Piles is a common complaint that affects many during pregnancy and after giving birth – in fact, about 30-40% of people who are pregnant get haemorrhoids. The joys.
But the issue often goes under the radar, with some mums suffering in silence (not to mention, discomfort).
Haemorrhoids are swollen veins on your anus which pop out and look a bit like a skin-coloured miniature bunch of grapes. “Just like varicose veins in the legs, the veins are swollen, can be painful, itchy and may bleed,” Dr Deborah Lee, of Dr Fox Online Pharmacy, tells HuffPost UK.
Anyone can get them, but being pregnant raises your risk because the weight of your baby and hormone changes create the perfect conditions for them to erupt. The strain of pushing in labour can also create problems.
A mum recently took to Reddit to talk about how people “should talk more about what pregnancy does to our bodies and that some things can be fixed” – and judging by the hundreds of responses from women experiencing similar issues.
She explained how during both her pregnancies she suffered with bad haemorrhoids, on and off, which could be really painful at times. At one point, they even became thrombosed.
This is a “worrying situation,” says Dr Lee, as it means there is a blood clot inside the pile. People with this issue have a lot of pain in the rectal area.
After giving birth, the haemorrhoids shrunk and went away eventually, but the mum was gutted to find she’d been left with a bunch of anal skin tags.
“I had to Google it, nobody told me this was a thing,” she wrote.
Of course, with extra bits of skin hanging from her bottom, it meant that cleaning after going to the toilet was a bit of a minefield.
She would use a peri bottle (a bit like a portable bidet) to clean the area, before patting dry. And she kept up this routine for four years.
“My second has turned one and I figured since we don’t want any more kids, I should get rid of those skin tags. They make me feel dirty, they itch and I shouldn’t have to live with that until I’m 80-something,” she wrote.
After a trip to the hospital, she claims she was told that the removal of the skin tags wasn’t “medically necessary” so they wouldn’t do it. She was also given the news that she’d developed eczema down there.
“I felt so offended!” said the mother. “Why can’t I reclaim my body if I feel dirty! And it does feel necessary if the things end up giving me eczema. I shouldn’t have to live with this issue for the rest of my life!”
After hitting this brick wall, she opted to go to a private clinic where she was told the issue was common and could be fixed.
She was also told using the peri bottle wasn’t a good idea, as the eczema she’d been diagnosed was actually a yeast infection from the humidity she’d been exposing her nether-regions to.
“I’m glad I found someone who told me and is going to help me fix it. So I’m here to pay it forward!” said the mum.
“If you think you have skin tags and they bother you, set your shame aside, find a good (private) proctologist and get yourself looked at.”
Typically, piles go away on their own. During which time, the NHS advises people to drink lots of fluids, eat plenty of fibre and wipe after a poo with damp toilet paper.
Other remedies include: taking paracetamol, taking a warm bath, using an ice pack, gently pushing the piles back from inside your anus (fun!), exercising regularly and cutting down on alcohol and caffeine.
To keep the area clean, Dr Lee advises against using wipes, which can irritate the skin, and instead to use water. “If needed, an emollient such as aqueous cream can be used as a soap substitute,” she adds.
Pharmacists can also suggest creams to ease the pain, itching and swelling.
Hydrocortisone cream, ointment or sprays are “very useful” for haemorrhoids, says Dr Lee. “Hydrocortisone is a steroid which is a potent anti-inflammatory.
“They are usually applied several times a day, such as morning and night and after having had a poo. They should not be used for more than seven days, and after this, you must see a doctor.”
Lidocaine creams and ointments are another possible treatment. “Lidocaine is a local anaesthetic. These are applied several times a day and work within an hour.”
Suppositories can also help to ease the discomfort, itching and swelling.
The first thing to do is not ignore the issue. If symptoms continue after seven days of treatment at home, or you get recurring piles or notice another change around your anus area, you should definitely see a GP, who might prescribe stronger medication for the area.
They’ll also check the suspected piles aren’t a sign of something else more serious, like bowel cancer.
If there’s no improvement, you might have to go to hospital for treatment.
According to the NHS, non-surgical treatments include:
If this doesn’t work, surgery is another option – although you may need to stay in hospital for more than a day for this. There are a few routes you can take:
It’s worth noting though that even after surgery, sometimes they can reappear.
“Unfortunately following the natural resolution of haemorrhoids postpartum, women can be left with anal skin tags which can stay around eternally and become quite bothersome,” says Dr Semiya Aziz, who works as a GP.
Skin tags are a little different to piles, as they are “floppy pieces of skin originating externally”, according to Jonathan Wilson, a colorectal expert.
Unlike haemorrhoids, they can’t be pushed back inside, and can be solitary or multiple.
Treatment is usually steroid creams for those with minimal symptoms, while others might require surgery under sedation. But Dr Lee notes: “The NHS does not routinely remove anal skin tags.”
“Many women choose to leave well alone, especially if it’s not too uncomfortable, although inconvenient,” says Dr Aziz.
“The only problem in this situation is that large anal tags may get in the way of keeping the anus clean, and cause possible infection.”
She adds that wiping after a bowel movement might also be ineffective when skin tags are present – some mums might find residual stool sits on the skin, causing irritation and itching.
If you have anal tags but don’t want to get them removed, she recommends:
There are lots of helpful travel gadgets on the market, ranging from high-tech tracking devices to simple products like a toothbrush cover.
But even though toothbrush covers are a popular staple ― both while you’re on a trip and even at home ― you might want to reconsider using one extensively. Below, dentists break down everything you should know.
“Covering a toothbrush with a toothbrush cover is a bad idea because the toothbrush cover traps moisture around the bristles, which is perfect for the proliferation of bacteria and fungus,” Dr. Jordan Brown, a dentist based in St. Petersburg, Florida, told HuffPost.
The oral cavity is covered with hundreds of species of bacteria like Streptococcus mutans and Granulicatella adiacens.
“When you brush your teeth, some of those bacteria are present on your toothbrush, even after properly rinsing it off with water,” said Dr. Aierress Davis, a dentist in Augusta, Georgia. “By placing your toothbrush in a cover and creating a moist environment, you directly promote bacterial growth, which isn’t a good thing.”
This proliferation of germs is especially likely if you place your toothbrush in the container while the bristles are still wet.
“Now, there isn’t much research that shows bacteria growing on a covered toothbrush causing harm to patients, but it is always better to allow your toothbrush to air dry after use,” Davis noted.
And although the potential for serious harm hasn’t been thoroughly researched, using a toothbrush cover can have some negative impacts.
“If you continue to use that same brush, it can lead to an increased risk of halitosis (bad breath), tooth decay (cavities), and abscesses (mouth infections),” Brown said.
“There’s no need to use toothbrush covers for daily use inside the home,” Brown said. “If you’re worried about faeces particulates from your flushing toilet you can either close the lid or move your toothbrush as far away from the toilet as possible.”
Indeed, the American Dental Association advises patients not to “routinely cover or store toothbrushes in closed containers,” and the dentists who spoke to HuffPost echoed this advice.
