This is the last weekend of April bringing the first third of a year to a close. I am always amazed at how fast the time flies and I am gearing up for an even busier May. But before we rush into that, I am going to enjoy some mid-Spring fun with our Happiness is Homemade features.
There is a beauty in stillness. But for much of my life, I did not know how to be still. I lived a life in perpetual motion. Fighting for all I achieved. Learning first hand the weight of my opinions by trial and tribulation. Nothing came easy for me. Including learning how to find the beauty in stillness.
Despite my accomplishments, I was restless. I just didn’t know this wanderlust was a masquerade of self-doubt in my life. Now several hard earned years later, I crave this stillness. It’s a vital part of my personal self-care. Whether that means sitting on my patio drinking a latte or tending to the roses in my garden, I always take time each day to lavish in calming moments of certainty.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that stillness didn’t come naturally to me. For most of my 20’s, I was addicted to busyness. I prided myself in being busy to a fault. Stillness came to my life by way of financial strife, massive weight gain, two miscarriages, strife in my marriage, and debilitating anxiety and depression. My body forced me into a life-changing stillness.
Stillness also became a spiritual quest. I learned that stillness wasn’t the absence of progression but my refuge from strife. The feeling of omnipresence through the faithful practice of peace. For the stillness I longed for wasn’t to be found in my fearful crying in the night or the aggressive busyness of my days, but in the beautiful periods of silence where I could better equip my heart to mind my own sense of self.
It’s been said that people average upwards of 50,000 thoughts a day. Thoughts that for me weren’t always pretty. You know the ones: I can’t do it. It’s too hard. I’m a failure. Moments that plagued my life for years. Thoughtless moments that needed to be made still.
While the world demands an arduous hustle, stillness requires me to receive only love, peace, and guidance. With this in mind, I’d love to share with you ways I’ve been able to bring more stillness into my life.
Tips on ways to bring stillness to your own life:
1) Meditation. Quieting the mind requires practice. One powerful way to shut up thoughts that don’t serve us is by practicing meditation. Just taking five minutes each day away from others to meditate to focus our attentions away from the hectic world can help bring lasting joy and progress to your day.
2) Learn to enjoy the silence. Many people are intimidated by silence. Silence causes you to address issues your running from. It’s easy to fill each day with busyness like mind-numbing television viewing or scrolling media feeds online. Nothing wrong there. However, if this used to fill a void, over time, the toll will manifest itself in the form of lost relationships, opportunities, and dreams. Instead, consider silence as part of your personal self-care routine.
3) Adopt a new mantra. The next time you have fearful and anxious thoughts that are raging within you, silence those thoughts by saying, “Peace, be still.” Rely on the strength of your own words being manifested into the universe. When you need strength, use your words.
4) Create new thought ratios. If you find yourself indulging in busyness, create new rations for stillness. For each negative thought, replace it with two instances of positivity. Over time, you’ll start to organically replace negativity in your mood, home, business, and interpersonal relationships. When it comes to thought, it’s just about the numbers!
5) Practice stillness. Leave yourself a sticky note of praise. Schedule alone time. Practice being a more grateful person. Do this and stillness will become like second nature.
Moreover, stillness makes me more an accountable person. It drives me to be peaceable, poised and purposed. I fervently believe that stillness is the physical embodiment of joy. Stillness helps me not just look put together but to be put together. Which is why I also love the new line of tees from Cents of Style, the Be Series Graphic T-Shirts.
Being able to literally wear my mantra of stillness makes this the perfect t-shirt for me. It’s all about replacing fast fashion for inspirational, practical pieces. I mean what’s easier than throwing on a comfy pair of distressed jeans, sandals, and an oh-so-inspirational tee?
These Be Series Graphic T-Shirts could also easily be styled with slacks and a cardigan, paired with a floral spring skirt, or layered over capris and tanks. The options are endless! Making this shirt capsule wardrobe ready. Cents of Style definitely delivered with these t-shirts!
This tee is stylishly fashionable, but still practical for my everyday needs and luckily for me (and you), they’re on sale for $15.95 (with FREE SHIPPING), using promo code BESTORY. Remember, this deal is valid this weekend, 4/28 through 4/30 only. And for all my fellow curvy girls, Cents of Style offers the Be Series Graphic T-Shirts in sizes S-2X, so those of us who have sexy and voluptuous curves can enjoy them too. Be still my heart!
