We are excited to share this guest post from Erin Cox as part of our New Year, New Mama series. Erin’s mission is to bring more joy to the world, improve marriages, and raise happier and healthier children by inspiring and motivating MOMS to take care of themselves first and lead their best lives. We love her advice to help make us all more happy, peaceful and positive mamas.

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Does anyone ever set a goal to simply be happier? This may seem like a modest goal, but achieving it can be difficult when you are constantly busy and have small children consuming your life. But…2012 can be different. This year is brimming with energy and excitement, and I have a feeling it’s going to be a breakthrough year! Setting goals and realizing success are two keys to feeling happy, and there are a few other practices that the happiest people do regularly that we can all incorporate to bring more joy to our daily lives. Here are a few ideas to get you thinking:

Set Goals and Move Towards Your Dream Life

When is the last time you sat down and visualized your absolute dream life situation? Are you living it now? If not, what would you need to do to get there? I encourage you to get clear on what you want in your life now, in the next year, and in the next five years. Maybe you are home with a baby now, but you envision yourself as a business owner, teacher, or blogger. Set small goals that help you lean toward your bigger goals and dreams. If you aren’t clear about what you really want out of life, how can you ever achieve it? When setting goals, make sure they are realistic and have a time frame. Then, hold yourself accountable. So, you want to start a blog? Then do some research on blog platforms and determine what you want to write or photo-document. Only you can bring your gifts, thoughts, and ideas to the world in your fabulous, unique way!

Take More Time For Yourself

Do you crave more time to exercise, read, sleep, or simply relax and catch your breath? There are more opportunities to take time for yourself than it might seem. During your kid’s naps, do you clean and accomplish task after task? Maybe a day or two each week, instead of cleaning and working you should just indulge in a guilty pleasure (think yummy lunch and catching up on recorded Bachelor), or get your kids involved in a little project while you curl up with a cup of tea and enjoy a fabulous book. In the evening, put your kids to bed early and take a bath while sipping on a glass of wine! Happy moms are those who take really good care of themselves so they have the energy to love and care for their families!

Be Completely Present with your Children

Focus on the task at hand while working, but when you are with your kids, try to give them your focused attention. We obviously can’t do this all day long, but how often do you sit down with your kids and revel in the moment with them, giving them your full attentiveness? It’s another way of fully living and experiencing your wonderful life. You are blessed to be a mother!

Find the Right Work/Life Balance

I’ve worked outside the home full-time, part-time, and not at all, and it took doing all of them to determine the work/life balance that suited me best. Do you feel at peace with the way you are living your life? Do you suffer from guilt while at work, or discontent and boredom while at home? There are so many solutions and alternatives that can allow you the time you crave with your family while also using your creative gifts and intellect. The same goes for balancing constant work and cleaning with downtime and enjoying the fruits of your labor. Make sure you are balancing your time in a way that honors your priorities in life!

Do Something Every Day That Brings You Joy or Makes You Laugh

Life should be fun to be lived to the fullest! And really, raising kids can offer you many opportunities to laugh every day. I remember one day when my oldest daughter was a few months old, and had a serious diarrhea blowout all over her adorable outfit, her blankets, and the car seat. What a mess! There was poop everywhere and I just wanted to cry. As I was trying to wash off my screaming baby in the tub while surrounded by poopy, smelly clothes everywhere, my husband walked in from work and said with a smile, “shitty day, huh?” and I just burst out laughing. It was just what I needed, and made light of what really was a humorous situation. Imagining what I looked like was definitely funny. I even had poop on my cheek. As mothers, we will experience many difficult and sometimes super-gross situations with babies… all you can do is laugh. If your kids don’t offer you enough humor, then be sure to find other things that make you smile. Call that funny friend or watch an episode of Modern Family. People who laugh easily are more fun to be around and enjoy the health benefits that laughter brings, such as: improved immune function due to boosted levels of infection-fighting antibodies, better digestion, and enhanced sleep!

In closing, I wish each of you a more joyful, fun, and serene 2012! If you’d like more inspiration every day, check my website Her Inspired Life and sign up for a free seven-day Inspired Life Kick-Start Plan! Also, my new book, One Hot Mama: The Guide to Getting Your Mind and Body Back After Baby, will be published by Hay House in the fall of this year.

I’ve been a fan of author Anna Quindlen for years (and years). My admiration was confirmed in May of 1999 when she spoke at my college graduation. It was an amazing speech: inspiring, timely and perfectly suited for me and the other women graduating and entering the working world. Her speech was so great, in fact, that it was later expanded into a best-selling book called Being Perfect. I saw her speak again last spring about her latest novel, the powerful Every Last One, and she is just as eloquent, intelligent and fabulous when chatting “off the cuff” as she is in her writings.

I’m sharing this essay called Good-bye Dr. Spock, which is included in the collection of essays called Loud  and Clear, now because it’s a great reminder in the new year to appreciate our children even when they’re taxing, tiring and troubling. It’s long but you won’t regret taking a couple minutes to read the entire thing.

Read, remember and pass it on.

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Good-bye Dr. Spock

All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow, but in disbelief.

I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like.

Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves.

Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the b ooks I once poured over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach, T. Berry Brazelton, Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education – all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations – what they taught me, was that they couldn’t really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay.

No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.

When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent, this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing.

Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton’s wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the ‘Remember-When-Mom-Did’ Hall of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language – mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, ‘What did you get wrong?’ (She insisted I include that here.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald’s drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

Even today I’m not sure what worked and what didn’t, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I’d done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over t he top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That’s what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts.

It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.

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Anna Quindlen is the author of five previous bestselling novels (Rise and Shine, Blessings, Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue), and seven nonfiction books (A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Good Dog. Stay., Being Perfect, Loud & Clear, Living Out Loud, Thinking Out Loud, and How Reading Changed My Life). Her New York Times column “Public and Private” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. From 2000-2009, She wrote the “Last Word” column for Newsweek.Check out Anna Quindlen’s collection of short stories, novels and essays at our affiliate Amazon.com.