No matter what you look like or where you live, we all spend our lives searching for the same thing.
Today we have an epidemic of people wasting time and money by searching for happiness in all the wrong places. The Whens is revolutionary because its simple message can teach us where to find happiness now.
Who are our Whens then? To meet your Whens, all you need to do is complete the following sentence: I’ll be happy when…
Chances are you have no trouble coming up with a whole page of answers. But every answer is the same: Happy when instead of happy now.
The Whens are the brain child of my husband and emerging children’s book author Steve Hanson. The idea came one night while we were both chatting about how I thought I’d be happy when I lost 30 pounds, but I actually wasn’t. I felt confused and annoyed that a belief I had had since childhood (thin people were happy), wasn’t true. At first I thought I was the problem — maybe I hadn’t set my goal weight low enough — but that’s when it hit us: it wasn’t the goal weight but rather the whole system that was wrong. That’s when my husband reached for his notepad and penned The Whens.
In our classic graduation book, The Whens are monsters that come in all different colors and sizes, just like our “I’ll be Happy Whens…” Except our book encourages you to be brave enough to step off their trail and search for what actually gives you a long lasting smile in life.
When Steve first read me his book, I was excited at how he had condensed and simplified a very complicated idea about being happy now so that it could be accessible to young (and busy) people alike.
Hopefully this is a concept that can help people change the direction of their life to a much happier path.
We’ve had so much fun making Short Poems for Kids every Tuesday that we decided to start making a new riddle for kids every Monday! They’ll all be funny with a silly picture to help you figure out the answer.
While Steve and I were talking about riddles, we started talking about our favorite riddles as a kid – that’s when Steve pulled out a folder from his desk drawer labelled “Riddles”. I shouldn’t be surprised how well documented and organized he is, but it always shocks me a little.
As a kid, he used to play school and many of the assignments he gave out were riddles. He got the idea because one of his favorite elementary school teachers gave him riddles as extra credit to solve every week. (He didn’t actually get extra points for solving them, she just knew he loved riddles).
I did not document any of my riddles from childhood, but I can still remember two of my favorite riddles:
NATASHA’S FAVORITE KID’S RIDDLES
What’s black and white and red all over?
Solution: “A sunburnt zebra” or “a newspaper” but there are tons of other answers. Steve seems to think “A penguin with diaper rash” is a right answer!
If a man in a wet scuba suit is dead in a charred tree in the middle of a forest, how did he get there?
There was a forest fire and he got scooped up in a helicopter bucket while scuba diving.
STEVE’S BEST RIDDLES FOR KIDS
POEM RIDDLE
I go around in circles,
but always go straight ahead.
I never ever complain,
no matter where I am lead
A Wheel
HARD KID’S RIDDLES
You heard me before
Yet you hear me again.
Then I die
Till you call me again?
Your Echo
I turn around once, what is our will not get in
I turn around again, what is in will not get out
A Key
Lighter than what I am made of
More of me is hidden, than is seen
An Iceberg
I am only useful, when I am full
Yet I am always, full of holes
A Sponge
VERY HARD KID’S RIDDLES
John and Mary are on the floor. Mary is dead. There are pieces of broken glass and some water on the floor. How was Mary killed?
Mary is a fish and John is a cat. John pushed Mary’s bowl on the floor.
Two fathers and two sons went hunting and shot three ducks. Each got one duck. How could this be?
There were only three people hunting: a grandfather, a father and a son.
A father and son were involved in an auto crash. The father was killed and the son was rushed to the hospital. The surgeon rushed in and upon seeing the patient exclaimed, “ I can’t operate on my own son!” How could this be?
The surgeon was the boy’s mom.
A man was trying to go home, but he saw the man with a mask there, who was the man with the mask? Why was the man afraid to go home?
The man with the mask was the umpire and he was scared because he might call him out, he was playing baseball.
KID’S STORY RIDDLES – STORIES WITH HOLES
A man lives on the 35th floor, which is the top of an apartment building. Every day when he goes to work, he walks to the self-service elevator on his 35th floor, gets in, and rides it to the street level. Then he goes to his job. When he returns that evening, he gets in the self-service elevator on the street level and rides it up to the 20th floor. Then he gets out, goes to the stairwell and walks 15 flights of stairs up to his apartment. Why does he do this?? ( HINT: He does not want exercise. He rides up to the 20th floor every day except for the days someone else rides with him.)
The man is too short to reach all the way up to the floor 35 button.
This man was the first person to climb to the top of this mountain — but he wasn’t the first person to climb to the top of Mount Horrible. How could this be?
We all know that carrots give you good eyesight, but did you know that carrots also have excellent eyesight? How else could they see in their underground, mud world?
Carrots have two sets of hair: their baby hair and their adult hair. After the green baby hair pushes out of the ground, which is what humans see when they look at their gardens, it falls out and their adult hair grows in. Because we only see the baby hair that has fallen out, we think carrots are stationary, well-behaved, polite vegetables that never move — nothing could be further from the truth! Carrots are constantly on the move and build fabulous underground rooms that connect like a maze.
Since they don’t have many supplies to work with, they construct everything out of mud. They make dirt chandeliers, mud couches, mud tables, and even mud toilets — And the best way to get from one room to another is to take a mud slide! But one carrot always has to stay close to the surface to listen for harvest time — that way he can warn the other carrots to grab a hold of their baby hair and prepare to be picked!
The carrot in today’s story is named Fred Carrot and he was extremely happy . When he was on lookout duty for the carrot harvest, he heard a teenage girl blasting punk rock music from her bedroom. Fred loved punk rock and his favorite band was the one she had on: The Fertilizers.
After guard duty, Fred Carrot invited over his best-friend, who was another ground dwelling vegetable, to make chocolate mud-fins.
If Fred Carrot was so happy listening to his favorite band with his best friend, why was he constantly crying while cooking?
Because people hardly ever see Big Foots (and when they do they are distracted trying to snap a photo), most humans never realized that Big Foots have tiny feet. Tom and Sandra (two married Big Foots) certainly had small feet, but somehow they gave birth to a son with enormous feet. They named him Gerald after his grandfather and treated him like any normal-foot-sized son.
Gerald grew up like any other forest-dwelling ape child and excelled at badminton, but he always felt ashamed by his feet. One day after playing badminton, he came home in tears. His parents said, “There are 46 other ape-kids like you in the world, but only one with big feet. You are special and should be proud. Embrace your specialness.”
So Gerald became obsessed with everything related to feet — especially toes. He threw out his toaster and got a toe-ster — it’s much like a normal toaster but shaped like a pinkie toe and doesn’t burn your toast as often. He traded in his blow dryer for a toe dryer (a very important appliance to Big Foots since they have a lot of hair to dry after shampooing). At the end of a hard day of badminton, he would put his feet up on a toe-stool.
Winter was always one of Gerald’s happiest seasons. Not only did he get to play snow badminton, but he also was able to do his favorite winter activity. He could feel the wind through his mane and watch the world fly by. What was Gerald’s favorite winter activity?
