally believe there is merit in NOT listening to MOST things children say, I find it hard to ignore them when they tell me that their new home doesn’t feel like "home". They can’t really back it up and give concrete reasons, both of them just say “I don’t know, but it doesn’t feel like home.”

I hear myself responding “well boys, home isn’t always a physical location. It can be a feeling or a smell or temperature. Don’t worry about recreating what you used to have in El Paso but instead working on creating what you want in Evanston.” This normally just gets me blank stares.

For parents who move children numerous times because of career demands how do they recreate new homes? It takes so long to make good friends; there must be a speedier way to create belonging. I really haven’t done the research on creating a new home and a sense of belonging because I wanted our experience to be organic. Other than talking in a friendly tone to every human I’ve come across in our new town over the last year, I’ve let my children pick their friends and how they make them. I’ve let them pick the park where they want to hang and their favorite restaurant. More than anything, I’ve just given them a love for walking and that’s how they’ve discovered their new city. I think they’ve done a great job creating their new home/life all on their own but…

Will they come home today and say, “This doesn’t feel like home?” I hope the banners and the fresh flowers and the bag of Chicago style popcorn and the cake (see above) make them feel like they’re home. I’ll let you know what happens.

Mom, I've lived in 5 houses and I'm only 10. Isn't that a bit much? -Older Son

One of the most complex issues that has surfaced surrounding our move from El Paso, TX, to Evanston, IL, was how to justify the move to our children. We didn't need to move, we wanted to move. In fact I wanted to move, just like when I wanted to move from San Diego, CA, to New York, NY, and from Brooklyn, NY, to Durango, CO. Telling children that you want to walk away from comfort, a good job, awesome friends, a lovely home, etc., is illogical.

My good friend Maura tells me to talk to the boys about the move, explain to them the benefits but both boys look at me with blank faces when I wax poetic about public transportation and many different languages being spoken on a city block.

What my children want and what my husband and I want is rarely the same thing and this move was not something they wanted, but they went along with it and only now, six months later, do I hear grumbling like in the title of this post.

But as always, and their therapist can hear all about it later, this move was about my marriage, my future and ME and I had a hunch it would benefit all that plus my children. Six months into it, I feel incredibly vindicated as both my husband and I are working at jobs we love, our children are attending one of the best public schools in Illinois (Go Dewey!) and lots of friends and neighbors have opened their hearts and homes to us without doing a background check. (Phew)

So as I look at my son as he awaits a good response to "Mom, I've lived in 5 houses and I'm only 10. Isn't that a bit much?" I can't help but just stare back at him in silence, pondering how well this will prepare him as he moves to a new middle school and moves to a far away university and moves to a far away country to follow his love after college. He'll be ready and happy to move and change because his parents taught him at the young age of 10 that moving is growing and like William Butler Yeats said “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”

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Thank you for reading my blog "Evanston Newbie", a project that I am using to chronicle my new life in Evanston. Do you have favorite Evanston bakeries, bike shops, events that you can recommend? Send me an email at thelisadshow@gmail.com and I will post my review on this blog. -Lisa Degliantoni