Kim is impatient...Kim is mean...Ok, alright, not all the time. But it is so stinking easy to let little nit-picky things ruin your whole day, and therefore the day of those in close proximity to you. You see…I am an early riser, and once I rise I go. I do dishes, laundry, dust, wipe, swipe, tidy, email, blog, smog, flog…you get the picture. I am basically turning into my mother. I say that with much pride. But I have to consciously sit down and relax from time to time, and doing so causes me to have ants in my pants.

When other non anty-panty people I live with are doing CRAZY things like, ya know, sleeping past 7, or worse...playing video games, reading books, or watching TV, I start having intrusive thoughts about…well…how shall I say…

…how generally lazy and useless they are, and how generally productive and awesome I am…

…there I said it. While I fully realize how hideous and inaccurate this is, these are the thoughts that plague me in my anty-panty hustle bustle none the less. Mind you, I called them intrusive thoughts for a reason. Because I would never admit that these are actual thoughts that originate in my own conscious brain. I’d rather like to think that they are being put in my mind by some supernatural force, Satan himself perhaps?? He doesn’t have anything better to do but telepathically zap me while I fold underwear on a Saturday morning right?

This brings me back to the patient and kind thingy, a well-known start to a series of verses from the Bible read at almost every wedding in America. We’ve all heard it. It outlines all the things love is…and it sounds so wonderful. What it also does is describe love as an action, not a feeling or an emotion. I honestly can’t remember much of the rest of the verses, but just those first two adjectives pretty well keep me busy and encompass what I need to work on most of the time.

The reason why I love principles like this is because it simplifies things so much if you really think about it. As stated earlier, I can definitely be impatient and mean (as evidenced by the use of the word ‘useless’ in the description above when referring to the people I am supposed to ‘love’ most in this world). BUT…if I am supposed to be patient and kind if I say I LOVE someone, well then, I guess I better fake it till I make it!! Don't look at me like that! Just keep reading :)

How this unfolded this morning was that instead of marching up the stairs with laundry basket in hand and announcing to the world at large in a slightly elevated tone that they could ‘MAYBE THINK ABOUT GETTING OFF THEIR LAZY BUTTS AND HELPING ME OUT' (the totally intuitive, human, take care of #1 thing to do), I left the basket downstairs, got 2 cups of coffee, walked upstairs and gave my husband one and sat on the bed and chit chatted for a minute (patient). Then...perfectly calmly, and with a sexy grin, I told him that instead of carrying the laundry basket upstairs, I opted for his coffee (kind) where he promptly jumped up and went downstairs to get the basket and started helping with the laundry without even being asked...huh!

I actually marched up the stairs repeating ‘patient and kind, patient and kind’ in my head over and over. This is something I have been trying lately. You see, when you repeat thoughts and actions over and over, even when they are not what you wanted to do initially (this is the 'faking it' part), something amazing happens…your feelings and emotions actually catch up (this is the 'making it' part, see? Not nearly as sinister as it sounded!). By the time I got upstairs I actually WANTED to be patient and kind and sit on the bed and drink coffee for a minute and enjoy my husband’s smiling face.

So…

[CAUTION: About to get preachy…]

You know what Biblical principles like this remind me of? Essential oils. Any oil user/lover out there will get this…we are ALWAYS so surprised when they WORK!! And how WELL they work!! The things in the Bible seem so counter-intuitive sometimes (most of the time) and like we are betraying our very selves, being archaic in our thinking, etc. But the fact of the matter is, those principles are the path to husbands jumping off the bed and running downstairs to get the laundry basket without being asked!!

It’s really quite self-serving if you think about it, but from the outset it seems self-sacrificing. This is actually the beauty in it. It meets the needs of everyone involved, and this is why it is so superior to anything we can come up with on our own. I guess that is why He is God and we are not. Applying these types of principles have never NOT worked for me. And yet, I choose selfish, bad behavior some of the time too, because what can I say? I am a work in progress.
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So…today, do the counter intuitive thing. Love is patient, love is kind…think about what that really looks like and put it into action. You might not believe the results.

As I walked to my car this afternoon after work I was greeted by an adorable pooch in the car next to mine with his paw out the window at the ready to give me a shake. Don't worry all you dog lovers out there...mom and dad were in the car also. Another employee was getting a nice visit from her husband and dog during her break. I proceeded to give the sweet darling several minutes of scratching and loving where he happily proceeded to bathe my face in doggy saliva. I always feel good when dogs and small children instantly like me because it's a great indication that I'm not a serial murderer. I mean...I've also never murdered anybody so that's another good tip off, but just in case anyone was wondering.

When the kibble slather was all over with, I thanked the owners and the pooch and got in my car to go pick up my kids from school. As I drove away I was literally grinning from ear to ear over my doggy kisses from some stranger's four legged friend. I started thinking about how the tiniest, silliest things can change the whole course of your day. I mean, I wasn't having a bad day, but after doggy kisses I felt like someone had given me a million bucks. Well...no one's ever given me a million bucks so I don't ACTUALLY know how that feels but I'm up for a clinical trial if anyone has a cool mil lying around :)

In all seriousness, I just took a minute to reflect on the things that matter in life and the things that make us feel joy. And I remembered to say thanks to the big man upstairs from whom all good and perfect things come... including doggy kisses. In general, I think having a grateful heart in all that we do is truly THE path to contentment. And I know I'm not reinventing any concepts here, but I think it's often said to give thanks to God even in the midst of trials and hardships, remembering how truly blessed we are in so many ways even when things go wrong. But I also think it's SUPER important to remember to thank God when our day is normal and things are perfectly fine. Especially when we have little wonderful treats like doggy kisses on the way to the car. Taking a minute to thank the Lord for that interaction extended the yummy feelings that much longer and made me that much more grateful.