“I tend to not recommend toothbrush covers unless you can really make sure the bristles of the toothbrush are completely dry before placing the toothbrush in the container,” said Dr. Richard Lipari, a dentist who practices in Chappaqua, New York.
While dentists don’t recommend using a toothbrush cover on a daily basis, they have slightly different thoughts when it comes to travel.
“It’s not a bad idea to protect your toothbrush while traveling,” Davis said. “Personally, I believe toothbrush covers should only be used while traveling. I don’t want my makeup or skincare products touching my toothbrush bristles.”
Although she used to wrap a paper towel around the bristles of her toothbrush, she now uses a travel case to keep it clean and prevent direct contact with other toiletries or packed items. The other experts similarly advised only using a larger carrying case that encompasses the whole brush, rather than a little bristle head cover, if you want to protect it while traveling. Just make sure it isn’t still wet or damp when you pack it.
“You can definitely use a toothbrush cover to travel, but it should really only be used during transport and while the toothbrush is dry,” Lipari said. “While you’re on vacation or at your destination you should try to leave the toothbrush out of the case.”
Looking beyond cover hygiene, there are other important steps you should take to ensure your toothbrush is as clean and sanitary as possible
“Keep it away from your toilet because if you flush the toilet with the lid open, poop particulate will find its way onto your toothbrush,” Brown advised.
You might also want to keep it out of the way of the sink, especially if with a shared bathroom, Lipari said.
“You don’t want your toothbrush directly next to where other people may be brushing their teeth or washing their hands to avoid any contamination,” he explained.
Make sure you’re changing your toothbrush or replacing the bristles frequently as well. Brown recommended doing this every three to four months, while Lipari suggested every two to three months.
“Make sure you’re changing out your toothbrush every six months ― at most,” Davis said. “If you look at your toothbrush, you can often tell when the bristles look worn or fuzzy. If that happens before six months, change it out. Not only for potential bacterial growth but for function; it’s not working at its optimal capacity with worn bristles.”
Regardless of timing, you’ll also probably want to change out your toothbrush or toothbrush head after recovering from an illness as well.
“Rinse your toothbrush after you finish brushing your teeth,” Brown urged. “Store your toothbrush vertically so the water drains off the brush. Avoid sharing your toothbrush with others ― that can spread viruses and bacteria. And if you use a holder, make sure you’re cleaning it too!”
Rinsing your toothbrush after every use should remove any visible debris from the bristles.
“If you’re extremely concerned, there are toothbrush sanitisers available for purchase that can reduce the amount of bacteria that remains on your toothbrush,” Davis said. “But no product will eliminate all of the bacteria on a used toothbrush.”
Cleaning wax off counters can be a real challenge for homeowners. Whether it's candle wax or hair removal wax, the stickiness and stubbornness of the substance can make it difficult to remove completely. Fortunately, there are a variety of methods and products that can help. It may take some patience and elbow grease, but with a little knowledge and effort, you can easily remove wax from your counters.
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To remove dried stubborn wax off surfaces, try using an ice cube. Rub the ice cube over the wax residue until it has hardened, and then use a butter knife or other blunt object to scrape off the wax.
These simple steps allow you to easily and effectively remove wax from a countertop without damaging the surface. Be sure to take your time and use gentle pressure when cleaning so that the surface remains unscathed.
Finding a cleaner that dissolves wax effectively is crucial to remove wax from surfaces. Common solvents like rubbing alcohol, bleach, and window cleaner can be used to remove wax from surfaces. Choosing the appropriate solvent based on the surface you are trying to clean is essential, and always follow product instructions and safety guidelines carefully.
To get soft wax off a countertop, use a non-metal instrument like a wooden chopstick or credit card to scrape up as much wax as possible. Afterward, you can use an iron and paper towels to remove the remaining wax.
The best cleaner to remove candle wax is a solution of equal parts water and white vinegar. Apply the solution to the wax stain and let it sit for about 10 minutes before wiping it away.
Overall, removing wax from countertops doesn't have to be a difficult task. With some basic knowledge and the right products, you can easily remove wax off your countertop without causing damage.
Remember to use non-metal instruments to scrape away as much of the wax as possible, and test any cleaning solution on an inconspicuous spot first.
Dawn dish soap can be used to remove candle wax. Mix a few drops of Dawn in warm water and apply it to the wax stain. Let it sit for 10 minutes before wiping it away with a damp cloth or paper towel.
While the task of removing wax from countertops can be daunting at first, with the right knowledge and products, you can easily tackle this tricky job. With a little patience and elbow grease, your countertop will look spotless in no time.
When it comes to removing wax from countertops, using non-metal instruments can be a game-changer. Plastic putty knives and credit cards make great scraping tools for hard surfaces. Use rubbing alcohol to remove any remaining residue and buff off any remaining wax with a paper towel.
One solution is to use a paper towel or cloth and an iron. Place the paper towel or cloth over the wax and apply the iron in circular motions. The heat from the iron will cause the wax to melt and transfer onto the paper towel or cloth.
Once the wax has been transferred, cleaning the surface with a cleaner is important to remove any leftover residue.
Goo Gone and rubbing alcohol are both effective solutions for removing wax from countertops. Apply the cleaner to a cloth or sponge and remove the wax residue.
The mineral oil trick is a go-to solution for getting stuck-on wax off surfaces. Just rub a small amount of mineral oil onto the wax, then wipe the wax away with a clean cloth. It's a safe and effective method and can be used on various surfaces such as wood, metal, and plastic. This trick is a household favorite because it doesn't involve harsh chemicals and is easy to execute.
One way to remove residual wax from a countertop is to work with hot water. Start by filling a sink or bowl with hot water. Then, submerge the affected area in the water for a few minutes, allowing the wax to soften and loosen up. After a few minutes, use a clean cloth or paper towel to wipe away the softened wax.
Lastly, if any wax residue is left behind, use a blow dryer to remove it. Be sure to keep the heat setting low and move the blow dryer in circular motions. This will help to melt away any remaining wax and make it easy to wipe off with a cloth or paper towel.
Removing candle wax is easy and not time-consuming as long as you remove it quickly!
The post How To Clean Wax Off Counters appeared first on My Stay At Home Adventures.
]]>Google has reportedly scrapped plans to release a pair of augmented reality (AR) glasses. The cancellation of the gadget, reportedly codenamed Project Iris, marks the third time the company's supposedly thrown in the towel on AR glasses. The most recent specs were expected to become Google's second foray into consumer tech and feature a more mainstream-friendly appearance than Google Glass.
In January 2022, the rumor mill churned out its first details on Project Iris, thanks to a report from The Verge citing anonymous sources "familiar with the project." Iris was reportedly wireless with external cameras and left heavy graphical processing duties to the cloud.
Last year's report also described prototypes in development as being ski goggle-like, but Business Insider's report Monday claimed that those prototypes were actually for Google's AR partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm to make a mixed reality (MR) platform. Google announced the project alongside minimal details in February 2023.
