Change of Lifestyle

Hi everybody!

Today I would love to tell you all about the change of heart I had last week, when I was in a particular good mood due to the nice weather and songs I listened to. In fact, I'd like to share this music with you because it will uplift the way you're feeling in no-time. 

So you know how people make reservations on New Year's Eve, in a depressed and forlorn attempt of changing their life around? Because let's face it... The only reason people make those reservations each year is because they're disappointed by the fact that they didn't stick to them last year. Well, I am not that kind of person. I never make reservations out of disappointment, but rather out of positivity that it would make my life just that little bit better or more worthwhile. No; I make my reservations on sunny afternoons in May. ✿

I just want to say first that I am very content with the way my life is going. I've got good education, good health, nice clothes and quite honestly don't have much to nag about. (Except for the horrendous amounts of homework they throw at us in school, making it close to impossible for me to find the time to write on my blog). But because of this general content, life can get kind of boring! I wake up every morning, at 6:30 -way too early- AM, and the exact same things happen with each passing day. I get up, I go to school, I bike home, I try (mind how I say try) to relax, I eat supper, I do my homework and then back to bed again. And despite it being such a rut, I feel like -besides obvious school schedules- I've got no self-created routine at all! I feel like I'm just floating around, randomly doing things and making bad decisions. Just passing time, if you get where I'm going with this?

Until last week's Monday afternoon.

Because that Monday afternoon, I had an epiphany!

I was watching loads of videos on Youtube, like I usually enjoy doing in my free time, when I realized that is what I want. I know it's all just snippets of someone's life and very probably also slightly acted, but still: I feel like the kind of lifestyle they portray is something I want, too. There's loads of videos where people show their night-routines, or their morning-routines; and I thought maybe, just maybe if I plan these fun, enjoyable moments for myself as well... As my own routine... Life wouldn't be such a rut anymore.

I have always been one to be very keen on good - or at least reasonable - marks at school, and to hold to a certain reputation. (If that's the correct word to use here? It's not necessarily a social reputation, but more some kind of reputation of myself which I created inside my head... Like an expectation to live up to, I suppose?) But with that I tend to forget the importance of making myself feel good, or at least at ease... The importance of doing something solely for myself. I suppose I rediscovered this on my feel-good hours last Monday afternoon.

So what do I mean by my Change of Lifestyle?

The way I'd like to live my life is based mainly on personal preferences, or so to say: To adjust my lifestyle to the things that make me feel my best. To no longer be dominated by the fear of failure, or fear of embarrassment that has been brought to me by school and insecurities. From now on, no matter how tough the day or how big the pile of homework, I will never forget myself. I will take the time to pamper myself with all the things that I love doing, wearing, smelling, seeing, hearing or reading. I'm sick of having panic attacks, and I hope that this way of living will reduce the amount of them I have. I believe that it will help me "breathe" through situations that make me feel nervous or trapped.

How am I gonna try to achieve this?

- Please note, that these are not things I'm forcing myself to do. These are things I want to do, and feel like would help me, and I will never feel guilty for not doing them. -

First of all, I'm going to try to take more time for my body. Strange as it may sound, when my life gets messy, my skin gets sticky. Things like showering or moisturizing or using crèmes take up quite a lot of time when you're rushing to get yourself to school. On busy days, I spend as little time as possible on skin-treatment like the ones I just mentioned. From now on, I'm going to try my best to take at least half an hour each day. Preferably at night, I will use my time to wash my hair with proper attendance, instead of thoroughly putting some shampoo in my hair. I will take time to scrub or cream or wash my body with products that smell nice and make me smile.

And then when I get out of the shower I will luxuriously besmear my legs with body butter or any other body lotion to my liking. Princess like, with a towel wrapped around my hair. And then I'll finish off the routine with my moisturizer from Formula 10.0.6, making my skin super soft; as it tends to get really dry after I've taken a shower. (Is that weird? It sounds weird, doesn't it? :p)

Right before I snuggle into bed, and cover myself under both my duvet and coverlet, I will put some hand-cream on and soften my lips with lip balm. Then I will put in my earplugs and listen to this playlist while reading a book or until I'm sleepy.