A lot of life is about our focus and perspective. I'm constantly reinforcing to my kids what life is like for so many other children not only in the US, but globally. It is literally unimaginable how most people live as compared to how we live in the United States. Short of dropping my kids off at the Tijuana border, they will never have a true perspective of what it's like and I'm thankful for that. But I try to find constant little ways to remind them and myself how unbelievably, and frankly obnoxiously blessed we are. There's no better way to find contentment. Contentment by no means translates into being unmotivated or not goal oriented, but it definitely means that whatever God's plans are for my life I'm okay with, because most often within those plans, there are always doggy kisses to be grateful for.

I mean, besides the very OBVIOUS reasons…A) It doesn’t go good with ketchup OR ranch, B) It’s not made of potatoes, C) There is no drive through were you can buy it, and D) You cannot retrieve it from the underbelly of your car 36 months later in the exact same condition it was in when you purchased it. ‘D’ being what we are going to gab about today. Actually I guess I gab and you read, which works out great for me, maybe not as great for you :)

I am finding this journey through natural skin care product manufacturing to be quite educational. I mean, I realize there is a science behind everything but when you start a company sort of by accident and RUN with it, you tend to have a lot of ‘Aha’ or even more accurate ‘You don’t know what you don’t know’ moments. And when you are like me and you do things like post on social media about the brand new product ‘X’ that you are coming out with before even making it because you got a 3am idea, it works out really well (eh hem..). I have actually been extremely lucky in this area for the most part except of course for the epic lip balm fails which I have talked extensively about. The good news is, there’s Google, and I am not reinventing any wheels here so it is fairly easy to solve most of my problems. I just have to break through my middle name, ‘I was born knowing everything and every idea I have is immediately awesome and going to work.’ It’s shorter in Italian. The good news is I will be equipped with enough info to have an honorary PhD in skincare product manufacturing (is there such a thing?) when this is all said and done.  

All of that to say (man I’m long winded!) that I really want to emphasize what these products are all about and what your expectations can be with them. I have discovered that there is indeed a reason there are 547 chemicals in every product on the shelf. Because when we became a civilized society and started opening things like Super Wal-Marts with 35,000 skincare products (per aisle) and consuming mass quantities of things we didn’t need, manufacturers got smart. They realized that their products really needed to be able to sit in a drawer for 500 years with 300 other products and not turn into a science project. What better way than to introduce science itself into the products!!?? Let’s see…we will need something for preserving, and stabilizing, and binding, and texturizing, and destructurizing, and restructurizing, and living through a nuclear holocostizing, etc. You get the idea. So now we have science projects all over our houses, not in the form of something that has gone through the natural decomposition process like last month’s enchilada dinner that got forgotten in the back of the frig, but rather because it was made that way to withstand the test of…well…infinity.

I’m here to tell ya, Body Food products will not stand the test of infinity. Actually I went to an especially hellacious (as in temperature) street fair last month and looked at my Pumpkin Pie lip balm a week later (unfortunately as someone was opening it and slathering it all over her lips, she seemed to like it just fine) and it was grainy and separated. Not dangerous or yucky by any means but not the silky smooth salve I had poured into the tins (DANG LIP BALM ALL TO HECK!!). Well, I got my lesson in ‘tempering’ butters…really just how you need to treat them with regards to heating and cooling so as not to have the fats separate out into crystals, YADA YADA!! Now this doesn’t mean you cannot carry the lip balm with you in your purse in 90 degree weather, it just means that if it heats up and cools down a bunch of times it might get a little grainy. I can combat that a bit on my end by cooling it rapidly after making it so as to freeze the lipids into position and they will be less likely to separate out, but I’m sure you get the idea. And some of you are like ENOUGH WITH THE SCIENCE TALK ALREADY!!!

The great news is, in my inadvertent effort to be lazy and having invented my ‘no heat’ method of lotion making, I was actually doing myself a favor, because the less heat these butters are exposed to, the less likely they are to separate…capeesh!? So that was an epic WIN with the lotion.

At any rate, I wanted to share some of this with you because I want you to have reasonable expectations with these products (and any other similar chemical free products). If your goal truly is to cut out some of the yucky stuff in your life, there is a catch…so to speak. They need to be kept in a coolish, dryish place and need to be used within a year, more or less. They are not going to be perky if you leave them in your car in the dead of summer while shopping or if you bury them in a drawer for 5 years and forget about them. They need love, they need attention, and they want you to use them EVERY DAY!! Is that too much to ask? :)

So…life lessons for today, eat McDonald’s Fries (or not), stop slathering yourself in science projects, take a chance with delicious, healthy, no yucky stuff Body Food products, and treat them kindly, understanding that they were not bound together with alien titanium found at the Roswell site coupled with hydrochlorothiazide chlorohexidine petroleum diacetate. Say that five times fast. (Only had to spell check one of those…MAN I’m good!!!)