]]>Are your empty wine bottles collecting dust? I have an easy wine bottle project that is just as fun to do as it was to empty them! Create beautiful hanging wine bottle planters perfect for the winos and non-winos alike. And just like wine itself, this planter gets better with age!
Create a straight line with tape around the end of your bottle. This will help support the glass cutter to make a straight line on your wine bottle. Make sure the seams line up!
Use the tape as a guide on where score with your glass cutter. Press glass cutter firmly and carefully score the bottle completely around in a straight line. Only make one score line on the edge of the bottle.
Next, move your workplace to a concrete floor, for safety, since we will be working with fire. Place candle on floor and light. Hold wine bottle over candle flame, slowly turning it as you go. You should hear a popping sound as you turn your wine bottle.
After you have completed burning the entire circumference of the bottle, submerge the end of the bottle into ice water. It may help to lightly tap your wine bottle against the side of the bucket to help loosen the end of the bottle. Edge didn’t come out completely straight? No worries, the plants and moss we are using can help cover any imperfections.
Wear a dust mask or take your project outside for this step; glass dust plus your lungs is not a good thing. Take your sand paper and buff down the hard edges. Make sure to get the outside and inside edges of the wine bottle. Dunk your wine bottle into your ice water once more to clean off any dust.
Next, remove your house plant from its container. Gently remove excess soil, exposing the roots. Use your wine bottle to measure to fit. Since roots can take up a lot of space, I suggest getting a small, lightweight house plant for this project.
Cut your wire into a length twice as tall as your bottle. Wrap Spanish moss and lichen moss around the roots, this helps hide roots and keep the plant from falling out of the wine bottle. Plants need to breathe, so when wrapping your wire around moss, do so gently, not tightly, this allows for water to get through and plant growth. Twist wire ends together, forming one long strand. This will become your hanging hook.
Since we removed soil from our plant, we need to add some more to our plant’s new home. Plug up the wine bottle top with a paper towel and add two handfuls of planting soil to your wine bottle.
Remove the paper towel plugging the lip of the wine bottle, and push plant through the layer of soil till wire is exposed at the top.
Tip: Thread wire through the wine bottle. Push roots first into the wine bottle. The moss and wire help hold the wine bottle in place.
To finish off this look we added twine to the lip of the bottle and up through the wire that will be our hanger. Then take your lighter to get rid of the twine fuzziness.
Our little plant has deserved a water break, pour water through the top of the wine bottle over a sink, to avoid spilling. After your plant has drunk its fill, hang your beautiful new wine bottle planter indoors or outdoors. Cheers!
Want another cool wine bottle craft? Check out this video from ENJOY CRAFTING:
Repurposing wine bottles is a fun and unique way to decorate your home. Create a few of these wine bottle planters project and scatter them in your patio or yard. You'll surely have a wonderful accent to make your plants shine!
Will you be making this stunning wine bottle craft for you home? Let us know in the comments section below.
Do you enjoy making cut bottle projects? If you do, here're 5 DIY projects using cut glass bottles. They're a unique addition to your home decor.
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Editor’s Note – This post was originally published in June 2014 and has been updated for quality and relevancy.
Everything overheard in those days. German on the streets, my mother and my father on the phone. They’re only children. My mother, Philip, and I: three bodies stuck inside the bright-yellow cage of a phone booth. He was in Bosnia on assignment. Assigned to what? We didn’t know. We were only children. We knew far away; we knew war-torn; we knew 10 days, maybe two weeks, maybe more. We knew we had moved to Berlin earlier that summer and turned a page we could no longer turn back.
The flight home to Toronto was a year away, a lifetime in our little lives. By August I’d stopped wishing for the rec center and its too-chlorinated pool, for the park near our house and the counselors who brought us there, those miraculously stoned 14-year-olds, letting us climb on the monkey bars and making us necklaces out of marigolds and calling it “camp.” I missed my best friend Eva, but not as much as I’d thought. And even when I missed her, I liked it, my missing, this nothing the same anymore, this everything suddenly in the past tense. I had been made for the habit of missing, living out of a single suitcase with the same four T-shirts and two pairs of soccer shorts, the one jean dress, which I wore only because it made my mother smile, the same way she smiled when she looked at herself in the mirror, a smile equal measures modesty and conceit. The smile of a discerning woman. I lived for those smiles, the rare exception of them; we all did.
It was my brother, Philip, 18 months older, who had a hard time of it. He would turn 13 that summer but had started wetting his bed like a much younger boy. Not every night, no, but once and then again and then again. Back at home, I might have let myself enjoy it, even gloat a little. He who could do nothing wrong, he who had been everyone’s favorite, my mother’s particular pet. But here, instead, I sat on the foldout chair in the kitchen of the cavernous short-term-rental apartment and watched as my mother stuffed the soiled single sheet into the too-small washing machine and turned to me with her index finger to her lips, lifting her coal-dark eyebrows, and I thought about how I was being asked to keep a secret all the time now.
One evening, waking up uneasy, aware of something happening just outside my reach—moving out of bed with the inevitability of a dream. My mother on the patio, cigarette in her mouth, like the movie star she was not. I let out a little yelp. Her words, their sound escaping my mouth, How could you? She looked surprised, although less alert than I would have thought; stubbed the cigarette out on the balcony railing, and came over to me, smelling of a stranger, cigarettes and something else, a new smell blossoming from somewhere deep. When she tucked me back in, she pointed to the other sliver of bed where my brother slept, his face contorted and red; Stumm, she whispered, our favorite German word. Our second secret. My brother’s bad habit and hers. She was training me, I was beginning to understand, to store them away.
In the daytime, walking in the Tiergarten. My brother’s mouth pressed to the spout of a water fountain, my mother not even saying don’t. The junkies sitting around the entrance of the Zoologischer Garten, girls not much older than me, with their agitated German shepherds barking at their own tails. I asked my mother why the dogs were like that, and she told me fleas reflexively, and I thought about the tiniest facts and how adults accrued them, how many there were that I had yet to encounter. How would I ever catch up?
Every evening, sharing an ice-cream cone from the Häagen-Dazs on Kurfürstendamm, my mother not even complaining about the tourist prices. With my father away, bills were dispensed from the neat stack in my mother’s wallet like a magic trick, ta-da, not a perpetual rummaging in deep pockets, coins jangling, my father’s nervous habit. You’re in Europe now, he’d warned us when we’d arrived at Tegel Airport. We needed to keep an eye on prices and remember the exchange rate, which could sneak up on us at any moment. My brother perked up then, literal-minded as he was, terrified of those calculations, the exponential dangers of being abroad. My father, before leaving on assignment, had even loaned him his cheap Casio calculator. No matter where we went, Philip set to converting the price of each purchase from deutsche marks into Canadian dollars, even though the currencies were nearly on par.
