Time spent with cats is never wasted…

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It was around this time last year that my husband and I adopted our cat, Mara, from a rescue centre. We had just returned from our honeymoon when we decided to get a pet, both of us had cats growing up and missed the energy and routine that pets add to a home.

The cats I had growing up were all rescued: Peach and Lucky were kittens abandoned in a sack on a construction site; Oscar was the runt of a farmyard cat’s litter, he was suffering from a respiratory infection and was left behind when his mother moved her other kittens from one barn to another. Despite having a difficult start in life, all of our rescue cats became such loyal and trusting members of the family that I was determined to give an “unwanted” cat a safe, loving home when my husband and I decided to get a pet of our own.

Although we knew very little about Mara’s background we took a chance on her because she seemed timid but curious and affectionate in the re-homing centre.

Mara has become such a big part of our little family that it’s hard to believe it has only been one year since we adopted her. From the cheerful chirrup when we arrive home from work to the impatient whine at feeding times and the rumbling purr when she’s content, the affectionate nuzzling and playful scampering, stretching across our laps for a snooze or curling up at the bottom of our bed to sleep every night, Mara has made a significant impression on our home and our hearts.

It’s been so rewarding to watch Mara start to trust us, settle into her new home and slowly overcome her timidity. Nowhere is this more evident than in her playfulness, Mara has progressed from hiding under furniture with all but her two front paws hidden swiping at her toys to scampering, pouncing and leaping after her toys in the middle of the floor with fearless abandon.

I learn so much from observing Mara, she lives in the present moment, she doesn’t ruminate on the past or worry about the future; and I’m always inspired by the pleasure she takes in the simple comforts of life such as companionship, food, play, rest and a warm, safe home.

The thought of coming home to a hug from my husband and nuzzles from Mara is enough to help me keep all the daily stresses and struggles in perspective. The quiet, cosy hours we pass together always fill me with a sense of peace, contentment and gratitude. As the autumn nights grow longer and the weather gets colder, I look forward to the three of us spending many more evenings snuggled up together. Have a lovely week.

Little Reminders to Slow Down

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I’ve noticed a chill in the air in the mornings and evenings, and every day the sun rises a little later and sets a little earlier. There are crisp leaves lying on the ground already, but many more still clinging to the trees gradually turning from green to shades of yellow, amber and red.

Autumn is my favourite season and part of the appeal is its transience. Every year autumn reminds me to slow down and pay attention to the world around me because if I’m wandering around lost in my thoughts or engrossed in my phone, I risk missing the beautiful display nature provides and won’t have another chance to appreciate it until next year.

Slowing down and being present in the moment were very much on my mind this weekend as my husband and I reunited with my family to celebrate my grandmother’s 90^th birthday. My family are scattered across the country and we don’t get to see each other as often as we’d all like so it was lovely to have everyone together, time to catch up with everyone’s news and to just enjoy being in each other’s company for a while.

There will always be other tasks to be done and things to distract me but time with the people I love most is something worth prioritizing and that I never take for granted. It is little moments like these, full of laughter, chatter and birthday cake, that help me to weather all the stresses and storms of life.

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We were delayed by roadworks on the way home. I could’ve been annoyed by the delay, but I chose to be grateful that the road was still open and that we eventually arrived home safely. I realize that neither my grumbling nor my gratitude made the traffic move any faster but feeling thankful made the journey more pleasant.

Gratitude and mindfulness don’t always come naturally to me, it’s a choice I have to make and remake over and over again. So many of us rush through life, always impatient for the next place, the next time, that we never really notice or appreciate where are are or what we’re doing now. Nature, however, is full of little reminders to slow down and take notice, such as the pretty sunset we were rewarded with during our delay. Have a lovely week.

Our First Wedding Anniversary

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Tomorrow my husband and I celebrate our first wedding anniversary. Watching our wedding video brings back a flood of memories and feelings about our ceremony. I remember feeling overwhelmed seeing all of our guests for the first time, my groom holding my hand so tightly in his own during the ceremony and my hand trembling as I signed the marriage register. I also remember thinking that it was over so quickly, and that it didn’t feel real. A year later, I think it’s because we were already married before our wedding.