Then, as I decide to close my eyes and try to sleep, I will first get my Sleepbot app ready. Everyone should try that app, it's amazing! It tracks you while you sleep, as in sound and movement, and wakes you up with a friendly tone within a span of time of your choice. It tries to find your lightest sleep, so that it won't have to tear you from your deepest. I decided to download this when I was fed up with the horrid beeping of my old alarm clock, and it really helps me getting out of bed in the morning. It also gives you tips on how to sleep better, or how to stay awake during the day, as well as it shows you how much sleep you're lacking. It's truly helpful and fun a the same time. (It helped me figure out that I talk in my sleep :/ Some nights ago I kept saying "dertig" which is Dutch for thirty.. I don't know what it means, but I've decided that I'm some kind of math genius and that I've found the answer to time travel :p)

I will try to drink more tea than I drink soda. I need to say that I love tea, so that shouldn't be a problem in any way.

I will try to eat more fruit. Fruit was always something that needed to be force-fed to me, and from now on I will take more initiative in taking it out of the fridge myself ;) Honestly, what's not to love about a little Tupperware box full of strawberries at school? Or lying back in the garden and eating grapes from the branches as if you're a Greek God? I realize that if I simply start enjoying these activities, it'll be easier to keep up as well.

I will read more books. You have seen the list of books I want to read, I gather? It's getting out of hand. There's so many that I want to read, and so many that I am not reading. Once reading for school - Lord of The Flies (which is actually a lovely book) and Tschick (which is German and I don't like) - is over, I wish to start in the book my dear friend Dominique gave me for my birthday. ♥ She gave me The Rosie Project, by Graeme Simsion, which is said to be extremely funny and awkwardly romantic. I can't wait to get lost in the pages while chilling in the sun. (Can the summer holidays be here already???)

I'm going to write more!!

Seriously, yesterday I couldn't go to school because I had some sort of mental breakdown/panic attack that affected my entire day, and I spent the rest of my day working on my book. Not only did I finish writing several chapters, and I'm very fond of those, I also wrote a long letter to my dear friend Othilie in Norway and worked on this monster of a blog post. ;)

Somehow I'm really excited about changing bits of myself. I feel more confident about this than ever before.

I hope you liked reading about this, about me and my changes; maybe you even got inspired yourself?

Lots of love,

Eva

Eeek, what objects start with the letter E?

You'd think it's easy to find object starting with the letter E, well, it isn't. Frankly, I find this collage a little boring compared to the others, but I'm posting it anyway :)

E is for Elastic bands, Earrings, Envelope, Eye shadow, Earplugs and Edgar Allan Poe.

Let's kick off with the main necessity in this collage; elastic bands. I wouldn't be able to live without them, honestly. I must say, though, that I wear my hair down more than I wear it up. (Which is solely because of my laziness) The past weeks I've been experimenting with different hairstyles, and I've come to find that I quite enjoy wearing my hair differently from time to time. My hair is curly and thick, and tends to be easily affected by the weather... Especially when it's raining... Lucky me, I live in the Netherlands! (Note: Sarcasm)  I've mastered the art of the "bun" on top of my head, although it hurts like hell to get all of my hair into one small, neat bun. I recently started wearing my hair in a high ponytail as well, and I'm currently practicing with braids :) And when I say practicing I mean cussing at tutorial videos on Youtube because they make it look so easy and I just can't seem to succeed.

If I was asked to give an example of an object of which I have hundreds but hardly use, I would say earrings. I recently gave a whole load of earrings away because I just didn't wear them. There are, however, like three favourite pairs which I do use: Including these little triangular earrings I bought at Parfois in Spain.

To return to a previous theme, I added one of the envelopes from my Snailmail box. This one I didn't make myself, but bought along with a cute postcard from Flow. I find it an adorable envelope with the little snail on it and the pretty use of colours (bright pink and beige). To tell you the truth, the inside of the envelope is even prettier :)

It took me a while to find a proper palette of eye shadow! I hardly wear it and the eye shadow that I do occasionally wear is all smudged inside the package so I figured that wouldn't look as pretty in the photograph. The only eye make-up I use is mascara and eye-liner, and I find that to be enough :)

Speaking of items I can't live without: Earplugs! (or earphones, whatever you call them) Oh, my, I don't know what I'd do if these weren't invented yet. I love listening to music while I'm cycling home from my dance classes in the late afternoon, or when I'm heading to the city on my own. I am, however, quite picky about when I listen to music outside. Like last week, when the weather was so nice and the birds were singing so prettily for the first time in months that I just couldn't bear blocking them out with One Direction :p I might as well just go ahead and say right now that I have a soft spot for birds... They are simply so cute and I love to hear them sing. I remember some time this winter I was sitting in class, taking some test, and all of a sudden I got really sad because I hadn't heard a bird sing for a very long time. And I couldn't figure out whether the birds were just gone or whether I had gone way too deep inside my mind. I just know that it made me very sad.