How many phone conversations inside those yellow phone booths, with the playing-card-size ads for call girls papering every side? My mother calling Realtors in German that sounded like her native French—a language she had always kept from us—those guttural sounds made pert and pinched in her mouth. Breasts everywhere. In ads on the U-Bahn and plastered to buildings and construction fencing. The Beate Uhse Erotik Museum taking up an entire city block, with its displays of tasseled and G-stringed mannequins. One night, on our way back from ice cream, two women—girls, really—waiting in their miniskirts and go-go boots by a lamppost, their eyes surveying the road. I stopped and looked: a car slowing down, a beat-up shoebox with a man inside it with an ugly mustache, the woman looking to one side and then the other, and then her head dropping down to meet the mustache. A strangely elegant dance. My mother telling me, Don’t stare. I couldn’t tell if she disapproved of the scene, or if she didn’t want to make its actors feel uncomfortable. She didn’t seem to mind about anything in those days, or her minding was different, a kind of loose minding I’d always envied in other mothers.
And then, not a secret anymore. She smoked continually, inside the house and in the café under the arches of Savignyplatz, where she drank not one, but two cappuccinos in a row, always identical in their stout white ceramic cup and saucer and delivered by a waiter in a tux. We must have made a funny trio: my mother and I, our hair dark as ink; my brother, a redhead like our father, with his little calculator, waving my mother’s smoke away. Hot chocolate mit Sahne in a glass mug for me, with its dollop of whipped cream floating luxuriously at the top. Philip ordered strictly Coca-Colas, refusing orange Fanta, which I knew he liked. He boycotted everything German, with his Canadian flag sewn onto his backpack.
This was West Berlin. 1996. My mother not yet 35, the age I am now. We never went to the east in those days. Only my father went on assignment. Berlin had been reunified, but you couldn’t have guessed it from the way we lived. The few expats we’d been put in touch with all lived in the West. The John F. Kennedy Schule, where we would be attending fifth and sixth grade in September, was in the West, in leafy Zehlendorf.
My father had explained to us before we moved: He had been posted by his newspaper to track Berlin’s reconstruction, the country’s reunification. But I didn’t think the city needed rebuilding. It was beautiful, broken as it was. We had gone to see the Wall during our first week. Our father had briefed us before the visit, given us a loose chronology of the Cold War, shown us pictures from the fall: Berliners from the west and east dancing on the Wall’s thick lip. Fall seemed a passive word when it came to all those people wanting the same thing at the exact same time.
Back at home, when we were alone together, my father spoke to me almost continuously. He spoke and I listened. On the way to dance class and soccer practice, on the way to the supermarket, and to sleepovers at Eva’s. He never seemed to mind that I was a child. He spoke to me the same way he spoke to his few adult friends, to the people he interviewed over the phone. I don’t think he knew how else to speak to me. He was the kind of parent who seemed perplexed by the lives of the young, as though he had never had a childhood. He retained facts with exquisite precision.
It was odd, then, that he should love my mother, who appeared in her very nature like the opposite of a fact one might retain. Or maybe it was this—her counterfactuality—that had drawn him to her in the first place. When my father was with her, he spoke quietly, in a choppy and informational way. They did not argue, or if they did, did not allow us to overhear. But it was impossible not to notice the way her mood might shift irretrievably in his presence, the skin around her jaw tightening, the divot between her eyes deepening, her body becoming more rigid and upright—all of the physical cues she gave my father to keep his distance, his hushed compliance. I wished, in those moments, for my father to be a different kind of husband, one who might tease her, might take her out of herself, but I think he had a great respect for a person’s inborn right to her inborn seriousness. And there was complicity between them; I saw that too. The distance she demanded and his careful maintenance of it created a world unto itself, just large enough to house the two of them.
We were waiting for our furniture and the rest of our clothes. We had packed light, hoping the shipping container would arrive in a few weeks. But it had been six now; the first apartment we’d planned to move into had fallen through. Fallen through what?
And so we visited dozens of apartments. At first, the three of us: my mother, my brother, and I. When my brother said he’d had enough of snooping around other people’s stuff—It’s weird, he told us accusingly, as though we were enjoying it too much—my mother and I went alone. There were those apartments so emptied of life, so generic, that it was impossible to imagine reviving them with our presence. But there were also apartments so palatial, so bohemian, with their open-planned kitchens and proliferations of glass jars—delicate strands of black tea, swirls of pasta—so nakedly not ours.
We spent a few days in Charlottenburg, seeing apartments there, but I knew that they were beyond the budget the newspaper had set. My mother, under the spell of the stately apartments, the ornate moldings, the high ceilings, acted as though money was of little concern, agreeing on the spot to move into a quiet apartment with a marble-counter-topped kitchen. But that evening, a rare fight erupted between my parents over the telephone, and the next day we had to bow out of the lease. Mein mann, my mother gave, in her rudimentary German, as an excuse. Mann meant “man” and “husband” at the same time. I found this strange, that one should imply the other. I had no intention, even then, of ever being anyone’s frau.
Later, my mother picking clothes out for us at the C&A department store with her version of exuberance, moving easily through the aisles, plucking items off the rack. I loved my mother best in these moments, when I coasted on the wake of her decisiveness, her confident tastes. Cute, my mother said, when I came out of the changing room wearing a tight ribbed polo with white jean shorts. She arranged my collar, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, very cute. Philip told me I looked weird, but when I asked him why, he said, You just do. Like a weirdo. He had always been sweet before, shielding me as best he could from the bullying I had endured in our middle school in Toronto. But he brooded all the time now.
I could tell from the Turkish families and sturdy German grandmothers wearing floral housecoats that the store was not fancy. My mother loved to shop, but she only bought refined pieces for herself, keeping the habit of luxury her own. In our first week without my father, she had bought a pair of sunglasses for 175 Deutschmarks, followed by a silk blouse for 250. The boutique’s attendant, a young giraffe of a woman with a liar’s gap, had said, Sehr, sehr schön, commenting on my mother’s silhouette. My mother had looked in the full-length mirror in the way she did in those days, with a coy self-satisfaction that seemed like a secret she kept stored up only for herself.
From time to time, after the purchase of the blouse, I would go to her room, find the stiff bag hanging behind the door, visit the crinkly paper, touch the shirt’s almost impossible weightlessness. I didn’t care about clothes; I cared about her, how she would look in them, how she would feel in them. She had told me, on the way back to the apartment, where my brother sat plastered to the couch watching a recorded episode of Melrose Place, not to tell him or my father about what she’d bought.
Rainy days spent on the low couch watching the TV shows Eva had recorded for me onto VHS as a parting gift. Philip watching alongside, not even complaining that they were mostly soap operas. Mom reading and smoking on the balcony, not minding what we did. In the early afternoons, she went out and came back with groceries: supermarket potato salad and cold cuts for lunch and frozen pizzas and a salad for dinner, as if she had forgotten how to cook. At home, she had cooked every meal for us, garlic-stewed lamb sprinkled with immaculately chopped parsley, effortless salads bright with lemon and olive oil, nut cakes soaked in orange-blossom syrup, miraculously light, all recipes she’d learned from her Sephardic mother, my grandmother, whom my brother and I had met only twice—both visits so short, it had been impossible to glean more than the fact that she was opposite to my mother: loud, and thickset, and so aggressively affectionate that Philip had burst into tears when she’d squeezed him goodbye.
