My Semi-Annual Closet Purge

This is a post I've been very excited about. My first Before and After!

Twice a year I go through all my clothes. I do this in April and October. I check for fit, appropriateness for my current state of childbearing, and general satisfaction with my wardrobe.

This time around I wanted to get closer to a capsule wardrobe. I used Pintrest to grab all sorts different opinions on what should be in a capsule wardrobe. Some were useful while others some seemed not to fit what I wanted to get out of my closet.

I'll do my next Beauty post on the links that were my favorites.

In the end, after attempting to form several different capsule clusters, I realized I should've just started with the most basic advice: Shop Your Closet and what you don't "buy", don't keep. With that and putting away the seasonal clothes, I was able to clean up my closet considerably.

Now I have a spare suitcase full of the winter clothes (seeing as we are now in the summer season) and another suitcase full of maternity clothes and the pieces I can't breastfeed in (I'm only halfway through that phase with my second baby).

Picture time!

Here is everything that was in my closet plus all my extra boxes. 

And now everything that could be hung up is on the rod. I have a spare room that doesn't have a closet to speak of so it has this awesome long rod for me to play with. I should mention that this pole is twice as long as the pole in my closet. It's great for having a separate space to (hopefully) do wardrobe consultations in the future.

This is what was left after the "shopping" and separation. I used to think I wanted to have some of every color of the rainbow. This may have stemmed from my organization style of having my closet arranged in rainbow order.

I had finally gotten tops to fill the orange and green gaps in my rainbow, and then I realized I had gotten Type 1 colors. I didn't notice this until I was looking at them and a few other pieces and I realized that they looked like candy by each other. "Candy" is how I describe the Type 1 color palette. I've since gifted them to my Type 1 sister-in-law.

And here is my finished closet. I used to hang my skirts separate from my tops (in their own rainbow, of course). This time around I decided to integrate them into the overall rainbow. (Notice the spectrum gap between the red and the blue?)

As a Type 4 I fully embrace my mainstays of black and white and love my bold accent colors. My closet now shows that.

I look forward to talking more about color schemes in the future.

5 Things I Want to Master Before My Birthday

Think of this as a mini bucket list.

I have mentioned how I want to get my life more figured out before my 25th birthday. That is in October so I have a deadline.

As a thorough Type 4, I have high standards for myself. My Type 2 tempers that a little with being a bit more relaxed about things, but at times my Type 4 fights back and accuses my Type 2 for settling for mediocrity. There are a few, maybe more, areas where my critical eye sees the possibility of improvement.

I'm not going to lie: I'm not super excited about doing these Improvement posts which probably means I really need to do it for myself. Change is hard and so is self-examination. Here it goes.

1. Exercise

I've already been working on getting more consistent about exercising. I love doing my morning yoga and I've gotten to the point where my days feels off if I miss my morning refresher.

I've cobbled together my own routine. I start with the warm-up from Maya Fiennes' Root Chakra video before doing a round of leg stretches, and close with some Sun Salutations. I feel good about it.

I would like to go the next step of incorporating more toning exercises to target my trouble areas. These don't have to happen all at once, but I'd like to see more thigh trimming, triceps toning, and fix my diastasis recti. Thanks to Pintrest I have plenty of possible workouts on hand to try.

2. Food 

From the beginning of our marriage, meal planning has been a big goal of mine. It's taken me almost five years to make any big progress here.

My big breakthrough has been switching to once a month freezer cooking. I love it. I get all the prep done in one day, I make sure I have a good variety of meals to avoid food boredom (there's my T1 popping out), and most of the meals I use are crock pot recipes. The foundation is getting in place.

The room for improvement is less with dinners and more with lunches and snacks. It's not like I don't have food on hand. That is surely not the problem. But I would like to make more deliberate choices in these areas. I have a mini library of diet books that I'm going to look to for more direction in how to go about reining in my impulsiveness when it comes to my less-supervised food choices.

3. Diet

I am also planning on doing another round of the Whole 30 regiment come August.

I've already done this diet once back in February 2015 and I felt I had great success with it. I didn't lose a whole lot of weight on in (only about 5 pounds, nothing to sniff at), but I did lose some inches and my skin cleared up wonderfully.

Cutting refined grains and other junk for a month is hard but definitely worth it. I'm really looking forward to it, mostly for the acne clearing benefits. My "Sugar Dragon" has gotten out of control and it visibly "breathes" through my face and I get quite self-conscious about it.

4. Scar Removal

On the subject of my face, I don't think I get super bad acne, but what I do get I have a hard time leaving alone. So I'm looking for ways to erase my scars.

I recently discovered a line of products from Rodan and Fields that sounds really effective, but before I even really consider shelling out the $500 I'd like to see what I can accomplish with things a little more within my reach.

