Good morning! I hope everyone had fabulous and restful weekends — they always go by waaaay too fast, but c’est la vie.

For today’s Marvelous in My Monday (as always, big thanks to Katie from Healthy Diva Eats for hosting), it’s all about a) spring, and b) random uplifting things to make y’all smile (I think we can all agree that Mondays need some help in the happiness department, amirite?).

I have to say: I’m incredibly happy about the glorious return of Daylight Savings Time (I know I wrote about this yesterday, but hey, this girl loves her sunshine). While it certainly has its downsides — most notably losing an hour and the fact that it’s dark in the mornings — I feel like it’s more than worth it for the extra hour of daylight in the evenings.

Now that we live in a bright and sunny apartment with west-facing windows, the evening sun is especially fabulous. It streams into our apartment, casting a beautiful golden-pinkish glow throughout the whole place. I absolutely love it. Considering that we were blocked in by other buildings and got almost no natural light in our old apartment, the abundance of sun here makes me sublimely happy. I can neither confirm nor deny the allegation that I may or may not do a happy dance whenever I walk in the door at the end of the day and am greeted by gorgeous light and the occasional beautiful sunset.

I also decided to celebrate the return of daylight savings time and the impending return of spring by baking gluten-free, vegan muffins. I used a mix of raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries in honor of the fact that berry season is around the corner (who has two thumbs can can’t wait for strawberries to be in season? This girl!), and they turned out beautifully. I also used a mix of almond meal, quinoa flour, and potato starch for the flour, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

In addition to sunlight, warm weather, and celebratory GF muffins, I found some little nuggets of uplifting awesomeness on the interwebz this weekend — so, if your Monday is in need of a little pep talk, check these out:

1) Waiter Who Defended Boy With Down’s Syndrome Gives All Donations to Charity: A waiter in Houston came to the defense of a little boy with Down’s when some ridiculously rude restaurant patrons made disparaging comments about said child. Read this and smile.

2) People all over the world, join in, start a (self) love train, a (self) love train: this is an awesome, awesome, awesome (did I say awesome enough?) video. Ladies and gents, we all have flaws — but more importantly, we all have strengths, gifts, talents, and wonderful personality traits. It’s easy to focus on our perceived shortcomings (I know I fall into that trap more often than I’d like to admit), but I propose that we all take a moment today to focus on the things we appreciate about ourselves. Seriously. Take 60 seconds and brainstorm a list of everything you like about yourself. Now keep that list somewhere accessible, so you can pull it out whenever you need to be reminded how awesome you are.

3) This Buzzfeed list of the 30 Happiest Facts of All Time is, quite simply, amazeballs. You’ll laugh! You’ll squee! You’ll learn random but funny facts! You’ll probably read through it a second time because it’s just that awesome! (And for real: pufflings. How effing adorable is that? Someday when I have kids, I’ll be enormously tempted to call them pufflings. They probably won’t appreciate that motif at all, but oh well.)

Hope everyone has a wonderful day — here’s to being one day closer to the weekend.