Finding My Happy

On celebrating holidays and embracing the little pops of peace and happiness wherever and whenever I find them. And chickens. Lots and lots of chickens!


So, holidays... The year has quite a lot of them. Bear died in the early hours of Christmas morning, so holidays and I got off to a pretty dire start this year. But life is short and terrifying, embrace the happy when it hits.

 I owe a lot of my holiday-celebrating enthusiasm to Pipsticks Pro stickler club! These ladies are awesome!!! They send me a pretty vellum envelope full of seasonally appropriate sticker love each month. Love! These pigs in the February pack are so so perfect for me :) Totally hoping for Easter/springtime/Irish feels in March!

I use my stickers to decorate my Erin Condren planner (of course!), as well as my personal journal, snail mail, and anything else that strikes my fancy. (Just in case any of my readers are thinking of joining the cult of Erin Condren, I would really appreciate it if you could sign up using my referral link. We would both get $10 discount code!)

I use three Erin Condren books everyday. My vertical life planner for planning, my horizontal life planner as a journal (where I write to Bear each day), and an Erin Condren notebook for more intensive/irregular journalling. This book is my free creative space and personal workbook. Knitting patterns and notes go in here. Reading notes. Rants and dreams. Washi swatches. Snippets of conversations overheard. I also stick photos and ephemera in this one.

 My finished Valentine's week in the vertical life planner. Kawaii Hello Kitty and love hearts theme! And also it was pancake day (#celebrateallthethings!) And I did of course celebrate pancake day! Used my regular batter recipe (1 mug gf flour, 1 mug milk, 1 egg), and managed to #eatallthepancakes over the course of Fat Tuesday and the following days breakfast :)

On Valentine's day itself I was my own best valentine. I ate peanut-butter and jam on toast, took myself for a lovely walk in the cemetery, enjoyed an outdoor tarot session in the spring sunshine. Cemetery coffee time!

These last few days I have mostly been knitting these creme egg cozy chickens. My faery Godmother, Shelagh, is awesome and does so much amazing charity stuff. She was making these chickens for the springtime fundraising efforts of the Liverpool Royal Hospital's R Charity. I wanted in, so she gave me a hand-written pattern and the yellow yarn to make my first few chicks! The raspberry-blue and lilac yarns were donated by another lovely knitclub lady :)

I obviously had to buy a box of creme eggs to make sure that the chickens were up to the job! I dropped of most of the chicks today. The chocolate is mine!

So... what this rambly post basically says is this. Holidays. Days that are somehow, by tradition or faith, by anomalous weather conditions, by monumental historic event, or just because pizza, special days. They are everywhere, all the time. And they are worth celebrating. And this everyday celebration ritual is exactly how I plan on living this mermaid life. And sometimes, even now, I find myself happy. And I don't feel any guilt about this. Living for both of us now <3