Again, thanks to Pintrest, I have plenty of ideas to try.

5. A More Uncluttered Life 

My first thought in regards to clutter is strictly all the physical stuff of life. I'm not calling my house a mess generally speaking, but we just have so much stuff. Fortunately we have a bigger house to hold all of it but it still gets under my skin just how much stuff we have. And it just feels so good to be able to clear out the junk we don't need hanging around.

Case in point, we just went through our library of books and were able to move several boxes of books out. The funny thing is that the point of this exercise was to make room for the books we know we'll want to get in the future.

I forgot to take pictures so there won't be a separate post about this. You'll have to take my word when I say that, visually, it doesn't really look like we made a dent, but aesthetically speaking it looks a lot better. Before, a lot of the books were just stacked according to size to get more on the shelves. Now everything is upright with the spines all facing out, so there is more color if nothing else.

This was an instance of assessing our belongings in a Good-Better-Best standard. In general, I'd like to lean more towards the Quality over Quantity view, working to get to the Less is More theory.

I think there can also be a metaphysical kind of clutter to be cleared out as well.

Here there is another motto I'm working on adapting. I picked it up from Freakonomics. Recently they did a "Self-Improvement Month" series of podcasts. In the "How to Become Great at Just About Anything" episode there was great focus on the work of Anders Ericsson's work on "deliberate practice".

For me, the "deliberate" part of the phrase is what keeps bouncing around my brain. I'd like to be more deliberate in all areas of my life; to live more "on purpose" and less "just because".

So I hope you like Before and After posts as much as I do because there are going to be quite a few in my future.

My DYT Story: The Recipe of Me

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then it stands to reason that I ought to go about describing the set of lenses through which I see the world around me.

Disclaimer: This post contains something like an affiliate link. I am a DYT (Dressing Your Truth) club member so I can get referral benefits, but this blog is not yet affiliated directly with Carol Tuttle. With continued support I might get there someday. For now I'm just a really big fan of the program.

I begin with a story...

Once upon a time I was pregnant. Well, actually I had just given birth to my first son and my mom was hanging out at the hospital with me before I got to go home. To pass the time she read me a book: Carol Tuttle's Discover Your Type of Beauty. This is where my DYT experience began.

The abridged version of my mom's discovery of this system is that she was looking for ways to better understand her children's personalities. She had already guessed that I was either a Type 4 or Type 2 of Carol's four Types. It turns out she was right. In listening to her read and as I read it myself, I was able to confirm that I am a dominant Type 4 with Type 2 as my secondary.

As a college graduation present, my mom went ahead and bought a DYT club membership for me. This included my own copy of the book as well as all the online resources and a Style Guide card. Admittedly, it took me a couple of months to get around to completing the order and telling them where to send the book and card. (I was busy enjoying my newborn.) But once it all arrived, I dove right in and it has become my new obsession.

I loved being able to say "yes" to so much  of what I read and then being able to go through my closet and redefine my style.

Make that LOVE.

I have always enjoyed watching makeovers and seeing Before and Afters, and here I got to do my very own. 

It has been a couple of years since then and the full-on obsession has quieted down a bit, but I now see the world through the lens of the Types. I try to use Carol's overall Energy Profiling system in my parenting, in my interactions with my husband, and in managing my own outward experiences.

Just for fun, I thought I'd reread the book and take notes on what parts of all the Types I felt a resonance with. We have all four Types within us but to different degrees, and so I had begun to envision a set of sliders that showed how much of each Type was in me. In this read-through with my notes, I was able to crunch some numbers and come up with my slider positions. And here they are!

As you can see, Type 4 is very dominant. To keep the graphic clean I didn't stick in the percentages I came up with, but I can list them quickly:

• Type 1: 5%
• Type 2: 21%
• Type 3: 9%
• Type 4: 65%

I did this partly to see where the other two Types stood in relation to my dominant and secondary Types. I'm not really surprised with my results.

Now that you can see my "Recipe" I guess I should do more to explain the ingredients. Each Type is generally described in terms of motion and how you move through life. In the book there is lots more detail on the different ways and characteristics that fall under each Type.

The Type 1 movement is upward and light involving randomness and adaptability to change quickly. I seem to only have a pinch of Type 1 in me. The highlights I can pull from my notes are that I can get bored when it comes to the food I make and sometimes with the clothes in my closet. This is part of why I love trying new recipes and shopping at thrift stores when I'm feeling a need of an infusion of New in my wardrobe.