We wrote our ceremony a few months before our wedding and our celebrant invited us to her house to rehearse it. I remember us standing in her living room, nervously repeating our vows, slipping the ring she provided us to practise with onto each other’s fingers and pretending to sip from the quaich. More than those fragments though I remember feeling like the whole world faded away until it was just me and my fiancé holding hands, staring into each other’s eyes and telling each other how much we loved one another.

In that moment, I felt like we were married. We both wore jeans and there was no champagne or cake. There were no guests, our only witnesses were the celebrant’s two dogs who spent the duration of our rehearsal fighting over a chewy toy. It was a beautiful moment all the same.

It was the memory of how I felt during our rehearsal that got me through the more stressful aspects of planning our wedding. It’s easy to get lost in the details but our rehearsal helped me to keep the wedding in perspective, the wedding might represent the start of our marriage but it wouldn’t define our relationship because it was just a legal celebration of what we both already knew to be true in our hearts.

Our wedding was beautiful, but it wasn’t perfect and I didn’t expect it to be. When I noticed little things that didn’t go to plan on our wedding day, I chose to focus on all the parts that went right instead and I felt so grateful to all the people from our families and friends who filled our day with so much love and joy, as well as to all the professionals like our celebrant, photographer and caterers who made sure it all flowed smoothly. Our wedding was a wonderful start to a new chapter of our story together, our first year of marriage has been delightful and I look forward to whatever the future holds for us. Have a lovely week.

Our DIY caketoppers and table decorations

Review of ‘Simple Matters’ by Erin Boyle

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Erin Boyle lives in a tiny apartment in New York with her husband and daughter, and writes a blog called Reading My Tea Leaves about simple, sustainable living.

Erin’s book, Simple Matters, covers similar themes to her blog and provides practical advice on how to declutter your home, change your purchasing habits by buying less, as well as investing in items which are durable or recyclable, and other ways to reduce waste and protect the environment.

This book is full of ideas on how to simplify and style your home, how to choose natural beauty products or make your own to reduce the chemicals that we put on our bodies, as well as DIY cleaning products (white vinegar, lemon juice and bicarbonate of soda have a multitude of cleaning uses) instead of the harmful detergents and bleaches available in the shops to reduce the toxins in our homes and our impact on the world. My favourite piece of advice (which I adopted before I’d finished reading the book) was keeping food waste to be composted in a sealed box in the freezer which prevents it from going off, smelling or in our case our cat from getting into it.

The writing can be a little dry and instructional in places, but comes to life when she describes her personal experiences of moving home, travelling, parenting and living simply. I appreciated that while Erin is dedicated to reducing her impact on the planet as much as possible, her personal brand of minimalism and sustainable living is both aspirational and pragmatic, she advocates conscious consumption but she doesn’t beat herself up for eating her favourite fruit out of season once in a while.

The presentation of this book is lovely, it’s packed with photos of her home and its contents to show that simplicity and minimalism can be stylish as well as functional. This was an easy book to read which made me think about ways I could live more sustainably and simplify my home.

Just a Hint of Garden Envy

My husband and I rent our home and it has a small front garden, which we try to keep tidy by cutting back the prickly, red Barbary shrubs someone before us planted and tending the half-barrel planters with our own little Japanese Acer tree, Tayberry, and Montbretia, but we’ve never really invested in the garden because there was always the possibility that we might move (though we’ve lived here for three years now), and we didn’t want to plant seeds only to be gone before they flowered.

I find myself feeling garden envy whenever I visit my parents. Mum primarily grows fruit because it’s easy to grow and expensive to buy in the shops, she reaps strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, rhubarb, apples and plums. Dad prefers to grow vegetables and takes pride in cooking us roast dinners with his own potatoes, parsnips, carrots, beetroot and onions.

