little white truths

I've been sleeping terribly lately so I don't have the energy for blog posts, and I definitely don't have the head for a review post this morning so I've decided to do my monthly positives two weeks early. 

I mean, why not. In my experience, the best time to do a monthly positives post is when you need to do one, and I need to do one today so looks like that's what we're doing.

In no particular order...

We're going away for our first holiday in years

You may have heard me mention that we tried doing a couple of holidays after we had my daughter, but we soon realised that it was a complete waste of money: it was stressful to get there and she never slept well when we travelled, so we came back more exhausted than we had been before we left - after having spent thousands on flights and accommodation.

After that second trip, we decided that we wouldn't travel until the kids were a bit older - and we also wouldn't travel without back-up. Next week we're going to Noosa for ten days, and we're going with my parents and also my sister-in-law and her partner, so there'll be six adults and two children. I like those odds.

There's packing to be done of course (I've come to hate packing for children) and our flight was changed so we'll be getting up at the wonderful hour of 4am on Thursday, but once we're there, we'll at least have some help and we'll also be able to rotate the kids into other people's apartments at night if we need to. Huzzah.

Mother's Day = gift vouchers

Mother's Day isn't something I've ever thought about much but I've been on no buys for months now for both skincare and makeup, and I already know that my husband is planning to get me a Mecca voucher for Mother's Day (my parents might too) so I'll soon have a few dollars to spend at will.

When you've been on no buys for a while and you suddenly have a gift voucher to spend, life gets more interesting and you put a lot of thought into where that money will go. The purchase feels more important and fun than all those purchases you made last year when you bought something every month.

So I'm looking forward to that and I've already been into Mecca and swatched a bunch of those Hourglass Confession Lipsticks, because I have one of those and I love it enough that I feel the need to buy another one. Let's hope I can find my shade.

The holiday = a break from panning

As you may know, I've been a panner for as long as I've been a beauty lover - and I finally hit the point this year where I'm over panning and I'm wondering whether it's still the right thing for me to do with my collection.

The thing is, I've panned my way down to levels that I'm generally happy with, and I feel like my focus now should be on rotating everything I own, rather than working on weeding out the older stuff and the things I don't love first.

Leaving that aside, I'm using our holiday as an opportunity to leave many of my panning items behind and instead use some products that I haven't used enough. I'm also planning to forget about panning lip products for two weeks and instead just take whatever I want to. I can't remember the last time I wasn't panning at least a couple of lip products. Freedom!

We've discovered the salmon tacos from Mr Miyagi

Mex and I are both huge fans of Japanese food and we live near Mr Miyagi on Chapel St, which is one of those places that's been on our list for ages but that we've kept putting on the 'later' list for whatever reason. But last weekend we went there with friends and gosh we're glad that we did.

Overall the food was decent but those salmon tacos were something else. I don't know what witchery's going on there, but they've taken rice and salmon and spices and all things nice and put them in a crispy 'taco' shell (which admittedly isn't a traditional taco), and the result is something that's off-the-charts good.

As I said to my husband yesterday, I haven't been this excited about food since having kids - I think because I'm so used to stuffing meals down one-handed, never getting to finish a meal in one sitting, and also losing half my food to little hands that want whatever Mummy's eating - so it's a big thing for me to be dreaming of salmon tacos every day because I've been a pretty disinterested eater for years now. Perhaps the tides are turning.

If you live in Melbourne and you haven't tried one of these tacos yet, you must. All four of us ate one and all four of us want another one. Now. That tells you something.

It's getting a bit easier to do things

Yesterday we took the kids to Werribee Zoo for a third birthday party, and while yes it was still a stress to get them both organised and in the car with all the usual extras (spare clothes, nappies, wipes, food, sippy cups, all that rubbish), once we were there, they were both well-behaved and it wasn't as stressful to do something like this with them as it was six months ago.

My daughter turned three in February and my son is now one and a half, so we've turned a little corner (for now ; )) in terms of how easy it is to get them out to places and also how easy they'll be when we get there. And we're lucky with the little man because even though he normally sleeps for a couple of hours after lunch, we've discovered that if he's in the situation where he can't sleep because we're out, he might be tired but he doesn't get grumpy. Yep, lucky. If my daughter was tired at that age she would always be grumpy and we'd have to leave.

I remember mentioning in one of these posts earlier this year that we'd started to do more social things because we could, and happily that trend has continued so we're at least in the situation now where we can do things with them on weekends and not pay for it the whole time and afterwards. Thank golly.

In sum

That's all from me. Christ I'm tired today and gosh we've got swimming shortly and then I have a whole lot of packing to do (blurgh), but at least I've managed to get a blog post in before the madness starts.

If I'm lucky, the sun will come out today so I'll also be able to photograph my Kat Von D palette and get my Project Dent post up later in the afternoon, which I'd like to do because there are other posts to write before we leave. We'll see.

Hope all's well with you, and speak soon x

* All images courtesy of unsplash.com