I STILL GET EXCITED ABOUT STUPID LITTLE THINGS “I never want to become too grown-up to be ridiculously happy about something small.” Alessandra Graziella Di'Stefano I still get excited like a child. I’m forty years old and apparently nobody has informed that part of me that we’re supposed to be more composed by now. 😂 When it snows, I’m happy. Really happy. I still want to watch it fall. I still get excited about a beautiful dress, a perfume I love, good food, the ocean, or seeing somebody else genuinely happy. Sometimes it takes almost nothing to put me in a good mood. I never want to change that about myself. There are parts of growing older that I appreciate very much. I know myself better. I’m more comfortable saying no. I don’t feel the same need to explain every decision I make. But I don’t understand why maturity is sometimes confused with becoming harder to impress. I can be a grown woman and still get ridiculously excited when something makes me happy. Animals are probably the easiest way to prove this. 😂 Give me an animal doing something completely ridiculous and whatever serious thought I was having five seconds earlier is gone. I love laughing. I always have. Sometimes I laugh so hard that my face hurts, and apparently my face has been keeping records because I have the smile lines to prove it. I used to look at those little lines around my eyes and think about aging. Now I look at them differently. Of course I have smile lines. I’ve smiled a lot. I’ve laughed until I couldn’t breathe properly. I’ve made ridiculous faces in photographs. I’ve squinted into the sun. I’ve laughed with people I love over things that would make absolutely no sense if we tried to explain them to anybody else. My face has been participating in my life for forty years. I’m not sure why I expected it to come out looking unused. Nico and I recently went to have our hair colored together, something we used to do when we were teenagers. Between the two of us, I honestly believe we have attempted every hair color legally available to the public. 😂 This time we ended up with some kind of medium brown/auburn situation. I already know there’s a very good chance I’ll be reaching for black dye soon. The hair color wasn’t really what made me happy, though. Sitting beside my brother doing something we used to do when we were young did. That’s what I mean by the simple things. They aren’t necessarily important enough to announce. Sometimes nothing remarkable happened at all. You laughed. Somebody you love was sitting beside you. Your food was really good. It snowed. You found a perfume that made you stop and smell your wrist seventeen times. An animal did something stupid. You stood near the ocean and listened to it for a while. I’ve had enough serious things happen in my life to know they will arrive without an invitation. I don’t need to practice being serious while nothing is wrong. So when happiness shows up, even in some tiny ridiculous form, I’m going to let myself have it. I’m going to laugh loudly. I’m going to get excited about snow. I’m going to wear the dress and probably buy another perfume I absolutely do not need. 😂 And the smile lines can stay. I worked for those. ❤️ Alessandra Graziella Di'Stefano © 2026 Alessandra Graziella Di'Stefano. All rights reserved. - @alessandra.distef3