The January Edit
Hi, hello, it’s me! 👋🏼 Long time no post. One thing I missed over the last year was this blogging space and it’s been on my list to get back into it. I’m sure I’ll get to a recap of 2019 soon enough as quite a lot happened! But I thought for now I’d get into it for 2020 and jump in with a monthly edit. In general, monthly edit & life lately posts are always some of my favorite posts to read so I thought why not for this year. I have an entire ‘The Wedding Edit’ series planned for all thing wedding related as well! I’ll be rolling those out over the next few weeks and months!
January felt like the longest month ever and I’m glad to have it behind me.
We got back from our honeymoon right before NYE and spent a lot of time settling back in to our normal routine. We were out of the country for about 3 weeks for our honeymoon and there was a lot of normal life things to get back into the swing of things. We jetted off to Europe for our honeymoon so rest assured that there will be some honeymoon / travel related posts to come!
We were extremely jet lagged and were waking up around 4-5AM every single day. We took that opportunity to do some deep cleaning/purging/organization of our kitchen, closets, and my beauty room. The month swiftly took off with birthdays - my brother, Ollie, and my mom - along with T’s parents’ anniversary. Mix that in with jumping back into work for both T and I, it was definitely a crazy start to the month.
... The Bad
At the end of our first full week back at work, I got the worst call from my dad and it was that my mom was in the ER. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on here before but about 3 years ago my mom was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. Although she could never technically be in remission due to the type of cancer she has, we had celebrated that her cancer was non-active and life went on as normal. I’ll admit that her health was something I took for granted. My mom was admitted to the ER for an obstruction and we found that it had caused a perforation and was spilling an infection into her body. At this time she was septic and we were basically told we had to do the surgery at that moment or risk losing her within a matter of hours. We opted for the surgery but before they could begin she went into cardiac arrest. Luckily they were able to revive her and brought her to the ICU (intensive care unit) where they worked on stabilizing her for about a week. Once she was stable enough, they were able to take her into the operating room for her surgery which ended up being a 2-part surgery. She’s continued to be in recovery in the ICU, just being moved to PCU (progressive care unit) earlier this past week. It’s been a hell of a rollercoaster with many ups and downs. While things have improved in some ways, there is a long path to recovery. Although we still have moments where we are uncertain how things will work out, I try to hold on tight to the moments of hope. It’ll almost have been an entire month in the hospital in a matter of days. It’s been a nightmare and it’s been hard to try to resume normal life with this lingering over my head. I don’t mean to share too much on the internet, but sometimes it does feel good to put it somewhere so that others out there might no that they aren’t alone if they are going through something too.
The Charity Sale
Some of my IG pals (Sally & Mili) did charity sales last year with extra products they had lying around. As someone who has felt extremely overwhelmed by the amount of PR received, this seemed like something that was absolutely perfect. I had separated items to be used in giveaway boxes but sometimes feel weary of constantly doing giveaways over on IG. Maybe it’s just my overthinking, but I don’t want my account to be viewed as one that uses giveaways as a way to jump up my follower count. I also don’t want to solely attract those that are crazy about entering giveaways without truly being engaged with my content. While I did end up putting together a few boxes during my Bridal Shower as “prizes” for games, I still quickly amassed a large amount of products that 1. didn’t work for my skin, or 2. didn’t have room for in my routine. Overall my first charity sale ended up working out pretty well and I sold 80% of the boxes I posted! I also ended up creating a @shopwithchy IG account where I list one-off products to be purchased. The account is private so if you’re interested in buying discounted products, please head over and follow that account! All proceeds from the items and boxes I sell will be donated to charity.
Home Changes
We decided last year before our wedding to just renew our lease for another year with the goal of buying a house in 2020 🤞🏼. With that, w e decided to just mount things in our apartment and drill holes. We mounted a mirror/shelf near our front door to drop things off when we get home and hang our keys - it’s the cutest and I’ve literally been wanting to mount it since we moved into this apartment a year and a half ago haha. We also ended up mounting our TV in the living room which emptied the top of our media console - you can bet I quickly dusted it off and placed my bits and bobs on it quickly. T pretty much just stared at me in shock at just how fast I did it, although he 100% expected it. It’s also nice because we can now swivel the TV to face us if we’re in the kitchen or if we’re sitting at the dining table eating dinner. Lastly we ended up adding two shelves into the office area above my desk. I also got rid of my iMac because I honestly just don’t reach for it and I’m excited to see how this space changes up over the next few weeks.
I’m definitely still on the hunt for some cute dining chairs, but part of me also wants to wait until we get a house before I invest in buying any more furniture. I’ve been eyeing up some chairs from France & Son - maybe once we make more of a decision on what we’re doing we’ll finally pick up these dream chairs of mine.
Beauty Routine (Or Lack TherE of)
Overall my skincare routine was very minimal as I was spending the better part of the month at the hospital. I was just doing the bare minimum with skincare (toner, serum, moisturizer, and sunscreen) and not even putting a drop of makeup on. It was definitely refreshing to not wear makeup for so long and it always makes me appreciate and enjoy the process of applying makeup after having taken a break. Having not worn eyeliner for so long, I got used to seeing my eyes as they normally are and had a bit of fun experimenting with eyeshadows and cream eyeshadows with a smidge of eyeliner (and no winged liner). I did have some new skincare discoveries I tried and loved, but I’m going to save that for a beauty/skincare favorites type of post!
Favorite TV Shows
Ok maybe this is slightly cheating because we watched most of these in December, but still recommended these nonetheless. During our honeymoon we binge watched through The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (season 3) and The Witcher. If you loved watching Gilmore Girls, I highly recommend watching The Marvelous Mrs Maisel - it’s from the same creator, Amy Sherman Palladino, and I just love how she captures and draws you into each world. I have a love/hate relationship with Amazon Prime shows as they’re all released at once and as a serial binger, I finish it in the span of a day or two and am left waiting for an entire year lol. The Witcher is a little bit out there but I love me these types of sci-fi/fantasy shows and who could say no to the handsome Henry Cavill as Geralt of Rivia?
T picked up Apple TV towards the end of 2019 and we quickly got sucked into 2 shows: The Morning Show and See. For The Morning Show it was fun to see Jennifer Aniston & Reese Witherspoon on screen together (they were former siblings on Friends after all), but also a bit strange to see Steve Carell in a role where he wasn’t goofing around. See was probably one of my all time favorite shows and it was a show I quickly became obsessed with and would always insist to T that we needed to watch. Jason Momoa is bad ass and I expected nothing less of him. See is another sci-fi show set in the future where the entire world is blind - it was interesting to see how a population would adapt to lack of sight and continue their day-to-day lives. Also the fight scenes in these are insane. The show definitely took a turn I wasn’t expecting and I cannot wait for Season 2 to come out.
Some other shows we enjoyed were The Mandalorian (hello, baby Yoda memes) and His Dark Materials. I definitely feel fortunate to have access to so many of these TV streaming services and it’s mostly due to the fact that my family splits these up and we share the accounts with one another 😅.
—-
I think that’s about it for now and hopefully I’ll get back into somewhat of a normal routine with posting on here again. I hope you’ve all been well! And if there are any posts you want to see, please let me know!