When the apartment in Charlottenburg fell through, we stopped looking for a place to live. We’ll let your dad do the digging when he gets back, my mother said, with a wry lilt. I knew that our sublet was ending in just a couple of weeks, but I said nothing, following her lead, as I always did. My father had been gone for three weeks, nearly four, and we no longer counted down the days. At night, I heard my brother crying, and instead of asking him what was wrong, I let him. We were each, it seemed, in our new confinement, in our new closeness, entirely on our own.
After the rain, a period of surprising heat. We peeled ourselves from the couch, took the U-Bahn to the Olympic swimming pool in Spandau. The place was packed with families. Bodies young and old on display. Philip grew red, chin down, eyes at his feet. We found a rare spot of unoccupied grass, where we lay our brittle bath towels. My mother on her belly, back to the sun. I bent down and undid the straps; I didn’t need to be asked. I found her handbag and took out the suntan lotion and squeezed the cream into my hands. Gross, Philip said, in his perpetual embarrassment, looking down at his Game Boy. The cream was cold against my hot hands; I massaged until the sunscreen disappeared into her back, hoping it might last longer, giving me something to do while I was here, letting me stay with my mother’s familiar body, rather than the dozens of others calling my attention nearby.
Old men with their enormous, globular bellies. Girls in their teens smoking nearby, no adult intervening. I never wanted to leave. When our father had told us that we would be moving to Berlin, he had said four years, and that had seemed like an eternity. I had cradled the telephone for hours in my room, crying to Eva, planning ways I might stay with her family in Toronto. But four years now seemed too few. I would be 15 then, just as old as those girls over there. We had been inseparable, Eva and I, but I no longer missed her. It seemed that I had been carrying on with her because I hadn’t yet known about the world, all the other people in it.
Then, Sabine. Not the first day at the pool but the second. At first, just a stranger on a towel a few meters away from mine, topless, me trying not to stare. Oblong nipples, dark and distended like stretched-out full moons. My mother, with one eye open, only half-listening to what Sabine was saying—she had started talking without a greeting, a stranger on a towel next to mine, our sudden intimacy, no introduction necessary. Philip, playing Tetris, pretending, successfully, not to care. Sabine was tan with an unevenly cut bob, no doubt something she’d fashioned on her own. She had hairy armpits; I tried not to look at those either. I’d never seen hair there on a woman before, but it had the same illicit urgency as the dark triangles in the pornos passed around at school. Sabine wanted to know where we were from; she had heard us speaking English. She had spent, she told me, a year in Wisconsin as a teenager on exchange and it was the most beautiful place in the world. Have you been? she asked, as if I were not an 11-year-old child. I told her I hadn’t, but that it seemed like one of those places that had more livestock than people in it, the kind of comment I’d heard my father make in the past. Laughter, hers, deep and from the belly, You’re funny. It’s good to have a sense of humor in your age, which made me blush. I wanted, from then on, above all else, to make Sabine smile, to make her laugh. Sabine spoke English well, save for her prepositions, which made the whole world, in her mouth, a little askew.
My mother and Sabine spoke for a while and I could sense that my mother was glad to finally be speaking English again, to be having a conversation with someone other than me. Back home, my mother had always been entirely self-reliant, the kind of mother who didn’t easily make friends with the other mothers or the neighbors or her colleagues at work. But she and Sabine got along immediately. Or Sabine spoke and my mother listened.
We spent the afternoon together. Sabine, we learned quickly, was a student at the university, and still, at age 29, working on her undergraduate degree in sociology. Looking back on it now, my mother must have envied Sabine this freedom, to study at the university for so many years without financial pressure. My mother had completed only the first two years of a degree in business administration before leaving Montreal for a summer job in the offices of an insurance company in Toronto. She’d met my father and stayed on, closed the door on her life before him.
Sabine had an ease about her, so that when we got up from our towels to walk back to the U-Bahn, so did she, and instead of taking it in the direction of her apartment, she jumped onto our line, and spoke to us until we’d arrived at our stop, and then, as if it were the most natural thing, walked us all the way to the door of our apartment building. I could tell Philip found this infuriating, as he always did when other people tried to burst our sacred family bubble. My mother and I watched her with rapt attention, and for the first time since we had arrived in the strange city, we both felt taken care of. We made plans to see one another again the next day, or Sabine suggested it and my mother agreed. And just like that, Sabine was in our lives. Sabine, of the loose-fitting skirts and tops, breasts—untethered, outlined by a silk camisole—that I couldn’t help but track, shifting beneath her shirt as she moved, as she talked. Her smell like baby powder, and something botanical, the smell of all drugstores here, a scent that I would later come to think of simply as Germany.
Trips to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum and the Fernsehturm and the Pergamon Museum were swiftly deemed boring by Sabine. Instead, a walking tour of all of the apartments she’d either lived in or thought of living in, and the ones her boyfriends and close friends had lived in too. This is where I lost my virginity, she informed us, pointing to a white-and-pink facade on a sunny street in Moabit. He was sleeping inside a bed, you know, that is close with the ceiling, so it was not a very good idea, she explained. A mezzanine, my mother providing the English word whenever Sabine couldn’t find it. How old were you? My mother asked. Thirteen, Sabine said tonelessly. My mother must have found this very young, but she said nothing. Instead, she smiled, Sabine looping her arm in hers and continuing the tour. And that is where we broke up, she said, pointing to the intersection of two broad boulevards nearby. Sabine had a way of making it seem like a life, for being one’s own, was worthy of commemoration.
My mother never spoke about her own life this way, even though I knew hers had been an interesting one, full of rupture and self-definition. The fact of her, her past, always just beyond our reach, a living mystery. Why, I’d asked my father earlier that year, did we only rarely visit our grandparents in Montreal, or did our mother ignore calls from her sisters, who seemed, from the photographs at least, lively and sweet? My father had simply said, Your mother is a very complicated woman, as if we were two men sharing in our private language, in our incomprehension.
We must have met Frank soon after that. Frank was, Sabine explained, her partner, a word I had only ever heard used in the context of business or crime. Frank—with his tight jeans and stringy, greasy dirty-blond hair, eyes blue and nearly cruel, a tiny gold hoop in his left ear—looked more like a criminal than a businessman. He smoked constantly, a brown stain where the filter hit the front tooth. He smelled too, of stale cigarettes and body odor, and something else, pine maybe, which was meant to mask it. On warm days, it only intensified the smell of his sweat.