So, friends, I encourage you all to approach life, and our trials, in stillness. To life free from the noise of anxiety. To live a life marked by the comfort of stillness. And if you want to start your journey of stillness by snagging a Cents of Style Be Series Graphic T-Shirts, that’s cool too!
Be still, friends,
Composting is a sacred act. Especially to those in the zero-waste community. Composters who consistently, deliberately, and thoughtfully tend to the transformation of waste into life-giving garden nutrients are among the biggest rock stars of the green movement. For without the cycle of decay life on this planet could not exist, and it is truly one of the best and most sustainable ways to keep your gardens at home thriving season after season.
Now you may be thinking, we’re just discussing rot here, right? We are. But composting is far more than just free fertilizer for the garden. It’s a vital and necessary sustainability strategy for reducing waste, closing the nutrient cycle, and preventing air pollution that causes climate change.
Composting can remove well over half of your household waste stream while reducing the burden on landfills. Composting can also provide homeowners with a cost-effective means of replenishing your lawn, trees, houseplants, or garden.
Still, there is an even more compelling reason we should all be composting. When organic matter like food waste goes to landfills, it ends up decomposing anaerobically—or without oxygen. This process creates methane, a greenhouse gas 20-35 times more potent than carbon dioxide, the chemical responsible for global warming. Which contrary to what many politicians will tell you is a very real problem facing our planet’s future, as landfills in the United States third-largest source of compiled methane emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Compost can also help households deal with the food waste epidemic.
When we scrape off our dishes after a large meal, we rarely pause and think about the significance of our action. It seems routine to us: if we have leftover food scraps, shouldn’t they be thrown in the garbage? Our routine practices, unfortunately, make it difficult for us to conceptualize the magnitude of global food waste. The problem is bigger than we think.
According to a recent report by UNEP and the World Resources Institute (WRI), about one-third of all food produced in this country annually, with an estimated worth of $1 trillion dollars, gets wasted in America each year. That’s about 1:4 calories intended for consumption is never actually eaten and ends up in the trash. Which means that in a world full of hunger, ever growing food prices, and social unrest much should be done to curb food waste in this nation.these statistics are more than environmentally, morally, and economically egregious considering that
These statistics are all the more than environmentally, morally, and economically egregious considering roughly 40% of all food processed each day in America will end up in landfills. In a nation where 42.2 million Americans live in food insecure households, including 29.1 million adults, 1:6 veterans and elderly persons, and 13.1 million children. A staggering 13% percent of all US households.
So what can be done about food waste at home? Plenty! Buy only the foods you will consume and regularly enjoy. Reconsider your buying habits. Implement meal planning to determine how you will use up foods that are purchased. And for food that is set to expire at home, donate all nonperishable food products to food pantries. Composting should be a rational habit of disposing of organic food scraps and not a compulsory purging effort. The bottom line is this- Food does not belong in landfills.
It also goes without saying that there is no more powerful ingredient to soil health than compost. Whether you till it into your garden beds or use it as mulch around shrubs and trees, it is considered essential to organic and sustainable food production each season. Once it’s in the soil, finished compost—or garden humus—increases plant fertility, adds both micronutrients and macronutrients, buffers pH levels in zones prone to excess acidity, helps prevents many plant diseases, breaks down soil toxins, and improves soil structure. It’s like a booster shot to the soil.
Even for those without a garden, composting should still be a necessary household practice. It’s just as simple to compost your scraps as to walk them out to the trash. Many communities even offer neighborhood recitals or weekly curbside collections bins for your organic household waste. Waste which can be used to enrich local farms and co-ops that risk soil overuse the nation over. While this may seem daunting to start, composting will become second nature in no time flat!
Here a few tips to help get you started composting today:
1) A compost pile can be as easy as starting to rot a heap of veggie scraps, dead leaves, and grass clippings in the far corner of your yard, but most people, like myself, seek to contain their compost in a neat-looking compost bin.
