Oil Life, Happy Wife

NOT JUST OILS! Did you know that Young Living has much more to offer than essential oils? For many of us, essential oils are what brought us to Young Living. Oils though, make up only a portion of the products they offer. I started this journey with a need to increase my toddler's health. Now I am on a mission to drastically reduce the amount of chemicals that go into our bodies and promote wellness wherever possible. I am obsessed with the oils because they work. I can see and feel a difference when I use them. I never dreamed that we would be able to fit the oils into our tight budget, but we have figured it out because we saw the benefits and knew we didn't want to be without them. Being with Young Living isn't about single products, it's a whole lifestyle change. YL has a whole line of household products that are actually healthful. They have dishwashing liquid, dishwasher soap, laundry detergent, household cleaner, etc. You can actually benefit your heal...

I am a stay-at-home mom. I have been for nine years. Motherhood can be both exhilarating and exhausting. I follow a ton of mom pages on Facebook because if you don't embrace the funny, you’ll go crazy. I am incredibly grateful for them. The content is so relatable. Sometimes it's almost as if they have cameras set up inside my house. It's comforting and reassuring to know that other moms are experiencing the same ridiculous daily woes in their journeys through motherhood as I am. Many days are filled with diapers, endless toy pick-up, funky smells of unknown origin, and arguments about tiny bites of food. Some days the toddler skips his nap and falls asleep before bath time. Sometimes he has chips for dinner because that's what he will eat, and I am too tired to fight. He has code red meltdowns in the checkout line because I didn't let him put his drink on the belt exactly the way he wanted to. I get it. Motherhood can be trying and overwhelming and daunt...

Good communication between a parent and child is one of the most important gifts in life. When done correctly, the seeds you plant when your children are small will continue to bloom throughout their lives. Here are 10 tips to improve your parent/child communication: 1. Listen to your kids.  I mean really listen to them. Oftentimes, kids don’t articulate their needs well. You need to analyze their overall behavior to get an idea of what is going on with them. Sometimes the most important details are in the words that weren’t spoken. Pay attention to topics that come up frequently. That may indicate an area that a child needs help with but doesn’t want to ask for. 2. Ask them questions.  Be interested in your children’s lives. When they tell you stories, ask for more information. You can inquire about their daily activities and friends without seeming nosy and overbearing. You don’t need to be best friends with your children, but you do need to purposefully stay involv...

By now everyone has seen the story of the mother orca that carried her dead calf for 18 days while she grieved. When the mother became too tired, or she needed to eat, the other orcas carried him for her. Almost every blogger on the planet has written a post about the power of that orca's grief. I've seen two in my news feed already today. While I have experienced the loss of multiple unborn babies, I have never had to go through holding a child who has died after his smile has been permanently etched in my mind. I don't know how anyone survives that. Maybe they never really do. This post is not about grief though. It's about something else I saw in this story. I have always had a hatred for the phrase, "it takes a village." It doesn't really take a village to raise a child. It takes a parent or parents who watch their kids carefully, always put them first, and who sacrifice daily to give them everything they deserve. My husband and I have never relied...

Have you ever noticed that some people have their oils organized in rainbow order instead of alphabetical? If you call Young Living customer service they'll tell you that the oils aren't color coded. While that might technically be true, they used to be, and much of the old system is still applicable today. The colors effectively group oils together by therapeutic action or energetic families. If an oil isn't working how you'd hoped or you don't want to use the same one every day, you can choose other oils in that action group. For the super science-based version on how oils can be split into groups, you can go the The Ternary Concept under Education in "The EO Bar" app. I have been watching videos by Jen O'Sullivan for a while, and her info has helped me greatly when looking for which oils to use for our family. Here are some of her rainbow groupings: For mental clarity and focus-  Copaiba, Cedarwood, Sacred Sandalwood, Vetiver,...

"Back to school" time marks an important chapter in your life every year. It's a time of excitement and anticipation for all the things that await you. There are friendships to be made and skills to learn. The air is thick with eagerness and pride. I'm so fortunate to be able to watch you grow and learn. This milestone is also bittersweet. A door has closed behind you, and only the most precious memories from then will carry on. This journey you must make without me, but I will always be right here. I will guide your mistakes into lessons and always remind you to be kind. I wonder if you'll ever know how proud I am of you. Every triumph you make causes tears of joy to well up in my eyes, and I try desperately to rid them so as not to embarrass you. I'm going to be that mom, the one who is always cheering for you, even when the rest of the world is quiet. I hold your small hand in mine on the way up to the school, fearful of the day you won't...

Do you ever think of a word or phrase that just gets stuck in your head? The other day I was talking to my husband, and the phrase "never a dull moment" popped into my head. The thought just sat there, taunting me. What I wouldn't give for a dull moment. I could have been contemplating the craziness of kids in general or the hustle and bustle of school or sports. That's not what I had in mind though. We were discussing Frog's health. It is always something. Between his asthma and his tummy troubles, his speech delay and catastrophic meltdowns I just feel lost all the time. It's like a puzzle I have all the pieces to I just don't know how to put it together. Diet changes, oils, prescription medications, and supplements fill my days. My brain is frantically on overload. What's different about today? Do I give him this or that? Did he eat something that caused this? Did this make it worse? Did that help or not? It's a constant weighing of symptoms...

Those of you who have known me forever probably remember me as the outspoken, spunky person I used to be. I wish I was still that person. For the last three years I have had terrible social anxiety. Well, I have anxiety in general now, but social functions are a real problem. I start days in advance mentally preparing for the events that I RSVP to. I hold my breathe as my heart races and pray for it to be over. It's not that I don't love my friends and their friends. It's just that there are too many things going on, and way too many of them are beyond my control. So we got invited to a Sky Zone Birthday party for one of Monkey's classmates. Monkey was super excited, and I knew I couldn't let him down. We went, and I tried my best to keep Frog busy and safe for the duration of the party. It went well but was not without challenges. He kept jumping right on top of other kids. He screamed at some child in the foam pit for no reason, and then he hit a little boy w...

Let's talk purity! It might surprise you, but the term "100% pure essential oil" is not regulated... AT ALL! So as long as the bottle contains any amount of pure essential oil, the company can claim that, despite whatever else is in the bottle. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that all other companies are the devil. Some companies sell a decent product, but it doesn't have the same quality of therapeutic action as Young Living. In the world of essential oils, you get what you pay for. For example, 100 times more lavender is exported from France than is actually grown there. (Read that sentence again.) That is accomplished by adding pure oil from another species of plant to it. Another example is that some companies will add corn mint to peppermint. Sometimes a company will distill a plant and then distill that oil multiple times to remove what they consider to be harsher constituents (often stronger smells). They end up with a sweeter smelling produc...

My sister wrote this for my birthday today, and it made my heart so happy I wanted to share it here. The Day You Began Birthday [burth-dey] Noun. The anniversary of the day on which a person was born; the day when something began.      4 years 6 months and 18 days before I was born, you came into this world naked, vulnerable, scrunchy-faced and screaming. While I don't know your birth story (how many hours were spent in labor, was it a textbook delivery, what kind of humorous goings on happened in the moments before and after), what I do know is this: August 2nd was the day you began.      The moment you drew your first breath, the universe was already paving the way for you. Everything from the people you would meet, to the mistakes you would make, to the love you would encounter. Your first ear piercing scream was your announcement that you had entered the world, and that you would be a force to be reckoned with.   ...