Frank, we pieced together from his digressive, elliptical storytelling, was from a town in the former East, a cow farm, where he’d grown up a strict Catholic. I grew up in the Scheisse, he liked to say, laughing, always looking at me when he made the joke, even though it was my mother’s response that he tracked afterward. And I wasn’t one of these guys who wanted to come to the West: America, Bruce Springsteen, that kind of thing. I miss it every day. And then Sabine would say something in German, just to him, something that sounded to me unspeakably technical, that I could not associate with love or romance. Yet Frank would respond, in English now, But of course, I would not know Sabine, and they would kiss—open and lingering and a little bit wet. Philip looking at his feet, my mother unfazed, as though the woman who’d spent our childhoods placing her hands over our eyes whenever an intimate scene came onto our small television screen had been suddenly replaced.
Philip disliked Frank right away. I don’t know why we’re spending time with that trash, he said one morning, when my mother had made plans for us to spend the whole day with Sabine and Frank. I didn’t know you to be such a snob, my mother said, slapping him lightly across the face. She seemed as taken aback as we were by the gesture; she and Philip had been inseparable back home. In Toronto, it was in my brother’s presence that my mother had been happiest, most at ease. But there was no question of canceling our plans. The day trip to Treptower Park had been Frank’s idea; he was appalled, although not especially surprised, he let us know, by how conservative we’d been in our explorations of the city’s former East.
That afternoon, Frank, as though aware of Philip’s objections to his personality, seemed set on taunting him with it. On the walk to the S-Bahn station from our apartment, he teased Philip about his near-empty backpack. Each time we passed a phone booth or a vending machine, he made a show of sticking two fingers into the coin dispenser to check for stray change. Frank finally found a deutsche mark coin in a cigarette machine and, unbeknownst to Philip, stuck it in the front pocket of his backpack, winking at me as he did. Frank must have been feeling lucky, because when my mother took our tickets out from her wallet so that Philip could validate them—one of Philip’s few remaining pleasures—Frank grabbed her gently by the arm, intercepting the exchange. We were tourists, Americans, he explained. Canadians, Philip mumbled. Certainly, Frank continued, we could get away with saying we didn’t understand German if a ticket inspector came onto the train. And if you get the fine, I pay it, Frank said. And if you don’t get inspected, you give me the tickets. Sabine rolled her eyes; Philip glared at Frank. Of course, there was nothing fair about the offer, but my mother looked at Frank and smiled, satisfied with the terms. It’s a deal, she said, a girlish glint in her eye. It was a long journey—11 stops—my stomach tight the entire time, picturing the moment we’d get caught, what would come afterward. We would have to tell my father, explain to him what we’d done: We had not paid the fare, on a dare. Why would you do such a thing? he would ask us, with the tone of moral incredulity he used whenever questions of civic responsibility, of personal integrity—however minor—were at stake.
Inspections were frequent, but we got lucky that day. At the Treptower Park Station, my mother deposited the unused tickets into Frank’s expectant palm; he slipped them into the back pocket of his jeans and said, Schönen Dank! My mother did not look dejected. She appeared light, celebratory, even, as though she had gotten away with something too. From then on, Philip called Frank and Sabine “The Scheissters,” and to show my solidarity, I called them that too, even though I didn’t think it was fair that Sabine should be absorbed into the insult.
Frank called me Frank, even though my name was Frances, Frankie to my family and to Eva. But Frank thought it was too much of a coincidence that our names should be so similar, and so he shortened my name and made it into his own. I didn’t mind having a new name in this new place and so I didn’t complain. I neither liked nor disliked Frank. I merely saw him for what he was: a man, not my father, who was suddenly always there.
I had never seen a man’s body so close up, not even my father’s. Frank invited us to look at his in a way I understood women usually did, his T-shirts tight and worn so that we could make out his chest, lean and muscular, the veins pulsing down his arms as he moved, his limbs long and articulated. He had a strangely narcotic effect on my mother, so that when he spoke, she watched, impassive, until a languid smile emerged, which seemed to connect her to some internal circuit board.
Frank was a journalist too, he explained, but not the kind your father is, he told me, putting his arm around my shoulders and squeezing. I write about politics and ideas in newspapers you or your father probably haven’t heard of. I wanted to tell him that my father had ideas too. He was the smartest man I knew. In these moments, I forced myself to remember my father—the sprinkling of freckles on his fair arms, his hair a funny russet mop that puffed up when it got too long—as though doing so would help my mother remember him fondly too.
They liked me, Sabine and Frank, immediately, and treated me, it strikes me now, like my mother’s Mann. Do you two eat wurst? The two of them asked us one afternoon, as if my mother and I had the same taste in everything, excluding Philip from their questions, their attention, as they had learned to do. We both nodded, yes, which surprised me; I had never seen my mother eat pork before. Although she had disavowed nearly every part of her upbringing, she had always drawn the line at eating pork.
And so, one afternoon at the Imbiss in the hot August light, my mother eating an entire bratwurst, drinking not one but two cans of beer. Frank offering his own freshly opened Schultheiss to Philip, whom he insisted on speaking to in German, Musst du es probieren—You have to try it. My brother looking up at my mother: a nod, or even just a lack of one. A sip, lips pursed, and then another slug, and then another. You like it? Frank asked. My brother shrugged but took another gulp and burped loudly. Everyone, including my mother, laughed. Frank was the one to say, Ja, enough, before grabbing the half-finished beer with his thick fingers and drinking the rest of it himself. Did I see it then? Philip’s particular pleasure? Some special unlocking of genetic proclivity? Or maybe Frank, like any good con artist, simply knew exactly what each of us wanted before we ourselves had figured it out.
Sabine was our self-appointed teacher, our cultural liaison. Children in Berlin, we learned, took the U-Bahn alone to get to school, often before they could even read, and so they would count the stops on their fingers. It’s normal, she’d say of anything that seemed strange to us. What Sabine found abnormal was that we had never visited Wisconsin. How could we have missed the most beautiful place in the world? One afternoon at Wannsee, while my mother and brother were off swimming, Sabine asked me if I’d ever smoked a cigarette, and when I told her no, she looked at me as though that was not normal either and then said: You should try everything once; then you can take your decision. Otherwise, you’ll always be like everyone else, letting them decide for you. I hated, above all else, disappointing Sabine, and so I vowed, privately, to take her advice seriously.
That evening, at the apartment, my brother and I sunburned and tired, my mother unpacking our beach bag immediately, as she always did. Philip sent to the kitchen to turn the oven on for our frozen pizza, our mother looking around frantically in her beach bag. I don’t believe it. I had them all afternoon, she said, looking at me, as though I would know exactly what she meant. I was certain I packed them up. Do you remember, Frankie? she asked me. My sunglasses, she clarified, impatiently. I tried to piece the day together in my mind. But I couldn’t picture the sunglasses or their leather case, just the faded spray roses of Sabine’s old bedsheet; Sabine cross-legged, quizzing us from my mother’s German-word book, the tanned, chubby look of her toes, painted a surprising pink; Sabine’s sunscreen, her open pack of paprika chips; Philip nearby, on his own towel, reading a comic book; Sabine stuffing the sheet into her Kaiser’s supermarket tote bag, smiling at me. Maybe Sabine put them in her bag when she was packing up? I offered. Maybe, my mother said, but I could tell this was not a version of the story that she liked, the answer she wanted. She furrowed her brow, moved away from me. Maybe someone took them on the U-Bahn, she said, not looking at me. We won’t tell your brother they’re missing, okay? But she didn’t have to worry about that.