2) In order to maintain my zero-waste kitchen, I keep a stack of compost bowls ready to collect scraps. A quick tip- to reduce the risk of fruit flies being attracted to your compost bowl, simply place your bowl in your freezer or deep freeze until ready to dump in your compost bin!
3) Let’s also consider your compost bin itself. There are many different kinds of compost bins to fit every living situation: simple pallet bins, tumblers, towers for urban yards, and even worm composters that fit in the space under your kitchen sink. To start composting, just be sure to select the bin style that works for you, and if it is an outdoor model, install it away from your house.
3) In my own home, we use bins constructed of already on hand hinges and free heat-treated pallet wood. Each bin took my husband under a half hour to construct. We also found that as bins fill up, the thermal energy they expel can cause the contents to expand. To remedy this, we added chicken wire around each box, as needed.
4) Compost is truly a work of nature in progress and is highly dependent on balance. An efficient compost pile is a careful balance of dry, brown things that contain carbon (like leaves, dried grass, straw, or shredded paper) and wet, green things that contain nitrogen (like fruit scraps or veggie peelings). So, for example, if you add a lot of shredded leaves or cardboard to the pile, you will need to balance and mix it with a nice heap of fresh grass clippings so things don’t get too dry, or vice versa.
5) You will also want to shred or chop your compostable items before you put them into the pile, as smaller items rot quicker than larger pieces. Slow-to-compost items like tree branches, nut shells, and hair can be added to the back of your compost pile to ensure you’re keeping your faster compost pile closer to the garden. Compost also requires weekly turning and aerating, moisture added as needed to maintain proper moisture, and items such as fish, meat or lipids, substances that create strong smells and attract critters from miles around to your yard, should be avoided.
A good rule of thumb when it comes to composting: When in doubt, leave it out.
7) So for those I still have with me on this composting thing, I also wanted to equip you with a starter list of 101 common household items that can be composted. Keeping in mind, the following list is simply a starter series and is meant to get you pondering over what can be composted daily and weekly from your home. To imagine how little you actually need to throw out each week at home!
101 Things You Should Be Composting At Home:
So, everyone, that’s my list of the 101 household items you should be composting daily. I hope this list will inspire you to start composting this summer season. Even if composting isn’t your cup of tea, I encourage you all to re-think your food waste at home. So friends, now I have to ask, do you compost at home? If so, I’d love to hear your best tips below!
Here’s to reducing food waste at home,
So a little more about what makes UpSpring Prenatal+ gummies so unique. These gummies are unique in the vast industry of prenatal’s due to their formulation, including Alpha GPC and a highly bioavailable form of choline, which provides baby with a blood-brain barrier to properly nourish your baby’s growing brain and enhance DHA absorption.
This formula also contains the natural form of vitamin B9, folate, instead of synthetic folic acid all in three delicious, all-natural mango-peach gummies and one easy-to-swallow tummy-friendly soft gel each day. With UpSpring Prenatal+ gummies you’ll get 100% of your needed daily value of 11 essential nutrients and brain-building omega-3 and Alpha GPC.
UpSpring prides itself in offering its consumer base with innovative solutions to the everyday health and wellness challenges new and experienced mothers and their babies alike. UpSpring provides mothers with a “more fun, less worry” promise, so what more could mom’s currently trying to conceive, like myself!
Happy Monday, everyone! Well, it’s time for another Meal Plan Monday! For us, this week is starting off to a cool overcast start here in Dixie. This past weekend was very easy and laid back. We finished our Spring Cleaning and worked on rearranging several rooms of furniture. Though I always look forward to tackling a new weekend warrior project each week, I also look forward to the pleasant certainty of a well planned, money-saving meal plan.
This week’s menu again reflects our need to eat down our food stockpile. As we are having to consume everything we have on-hand first, though we did purchase several items food and home consumables, each of which garnered us back online app rebates, which will give us groceries and products that can help us in the weeks to come for our family of three as part of a minimalist meal plan. Luckily, I estimate we only have five weeks worth of meals left to consume in our deep freeze. At that time we’ll switch gears and concentrate on eating down our pantry stockpile.
