-Coconut Oil. It's beginning to rival the popularity of kale. Many people use coconut oil in the kitchen, but have you also heard of all of the other uses for it?! We happen to have a Costco-sized tub of the stuff at home, so I've been putting it to use in and out of the kitchen. I love to use it on my face as a moisturizer, I've used it as a natural eye-makeup remover, and I've even joined the fad of oil pulling. Yes, oil pulling is as strange as is sounds, yet wonderful at the same time (it definitely helps to calm me down before bedtime). That being said, if you'd like to stick to the culinary side of coconut oil, these no bake almond joy cookies are amazing and addictive!
-We're coming up on a kitchen renovation!! I will most definitely be sharing before and after photos. We're so fortunate to have my very talented uncle doing the renovation for us, and as overwhelming as it is to think about packing up and displacing our entire kitchen, I know that the end result is going to be amazing.
-This article from The Atlantic really hit home for me last week. Mourning a loss can be so isolating at times, and I find immense comfort in reading about grief and knowing that others are able to put the emotions that I've been feeling into words so perfectly. A couple of big takeaways:
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” writes Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking. “We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We cannot know, she says, when we lose the person we love—as she lost her husband John Gregory Dunne 11 years ago—“the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” The tragedy of such grief is that the loss of a loved one is irreversible. It is total and final. Even so, while some of the grief-stricken remain depressed for long periods of time—developing what’s called “complicated grief”—most people move on. They eventually settle into their old routines or develop new ones. Their lives recover a semblance of order. Sad though they may continue to be, they are no longer held hostage by the chaos of their emotions. They are resilient.
One of the most common responses to loss is feeling like the world is out of control. Day to day, most people go about their lives thinking they are in command. They decide what they do, whom they see, and where they go. And death—a familiar part of life in the past, when diseases were untreatable and public parks were cemeteries—is now remote, for the most part unseen, and often unthought of. So the sudden death of a loved one can shock and stun. The bereaved can be overcome by a helplessness that is otherwise foreign to their lives. As Didion writes in The Year of Magical Thinking: “Everything’s going along as usual and then all shit breaks loose.” When Norton and Gino probed deeper into the emotional and mental lives of their research subjects, they found that rituals help people overcome grief by counteracting the turbulence and chaos that follows loss. Rituals, which are deliberately-controlled gestures, trigger a very specific feeling in mourners—the feeling of being in control of their lives. After people did a ritual or wrote about doing one, they were more likely to report thinking that “things were in check” and less likely to feel “helpless,” “powerless,” and “out of control.”
-We're officially Nationals season ticket holders! Following along the theme of rituals, we'd always talked about going in on a package with my parents for the baseball season. The four of us would head to the ballpark a few times a year to catch some games (we also had season tickets to the Orioles prior to the Nats' arrival in DC), and this year seemed like an especially meaningful time to cement that ritual and tradition with season tickets. Go Nats!
-MERE IS COMING THIS WEEKEND!! Her February trip was nixed due to inclement weather (grrrr Mother Nature!!), but fortunately we were able to reschedule for this weekend! It's impossible to put into words what a rock Mere has been for me, but her friendship is something that I hold so close to my heart and I'm beyond excited to get some best friend time this weekend :)
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