Type 2 is my secondary. This movement is described as fluid and flowing. My emphasis here is creating comfort in my life. I am sensitive, nurturing, a good listener, a planner, soft spoken, and I don't really enjoy change. I enjoy comfort foods, I organize things in piles, and I have to touch the clothes that I might buy to make sure they are soft and feel good in my hands before I try them on. I can get caught up in focusing on details and I have been a bit of a pack rat when it comes to objects of sentimental value. I also feel that having so much Type 2 in me lends itself well to my massage therapy training; people tend to fall asleep during sessions with me, which is awesome in my profession.

I only have a dash of Type 3. This is active and reactive and is much more abrupt and forceful. In this area I enjoy results and making To Do lists, but I lack the actual push of a full Type 3 to get things in motion most of the time. I guess that is why I am attracted to this Type as my opposite. My husband is a Type 3 and I actually prefer Type 3 colors in my interior designs.

I had a full three pages of notes of my Type 4-ness.  Picking just a couple of highlights is going to be hard for me. (Expect a separate post on this in the future.)

This movement is constant and still with a very reflective quality. The natural gift of a Type 4 is Perfecting. I like to think of it as Editing, but I use it in more than just my writing. This gift applies to how I go about living my secondary and tertiary Types. My Type 1 inspires me to vary my cooking, but my Type 4 searches out the best recipes. My Type 4 helps me not get stuck on details, reduces my pack rat tendencies, and helps me create a repeatable massage to refine my Type 2-ness. The Type 3 results that I love seeing the most are anything that even resembles a Before and After piece because those are the essence of Editing.

I just can't condense the biggest part of me any farther in this post. Look forward to more Type 4 related posts in the future. (I'll add links as they are written.)

In the mean time, if you want to begin your own Dressing Your Truth adventure, check out this link to start with the free online course. (Here's where I can get referral benefits, if you were wondering.) If you are anywhere in the Montpelier, ID area or are connected to me through social media, I'd love to be a helpful guide in your journey. I love answering questions and you can count on me if you need help tackling your closet.

Bon voyage!

Why Motherhood is Worth It

Happy Mother's Day!

This just seems perfect. My first testimony post is in time for Mother's Day and I was already wanting to talk about motherhood as an extension of introducing myself in these first posts.

In real time, I'm in the midst of a great need to remind myself of why I am doing this on a day to day basis.

Motherhood is hard.

But it is always worth it. Sometimes we just lose sight of that in the moment.

And yet, this was always my dream job. Growing up I knew two things for sure: I was going to get married in the temple and be a stay-at-home mom. I did get married in the Rexburg temple and I am so blessed to have a  husband who provides sufficiently for our family to allow me to be a stay-at-home mom.

So being a mother has always been a high priority for me. But why? What are my incentives? I explored this before I ever got pregnant in a paper I wrote for a college English class. I could just link to it, but to save you having to read ten double-spaced pages of well-documented research, I'll just quote my abstract.

In this piece the author explores the question as to why mothers should stay home to nurture their children by looking at the results of having the mother absent from the lives of their children. These include the rising rates of child obesity, misbehaviors, and other symptoms of unhappiness in children and adolescents. This author proposes that such problems are largely due to mothers being absent and neglecting the nurture of their children. Therefore this author has an increased resolve to be a stay-at-home mother herself for the benefit of her children.

Basically, I got to look at all the bad stuff that can happen when there isn't a stay-at-home mom in the picture and that was more than enough incentive. I wanted my babies to be healthy, happy, and safe, and I felt I was best able to make that happen.

Now that I am a mother in truth I can see all the little moments that make it all worth while. I love that I can count on getting smiles from my baby and I love it when my toddler just wants to snuggle. They both amaze me each and every day. Watching them grow and progress is what gives me warm fuzzies.

It's the occasional tantrum when they are both crying and I'm at the end of my rope that I forget the big "Why am I Doing This".

I am doing this because I believe in being a nurturer and I take The Family: A Proclamation to the World as my pattern.

Parents have a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness, to provide for their physical and spiritual needs, and to teach them to love and serve one another, observe the commandments of God, and be law-abiding citizens wherever they live...Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities. By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.

Love and compassion are my foundation. Repentance and forgiveness are my daily tools. And my faith is strengthened everyday as I learn a little more how to be Christ-like. My children show me what Christ meant when he commanded us to "become as little children" (Matt. 18:3). My children are the greatest examples of forgiveness in my life, which shows me where I have much room to improve.

My sweetest moments are when I just tell my babies that I love them and in my heart I feel heavenly echos reminding me that I too am loved even more than I can comprehend.

So, yes, being a mother is hard, but it is also my path to Heaven. The path is often bumpy, but I don't walk it alone.

In God’s eternal plan, salvation is an individual matter; exaltation is a family matter. (Elder Russell M. Nelson)

 That is why it is worth it. Eternally worth it.