The next afternoon, at the Hackescher Hof with Sabine, white tablecloths and gold-stenciled columns, spaetzle for lunch, little worms wriggling around in a butter sauce. I waited for my mother to bring up the missing sunglasses. Instead, when the sun became too bright, she shielded her eyes with her hand. Want to switch seats? Sabine asked. Oh no, I’m fine, my mother answered. I forgot my sunglasses, she offered up, a lie uttered so effortlessly, I wondered how many others she’d told in her life. I never wear sunglasses, Sabine offered up. It’s too much of a, how do you call it, a curtain, with me and the world.
When the check came, my mother was still in the bathroom, and I watched as Sabine moved it toward my mother’s side of the table, not even trying to hide the gesture from me. I nearly asked about the sunglasses, but then I remembered: I was only a child. When my mother returned, Sabine rose and went to the restroom as my mother placed the cash down for the meal, as she nearly always did with Frank and Sabine. I knew that they believed us to be rich, and my mother had done nothing to disabuse them of that impression; no doubt, she enjoyed the fantasy too. I had the thought, not for the first time since we’d moved, that if adults knew just what children really saw and understood, they would not act as though they were alone when children were around.
Back at the apartment that afternoon, my mother took me aside and told me, I think I know what happened to the sunglasses. I remember feeling a little tug at my shoulder on the U-Bahn. But I remembered it differently: On our journey back to the apartment, she had been standing with Sabine, gripping the pole, and had placed the beach bag with its large opening on Philip’s lap. He’d attended to it with his usual vigilance; there was no way anything could have been stolen under his watchful eye. But when I tried to say as much, my mother changed the subject.
Our sublet expired, and we moved into the Holiday Inn near the Gedächtniskirche. My father had been gone for five weeks by then, and his voice had started to sound, over the telephone, like a recording of itself. Soon, Frankie. They need me here. I love you. Take care of your mom. Philip had stopped speaking to him altogether. You’re going to hurt your father, my mother told him, but Philip just shrugged, not looking up from his Game Boy. Under regular circumstances, my mother would have complained about the hotel—the cheap floral bed covering, the bathroom with its bleach smell—but she took the unexpected move in her stride. On our first day there, she let us mope around in our pajamas all day watching NBC, the only English-speaking channel on the hotel TV, eating Haribo Smurfs and drinking Fanta straight from the bottle. She came in and out, running errands, smelling of cigarettes and her new perfume. We didn’t have many traveler’s checks left. My mother hid her trips to the exchange bureau from Philip and often asked me to stay behind with him while she went out to get more cash. When she returned, she put me in charge of placing the money pouch back into the bedside drawer when Philip wasn’t looking. I wondered what would happen when my father returned and found out that his cost-of-living allowance was being spent on dinners and drinks with Sabine and Frank, as well as other luxuries my mother had permitted herself in his absence. There was the bottle of perfume purchased at the Parfümerie Douglas while Philip and I waited outside; the pair of trousers to match the blouse at the small boutique; linen placemats and a delicate ceramic bowl she’d bought at a craft fair, first for herself, and then, when Sabine had suggested that she too liked the pairing, for her as well. My mother, I knew, had always kept a separate bank account, her own, where she saved half of her monthly paycheck from the insurance company, but this was not the money she was spending in Berlin. She had told me once, in a rare moment of maternal advice: Remember, Frankie, a woman always needs her own money. You never know what might happen between two people. It was true, I didn’t know, and yet I suspected it; with my mother, talk of relationships had always thrummed with a certain threat.
As a treat for Philip’s birthday, we bought a large jar of Skippy peanut butter, Kraft Dinner, and individual-size boxes of Corn Pops and Frosted Flakes, all priced as luxury goods in the KaDeWe food department. I was put in charge, before we went on this shopping spree, while Philip brushed his teeth and my mother smoked a cigarette outside, of removing the calculator from Philip’s bag. I found them then: my mother’s sunglasses, wedged in the inside pocket of Philip’s weightless backpack, not missing at all. I moved swiftly, still focused on my original mission. I placed the calculator in the bedside table, next to the laminated room-service menu and the money belt, and zipped closed the knapsack, laying it on its side, as it had been before I’d picked it up. I left the sunglasses exactly where I’d found them; I could be decisive, hide the truth as well as any adult.
Later, watching Philip in the imported-foods aisle, I was glad I had not told my mother. Philip seemed so at ease among the garish packaging, the familiar brands—his birthday homecoming—ignoring the prices, not even reaching for the calculator in his backpack. Although he was officially a year older, 13 now, his age seemed incidental. He was so much younger than me, in need of my protection, my secrecy. A few days later, feeling around for the sunglasses while Philip was still asleep—my mother gone to the bakery—I was surprised to find that the pocket where the sunglasses had been was now empty. I looked around in his suitcase, under his bed, in the pocket of his fleece, his windbreaker, but I couldn’t find them anywhere.
One evening, Frank and Sabine visiting our hotel room, their singularity at odds with the drab interior. Sabine sitting cross-legged, at home wherever there was a floor. Frank messing with the remote control. My mother wearing a pretty dress, mixing drinks on the varnished hotel-issued desk, as though she were hosting a cocktail party. A strange scene: this North-American family, father missing, with a 20-something German couple in the Holiday Inn Berlin Kudamm, 99 Deutschmarks a night, with a discount for a week, which my mother had negotiated by speaking to not two but three different employees. I had been relieved to watch her do it, to find that perhaps she had not, in fact, entirely forgotten about our father, about us. I wondered where our father would have settled if he’d been there that evening, but I couldn’t picture his body in the scene. The only person in the room tethering us back to him was Philip; I could tell Philip thought we were fickle, that our loyalties were cheap.
Ice, my mother indicated to Philip and me, passing me the plastic bucket. Philip took a while to snap to attention, but then my mother raised an eyebrow and we slinked out of bed into the hallway. We raced to the elevator in our flip-flops, tripping a little as we did. We fought to press the button. I won, as I always did, and then we fought, too, to press down on the lever of the ice machine. But I let Philip do the honors, knowing he needed the win more than I did, the sense of temporary power: the ice clattering, the loud whoosh, the release.
On the way back to the room, we didn’t race but walked slowly instead. Philip looked so sad, I wanted to shove him, or to slap him, as my mother had just a few weeks before, so he could come back to us, be my older brother again. I knew that he hated Frank and Sabine, hated their presence in our room, hated the way they acted upon our mother, and upon me. He missed our father and the normalcy his presence would have necessarily restored. He missed our beat-up minivan. He missed baseball practice. He missed our neighbor’s dog, a dachshund who always slunk right up to him, licking his open palm. I knew all of this without him saying a word. Why didn’t I miss these things too? I put my hand on his shoulder, just as Frank was in the habit of doing with me. Philip let me keep it there longer than expected before pushing it away. Don’t be a weirdo, he said. I could see, from the side, that his cheeks were gleaming pink; he was crying.
