In a parking lot lately, a movement caught the corner of my eye. I turned to see a dad, probably in his late 30s, soaring through the parking lot on the back of a shopping cart. The wind blew through his thinning hair, and for a moment I was caught up in the exhilaration of the ride. I couldn't see the faces of his children in the cart, but I'm sure they were laughing.

There are a lot of worthy goals to make at the beginning of a new year. We can run a marathon and finally write that novel, scrape our popcorn ceilings or scrapbook the first 10 years of a child's life. But here's a goal I'm going to tack in bold letters at the top of my list:

I'm going to laugh more with my kids, in that free and easy way that only children know how to laugh. I'm going to laugh because life is funny, not like a sitcom or a "Shrek" movie, which bends us toward the snide and cynical, but funny because it is as spontaneous and joyful as a flying shopping cart.

There is that oft-quoted, maddening claim that children laugh 300 times per day while adults sputter along at a mere 15 laughs. When my first child was born, I was determined to defy those numbers: I laughed at spit bubbles, leaky diapers and crazy seagulls at the beach.

But then life and fatigue and a bunch of wild kids caught up with me, and suddenly laughter wasn't so easy. I watch the faces of other parents when I pick up my son from school. They are pinched and furrowed, and they tug their kids behind them like train cars, telling them to pick up their feet, zip their backpack, and for heaven's sake watch where you're going. I recognize it as a mirror image of myself. I'm already thinking about the litany of things to be done when I get home — the shopping, homework, dinners, lessons and meetings.

But once in a while I tune in to what my son is trying to tell me. Today it's a funny story they read in class, something about a cat who causes trouble until his owners threaten to kick him out. And he can't even get through the plot because he's giggling so hard, and soon I'm laughing too.

I think a lot of parents want to laugh with their kids, but we go hunting for it in the wrong places. We schlep our kids off to Gattitown for a night in front of video games, or a day at Fiesta Texas or the zoo. But I never find myself laughing in those long lines in the hot sun holding a leaking snow cone. My kids and I laugh on our walks home from school, over the dinner table, or during games of hide-and-seek before bedtime. It's at those times away from crowds and forced entertainment when the stress of the day gets set aside for a suspended moment.

I recently read The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Slavomir Rawicz (2006, The Lyons Press), which is about a Polish man sent to a concentration camp in Siberia during World War II. He makes this observation: The people he appreciated the most during that time, chained to 30 other men and walking through the snow, were those who made humor out of hardship, who laughed at the irony of life and situation.

There is so much about parenting that is tedious and frustrating, from the young years of diapers, tantrums and messes to the teen years of rebellion and bigger messes. And on those days when I'm about to lose it, I call my mom and she always says, "Tiffany, you just need to laugh more with your kids."

She preaches by example. There was a lot of laughter in our house growing up. My mom taught us how to stick pantyhose on our head and pull them just right so our faces contorted like space aliens. To clean her floor, she taped sponges to our feet and let us skate around the kitchen. She hasn't changed much: For my son's fourth birthday, she presented him with a whoopee cushion.

My first driving experience is etched in both our memories. When I was 15, Mom took me to the Burger Center parking lot in South Austin. There was only one other car driving through the vast parking lot, but when it headed my direction I panicked, slammed on the gas, hopped the curb and ran right through the 10-foot fence around the stadium and into the chain-link fence that surrounds the track.

My mom and I stared at each other in horror, then looked at our van lodged deep in the fence and began to laugh. We laughed until the tears rolled down our cheeks, and we kept on laughing until the police arrived.

That's really what it's all about. We're all lodged deep into something, our jobs and houses and the day-to-day treadmill and the hope that our children will become contributing members of the larger race of people.

And if we can teach them one thing, and teach ourselves as well (which is really what parenting is all about), it's that the disentanglement, the pulling out from the fence, will go so much smoother if we can do it while laughing.

This article originally appeared in the Austin American-Statesman, and is used here by permission.