It might sound melodramatic but I believe gardening provided a lifeline to both my parents in difficult times. Through periods of my childhood, when my parents were hard up, mum grew her own fruit and vegetables to save money. Later, when dad was going through hard times, gardening provided a distraction from his troubles, as he devoted himself to building raised beds, turning the soil, sowing seeds and eventually harvesting his crops.

Gardening is a lesson in delayed gratification. The slow, steady pace of gardening encourages us to work hard today and look forward to reaping our rewards tomorrow.

Our own little patch is too exposed for us to enjoy sitting outside in the sunshine, but I find myself furtively eyeing up garden furniture anyway. We are lucky to have lovely parks practically on our doorstep and the beautiful Scottish countryside not far away, but I yearn for a little patch of earth of my own to cultivate; I long to grow snowdrops in January, tulips in Spring and big, bold roses in Summer. One day we will have a garden of our own to lovingly tend, but until then I will gaze at other people’s gardens for inspiration with just a hint of envy. Have a lovely week.

Review of ‘You Can Buy Happiness (and It’s Cheap)’ by Tammy Strobel

I’m only taking my first tentative steps towards minimalism and simple living, and found Tammy Strobel’s blog RowdyKittens while looking for de-cluttering advice. Tammy’s disillusionment with consumerism and desire to simplify her life resonated with me.

You Can Buy Happiness (and It’s Cheap) follows Tammy’s journey to downsize her possessions, clear her debts, find rewarding work and to design and live in a mobile tiny home with her husband and their cats. This is a short book, just over 200 pages, but it doesn’t read like a collection of blog posts, instead each chapter is fully-fleshed with research, references, interviews and personal anecdotes into a cohesive, stand alone book.

While I don’t see myself moving into a tiny home of my own anytime soon, I found Tammy’s book easy and enjoyable to read and full of inspiring interviews with other minimalists and practical advice about how to downsize and simplify your home and life. Tammy’s tone is conversational, her enthusiasm and gratitude seep through the whole book, but she avoids preaching to the reader about her lifestyle choices. I appreciated Tammy’s honesty throughout the book, she never makes the significant lifestyle changes she adopted sound too easy and she doesn’t shy away from describing her former materialistic self or the arguments and reservations she and her husband had about getting rid of the TV or exchanging their cars for bicycles.

Tammy provides a holistic approach to simplifying that goes beyond downsizing possessions and includes sections on changing our spending habits, investing in relationships, building communities, meaningful work and practicing gratitude. My only disappointment is that Tammy, a prolific Instagrammer and photographer, did not include any of her photos in this book, though she has published another book on iPhone photography. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and can see myself re-reading sections for inspiration and advice as I try to simplify my own life and de-clutter my home.

Setting My Intention

A little while ago, I read an article in the Guardian that said the ‘thank you’ card is dying out in the age of instant communications. As a child, Boxing Day and the day after my birthday were always spent writing thank you cards at the insistence of my mum, who always wrote a list of what I’d received from whom because she believed it was rude not to acknowledge a gift. Back then, it felt like a chore, when I’d much rather be playing with, reading or eating the gifts I’d received. As an adult, writing thank you cards has become a tradition which I’ve chosen to keep (though my timescales have slipped without mum overseeing my efforts!).

One of the things I’ve always admired about my mum is her sense of gratitude; no matter what challenges, sorrows or hardships life has thrown at her, mum has always believed in counting her blessings and her sense of contentment is enviable, and gratefulness is something she inspires in me.

It might be easier to send an e-mail, a text message or make a quick phone call but my preferred method is the old fashioned thank you card. There is still something lovely about taking the time to choose a card, handwriting a personal message and posting it. As letters and cards give way to methods of instant communication, I hope it’s a pleasant surprise for the recipient when the envelope drops through the letterbox amongst the bills and circulars.

Today with a grateful heart, I set my intention for the next twelve months of my life to slow down and notice all the blessings in my life. Have a lovely week.

Lovely and Grateful

Surviving on coffee and catnaps

Author: lovelyandgrateful