Also this past week I took the time to food journal for the first time in months. I went back over this past year’s journaling and will be using these pages to curate new menus in the months to come. This also included creating new go-to lunch options for this summer. Meals such as a bowl containing rice, half an avocado, a large piece of grilled salmon, a handful of almonds, and a massive spinach-carrot-cucumber-cherry tomato side salad with avocado oil, Greek seasoning, fresh mozzarella, and lemon juice. Options I can fix for myself and my family this coming Summer. That’s just the cat’s pajamas, in my opinion!
And last but not least, this past week I made sure to add proper supplements to my diet. This included: a multivitamin, vitamin B-complex, foliate (for my MTHFR gene mutation and PCOS), and an omega-3 fatty acids Creel supplement for heart health. Depending on your diet, these may not be necessary for everyone, but I noticed a considerable difference in my body after taking these supplements for just this past week.
So that’s my food, weight loss, and meal planning journey from this past week, and now this week’s meal plan!
Monday
Breakfast: Cereal with almond milk and bananas.
Lunch: Hummus, walnuts and carrot sticks with lemonade.
Snack: Grapes and String Cheese.
Dinner: Meatless Monday Vegan Black Bean Tacos, with steamed corn and lemonade.
Dessert: Frozen Greek yogurt, granola, and blueberries.
Tuesday
Breakfast: Cereal with almond milk and strawberries.
Lunch: Turkey and cheese sliders, with iced tea (with stevia)
Snack: Grapes and String Cheese.
Dinner: Taco Tuesday Slow Cooker Spicy Beef Flatbread Tacos with lemonade.
Dessert: Frozen Greek yogurt, granola, and blueberries.
Wednesday
Breakfast: Cereal with almond milk and Bananas.
Lunch: Turkey and cheese sliders, with iced tea (with stevia).
Snack: Grapes and String Cheese.
Dinner: Easy Paleo Chicken and Broccoli Stir Fry, with lemonade.
Dessert: Greek yogurt, granola, and blueberries.
Thursday
Breakfast: Cereal with almond milk and strawberries.
Lunch: Turkey and cheese sliders, with Crystal light lemonade.
Snack: Grapes and String Cheese.
Dinner: Bakes Zucchini, Greek yogurt, and quinoa gyros, with lemonade.
Dessert: Greek yogurt, granola, and blueberries.
Friday
Breakfast: Cereal with almond milk and strawberries.
Lunch: Turkey and cheese sliders, with Crystal light lemonade.
Snack: Grapes and String Cheese.
Dinner: Paleo Meatball Gyros with lettuce, peppers, carrots, Greek Yogurt dressing, and with iced tea (with stevia)
Dessert: Greek yogurt, granola, and blueberries.
Saturday
Breakfast: Cereal with almond milk and strawberries.
Lunch: Turkey and cheese sliders, with Crystal light lemonade.
Snacks: Grapes and String Cheese.
Dinner: Paleo Tacos served with corn and with iced tea (with stevia)
Dessert: Greek yogurt, granola, and blueberries.
Sunday
Breakfast: Cereal with almond milk and strawberries.
Lunch: Grilled cheese and granny smith apple sliders, with iced tea (with stevia).
Snack: Grapes and Fat-Free Feta Cheese.
Dinner: Crockpot Paleo Thai Green Curry and lemonade.
Dessert: Greek yogurt, granola, and blueberries.
This week’s meal plan cost: $31.45
So, that’s what we will be having this week. I’d love to hear what’s on your menu as well!
Here’s to Monday meal plans,
Paradise is calling! If you’re looking for a tropical vacation this summer, look no further! Enter the SOUR PATCH Kids Tropical Vacation Sweepstakes for a chance to win a trip for four to Hawaii! Just submit a tropical selfie to Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #spktropicalsweepstakes. Contest ends on May 31st, so get on it!
Find out more information here: SPKTropicalSweeps.com.
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Legal residents of 50 US/DC, 18+. Ends 5/31/17. To enter and for Official Rules, including odds & prizes: SPKTropicalSweeps.com. Void where prohibited.
And while you’re at it, try the new Tropical SOUR PATCH Kids Soft and Chewy Candy available at a Walmart store near you. All new flavors include Paradise Punch, Passion Fruit, Pineapple, and Tropical Twist. Which one is your favorite?