Edgar Allan Poe I sadly have nothing to say about. I just added this book to make the picture look pretty and I have never read a word of it. (shame on me) But, who knows! Maybe I will read it in the future and I will make up for this let down of a blog post ;)

In other news: I have been loving and obsessing over Zoella lately, and she posted a video on Youtube earlier this week showing the clothes she bought at Boohoo. I looked at her with awe. I more than loved the items she bought and couldn't help but browse through the amazing online Fashion shop as well. I just purchased a grey maxi dress, which Zoe is also wearing in her video, along with a dark grey midi dress. I am really excited for my package to arrive and to see how these longer dresses look on my body ♥ I have never worn anything like it before, so I am eager to find out. When they arrive, which should be within 5-10 workdays, I promise I will make a blog post about how they look :)

Love,

Eva

Dinglehopper is a legitimate word, right??

Second blog post of the day! Yay!

As promised, here is the update on my Instagram Alphabet :)

Here's D! It got a suprisingly large amount of likes, which made me very happy of course :) In this collage you can see my Diary, Daisy(by Marc Jacobs and by my sister), Dutch Tea, a DVD and a Dinglehopper.

I've got quite the pretty diary, don't I? It was given to me by one of my head teachers on the day of my father's cremation with the message to write my thoughts down in there. At first it just caught dust on my bookshelf but eventually I started writing more and more and I've become quite fond of it. It's a diary, but it's not like I sit down to write in it every single day. I just write in it when I think something is worth remembering, be it events, words or thoughts. To be honest, though, it's been a while since I took the time to write in it... For I have been really busy with other things lately. (I know, that's not a valid excuse...)

Daisy, Daisy, Daisy! I LOVE Daisy, and then I'm talking about both the fragrance and the flower. Story time! So I got this 50 ml bottle of Daisy by Marc Jacobs from my mother on my fifteenth birthday, because I simply wanted it so badly. I was first introduced to Marc Jacobs' lovely fragrances by my best friend and perfume junky Anne-Floor, who took me to perfumeries and sprayed Daisy into my scarf. It has become something like a shopping habit, actually! Every city we go to together, we stop by at a shop that sells Marc Jacobs and spray on the testers. (You can find it literally everywhere: We even managed to get some in a little village called Segovia, in Spain) To anyone who's never gotten the chance to sniff up this lovely scent, I suggest you run to your nearest perfumery and give it a try. Daisy is a lovely, girly but also fresh Eau de Toilette that can be bought in several sizes and occasionally comes in special editions. The other Daisy, which is also lovely, was not created by Marc Jacobs, nor is it a fragrance: It is a little felt dangle my sister made me for the same birthday, and it went with a book called The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Steven Chbosky (which I'm sure you all know about). 

Like you might have read on my blog, I quite like the phenomenon Snailmail. I send letters to penpals in other countries, and when I do I like to send little tea bags with them. Preferably Dutch Tea, because that's certainly a flavour they haven't tasted yet. To be honest, I even made tea bags for my tea bags... Yeah... I don't know what that says about my life... I just make these tiny little envelopes to put tea in to send to my lovely foreign friends. From what I've heard so far, they really like it. So I suppose I will just continue making tea bag-bags. Oh, God. (I truly like making those, though! Maybe I'll post a tutorial some day. They would also look really nice on gifts, if you are one of those extensive present-wrappers like myself.)

