January 2022 Recap

I’m so excited to start writing recap posts for the blog. I’m working hard to create a beautiful life and I’ve done so many amazing things this month.

It is winter where I live and the temperatures are slowly becoming unbearable. During this time of year it is easy to stay home where it is warm and cozy but I love this time of year. I don’t mind the cold and I am always looking for a new activity to do with my girls. This month was a lot of fun. I did a lot of things for myself and with my kids! 

1. Visited The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

I live exactly one hour and twenty four minutes from the White House, and surprisingly I haven’t been to D.C. much at all in my life. I never really went as a kid, and I used to go every year for the Cherry Blossom Festival, but the city was so busy during that time of the year that I never had the opportunity to do anything else in the city.

I was reading a book about Pablo Picasso with my girls and the book said that some of his work was in Washington D.C. My daughter said we should go right now… so I looked at the time, checked out the website to make sure we could visit and all systems were go. 

We got ready in 20 minutes and before we knew it, we were on the way to D.C. It was a beautiful day. There was still some snow on the ground from the last snowfall but it wasn’t bitter cold. 

I made a mini vlog on instagram with some footage from our trip. We were able to see a lot of Picasso’s work. We even saw one of the portraits that we were reading about in the book that morning. It was absolutely delightful. 

2. I took an art class from Sophie Tea

I have no idea how I came across Sophie Tea on Instagram one day but I immediately fell in love with her art.

I love art so much and actually started painting during the lockdown of 2020 (crazy how that is a part of history). Anyway, during the peak of the lockdown Sophie did a live art class where she taught her followers to paint her iconic abstract ‘nudies’ 

I watched the entire class and saved it for later but I never actually tried it. I think I was worried that I would mess it up. 

I put it on my vision board for 2022 because I really wanted to give it a try this year. *if you haven’t seen my vision board yet, you definitely should check it out*

I gave it a try during a snow day at the beginning of the month and I really like the way it turned out! I plan on doing one or two more practice runs of this and then I want to paint it on a canvas to hang in my house! 

If you want to give it a try you can find the full art class here!

3. I had my first hypnotherapy session

I’ve always been quite curious about Hypnotherapy because I think it is extremely fascinating that we as a society spend so much time working on our physical appearance and our mental health to an extent, but we often overlook the most powerful part of our body-our minds.

In 2020 I started reading very basic books with brain hacks to learn how to exercise my brain and become more aware of the power it holds. I know that we all live our lives mostly from what is going on in our subconscious minds.

I’ve been working on manifestation a lot and one of the important steps of manifestation is to rewire your mind to believe you have what you are trying to manifest. To believe that you are worthy and capable of attracting what you are trying to manifest.

I had my very first hypnotherapy session this month and it was absolutely incredible! Read all about it.

4. I did a creative journaling project

I started a new bullet journal at the beginning of 2022 and I wanted to make it more of a scrapbook-hybrid since I don’t really use my journal to plan my life. I use it more like a journal than a planner. I wanted to be a lot more creative this year and come up with prompts of things that would be good for my soul.

I did several creative journaling projects and I’m working on a post where I share them all but this month I did an alternate lives journal project. I listed alternate lives that I would like to live and created mood boards for them. In this photo you can see part of my Island Girl life on the left side and my Princess life on the right side. It was a lot of fun to imagine myself living other lives and really brought out

5. I discovered more elegant music

I love music. Who doesn’t? One of my favorite types of music is dreamy piano music. I am extremely particular when it comes to classical music because sometimes it can be a bit too intense for me. I spend a couple of hours searching Spotify for new music and I found the most beautiful song. I’ve shared it here because it is so lovely. It’s an elegant piano solo that I listen to all the time.

6. I dressed up and went out

When I created my vision board for 2022, I decided that I wanted to start getting dressed up more and going out with my friends. My goal is to buy one new dress per month and go out each month. 12 months, 12 dresses. For January I wore a vintage inspired red velvet off the shoulder ruffle dress. My bestie and I went to a local Italian restaurant. I loved that there was a live violinist there to play music for us. It was a lot of fun and an elevated dining experience. The food was lovely and I had the best time. Dress number 1 is in the books!

I finally made a baby book!

I had a beautiful childhood and my mom took a lot of pictures of me growing up. Like most people my age, all of my childhood photos were in an old box that was collecting dust.

I had saved a few of my absolute favorite baby photos to my phone, but there were so many more amazing memories that I wanted better access to. Taking all of your childhood photos, scanning them, and saving them to the computer is very time consuming so I always found excuses for why I couldn’t do it.

I didn’t have the time, the lighting wasn’t good enough for me to use the google scan app, anything I could think of. Now that my girls are getting a little bit older they are asking me a lot of questions about my childhood. I realized that it was time to stop the excuses and turn all of my childhood photos into a baby book.

I used to be a serial photo book starter but not finisher. Scrapbooking is time consuming and then when the first photo books came on the scene (shutterfly) I found the book design process extremely complicated. Luckily I found a photo book company that I am absolutely in love with. It’s Chatbooks!

Chatbooks is an app that lets you make photo books from the photos on your phone. No complicated page layouts, no time consuming tasks.

I have been using chatbooks for many years but still didn’t have the patience to create my baby book. Finally in the middle of the month I put on my favorite calming playlist and started scanning, cropping, and rotating photos. It took me a few days but the book is finally complete and I am so happy! I can order multiple copies for my parents and some for my kids to have when they are older. I want them to know my story so they can share it with future generations.

January was better than I thought

It’s always such a tough month because it is freezing cold and there really isn’t much to do. I’m glad I was able to make the best of it and do amazing things for myself and with my family. It’s important to keep life going in the winter. There are still fun things to do, you just have to put a little more effort in. I hope you had a wonderful month!