You can nag me all day about this, but I still stand with my old opinion that DVD's will always be better than streaming or downloading. It just feels that little bit more special! Like, I may watch a movie or series online at first: But when I truly, truly love it, I will buy the DVD. No questions asked. It is quite stressful though, when others don't feel as you do. For example when you're looking for the disc, and people say "Oh, it's okay! We can just download it." No. That is just not happening, I'm sorry. Just like when you've still got an old video tape of a Disney movie. That movie will be watched through the use of our old VCR player and I will not argue with you. As you can see in the photo, this DVD is a sample from my Once Upon a Time Season 1 box. If there's any TV series I find DVD worthy, it's Once Upon a Time. For reasons I am sure you will discover in blog posts that are still to come. :)

I would understand if some of you have no clue whatsoever why I call a fork a Dinglehopper, but I would also be slightly surprised :p A dinglehopper, of course, is the fork Ariel uses in The Little Mermaid by Disney to comb her hair. I love Disney, I love The Little Mermaid, and the word Dinglehopper was somehow the first word that popped into my head when I started thinking of objects starting with the letter D. On that note, I think I'll end this blog post with my favourite song of the movie ♥

I genuinely hope you like reading these posts, because I truly love writing them. Have a nice day! 

Love,

Eva 

Cats, Cats, Cats

Hi everybody!
Another one of those lovely sunny days today ♥ I'm already dreading next week, for they say it will start raining again :( For now I'm enjoying every ray of sun I possibly can; absorbing vitamin D for the darker days to come :) Hence why I'm sat outside in the garden, blogging right now!
It's about time I posted my photo for the letter C, so that I can post them simultaneously on my blog and Instagram from now on. So here's C:

C is for Cats, Candle, Cards, Camera and Croptop. 

Let's start with the cats, shall we? :) I adore cats more than any other animal. The Cat in the left corner is a postcard I got through postcrossing, and it came from a Canadian guy who had a very interesting story to tell. This is his cat, and he photographed it to send it to me ♥ It was a really friendly guy, and it is one of my favourite postcrossing postcards. In case you do not know what postcrossing is, I suggest you stick around my blog for a while because I will be putting up a page about my snailmail projects :) The other little cat is my sister's and has no emotional value to me whatsoever, I just loved it in my photo with the little red accents. I have a real cat, too, by the way; only she hardly sits still so she was inefficient for my collage ;) You will find plenty of photos of her on my Instagram account, though, so you could check out the cutie there. ✿

Candles! I love, love, love, love, loooove candles. They just set a certain mood ♥ Especially during winter times do you find me running through the living room with matches because I want to light every single candle we own. I've always wanted little candles in my bedroom, too, but my mum won't allow me to have fire in there. She's probably right, though; I can truly imagine myself accidentally setting my homework on fire... But candles are simply so cute! I just know that when I'm older and have a place of my own; every room will have some candles in it.

You have no idea how much I loved playing cards when I was little. I only knew a few different games, but it was the perfect way for me to kill time. Presumably because when I grew up and went on vacations; there was no Wi-Fi around on campgrounds yet. Nor would I know how to handle a computer at that age, to be fair. I would play card games until everyone was sick of me, or I was tired of losing over and over again. The last time I played a card game was a year ago, when I had to find a way to entertain my Spanish exchange student who lived with me for a week. I taught her Dutch games and she loved them, but when she started teaching me Spanish games I was all at sea.

The camera in the photo is not mine, but my sister's. With the sole and obvious reason that I had to take the photo with my own. I love photography, but I hate my own camera. Well, hate is a strong word... I just don't know how to handle it well! I feel like the snap-button has to be pushed way too forcefully in order to take a picture; often leading to moved frames. I truly wish I was better at photography than I am. Especially when it comes to the camera on my phone:  I literally CANNOT take a proper photo with my phone without using a shitload of filters on it. However, I am completely up to learning. On that note: A Fujifilm Instax camera is high on my birthday-wishlist this year.

To anyone who has never worn a croptop before; please try one out sometime. They are EXTREMELY comfortable, and especially nice during summer. You can wear them with shorts when you're going to the beach or pool, or you can wear them the way I do: With high-waisted shorts/skirts/jeans. Do I write that correctly? Last summer I bought high-waisted denim shorts from AmericanApparel in Amsterdam and I had never been more happy with a purchase. I also wear croptops with my high-waisted black circle skirt from H&M and my higher jeans from Monki. I always like to say; if you have a nice belly, don't hide it! It deserves to be seen! You worked hard on it :) (At least, I know I did: Turns out those ab-workouts during my dance classes pay off after all!)

So that was C, I hope you liked it! I will be posting D very soon on my instagram: @evazuring

Lots of love,

Eva