We had forgotten the key and so when we got back to the locked door, we knocked and waited, wondering, after some time, if we’d gotten the room number wrong. My mother finally arrived, slightly flushed, her hair down. She smiled at us; Willkommen, she said, as though we were late arrivals to her party. She was a little bit drunk, her eyes darker than usual. She looked young, like the photographs I’d seen of her from the period when she and my father had first met; she’d been only 19 then. Frank lying on his back, using a paper clip to clean his fingernails. Sabine, armed with my mother’s comb, returning to the activity we’d interrupted: braiding my mother’s dark mass of wavy hair. My mother was very proud and protective of her hair, and I had never once seen another person, not even my father, touch it. In Toronto, she had cut her own bangs and trimmed her own split ends. Sabine wet her comb in the glass and glided it through my mother’s long hair. My mother sighed with pleasure, and I had the urge to turn the volume up on the television. When Sabine was halfway done, she brought my mother to the mirror, and I heard Sabine say, You have such nice eyebrows. My mother demurred, said something about missing the woman who waxed them back home. That’s normal? Sabine asked.
For my 11th birthday, earlier that year, my mother had taken me to that very aesthetician; she had waxed my legs and the three lone hairs under my armpits, the small shadow above my lip, the hair between my eyebrows. My mother had made the appointment for me; driven me to the small salon, in a strip mall in a part of town I’d never been to; sat on a chair beside me as I squirmed in my underwear beneath the stranger’s tender efficiency. When I had started to cry, my mother had grabbed for my hand, but I’d refused it, finding her touch unbearable. I had the thought for the first time: I am separate; I belong to myself. And aside from thinking that my mother was the most beautiful, the most interesting woman in the world, I hated her a little bit too. I had immediately swallowed these thoughts down. I was a good-natured, loyal child, and it had frightened me, what these thoughts might do, what they might set in motion between us. My mother had said, in the car on the way home, as a kind of apology perhaps, You’ll thank me later, because you’ll never have to shave. She had always been, before this moment, so careful with me. Whatever her mother had been to her—overbearing, intense—she had handled me with an opposite energy. It was as though she were worried that any explicit assertion of her power—to love or to punish—might affirm some similarity between them.
Philip seemed not to take in the scene in the hotel room. He crawled into the nearest bed, tucked himself in with his jeans still on, returned to Super Mario Brothers. Frank propped himself up on his elbows and snapped his fingers at Philip, and said, Hey, man, I think there’s a beer in there, pointing to the mini-fridge. Philip perked up at the mention of the beer, even putting his Game Boy down. Yeah? he said, with his practiced shrug. Ja, Frank said, and set about getting him one. He crawled around my mother and Sabine; I waited for my mother to say something, anything. Surely, she should be the one to say no. But it was Sabine who grabbed Frank by the belt loop as he made his way past her, and I watched as some electric current moved between them, and then a few words spoken in German very quickly—too quickly for me to even hear the words individually—Frank crawling backwards, as if on rewind, head down, looking up at Philip and saying, Sorry, man. When Sabine speaks, you listen; that is the rule. Philip did not say anything or even look at Frank, just back at the tiny screen of his gray console, but I could see the redness that had erupted across his throat. The invitation to have something he might want, and then its retraction, was the exact kind of inconsistency that drove Philip crazy.
I spent the rest of the evening lying in bed with Philip, pretending to watch the German-culture program that was playing on TV. The men were debating something important about the future of the country, but I couldn’t understand what positions each was taking. Just two old men frowning, gesticulating; Frank snorting, swearing on the second bed. My mother sat silently on the floor, back to me and to Sabine, who continued to twist her hair into a braid that looped around the front of her head like a crown. My queen, I had heard my father call my mother on a few occasions, and the idea had embarrassed me, his deference to her, this power she had accrued how, exactly? She sat that evening nearly silently, an emanation, head rocking gently back and forth with the current of Sabine’s hand weaving. It seemed more and more dangerous—her power, her sovereignty—a glass teetering on a table’s edge.
Done with her coiffure, Sabine rose and tapped my hip to indicate that I should move over and settled onto the bed between Philip and me. Philip groaned, but Sabine laid her arms around both of our shoulders and declared: It’s like camp, isn’t it? And we’re like s’mores. I’m the marshmallow. She laughed. I had them once in Wisconsin. So disgusting, right? But, you know, good too, she said to Philip. But he ignored her, so she looked at me, and I said, Yeah, not knowing what else to say. My mother was in the bathroom, and for a moment, I had the thought that if she left us, as I knew some parents did, maybe Sabine could step in and be my mother instead. Yet if my mother left, wouldn’t it be to be with Frank? In which case, Sabine probably wouldn’t want to stick around us, to be reminded of her heartbreak. Or maybe my mom would want to live with both of them like on Melrose Place, where young and attractive people lived near one another, a revolving door of attachments and betrayals—only in this case it would be in Berlin, and there wouldn’t be a pool but an interior courtyard with decrepit bikes and an elaborate system of trash and recycling. The image of my mother, living another life without us in it, was not a new one. How long had I held it? Not a fear exactly, but a queasy interior tug, a thought to avoid just in case thinking it might make it come true. I had always been comforted by a certain attendant superstitious belief: My mother loved Philip far too much to leave our family. He was too precious to her, too dear. But that had been before; now I wasn’t so sure.
When my mother finally came out from the bathroom, she looked taken aback by the arrangement of our bodies. She gestured to the spot on the bed next to Frank, and said to Sabine in a gentle but firm tone, You’ll be more comfortable there, no? Sabine squeezed my shoulder, rose and jumped into the bed next to ours, curling up to Frank like an overgrown cat. He lay his hand instinctively on her soft waist; she made a sound like purring. I missed Sabine, her warmth, her heavy breathing, her thick presence next to mine, so foreign and pleasurable. Instead, Philip’s clammy feet, my mother’s rigid body, kept at a distance from mine. I wanted to grab my mother’s hand, to tell her not to leave us; we were a family. Philip needed her; he wasn’t doing well at all. But I couldn’t get my hand to move over to hers. My arms stayed stuck to my sides, unwilling to cooperate.
Frank asked if they could order room service, and my mother said, Of course, leaning over and opening the side-table drawer, just long enough, I noticed, for Sabine to see, above the laminated menu, the thick money belt—beige and somehow as illicit as a pair of underwear or some exposed part of the body. My mother and I had gone together to cash 1,000 deutsche marks only that afternoon. My mother lay back down, turned over to face us; she put her arm around my waist and tried to reach for Philip too, but he shimmied his body away from ours in revolt. My mother settled on hugging just me. A relief. I could breathe again. Get some sleep, Frankie, she spoke sweetly into my hair, kissed my cheek. You look nice, I said, touching the thick silken plait poised above her forehead.
I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes, it was morning, and my mother was already dressed, Philip snoring next to me, still wearing his jeans, his face ruddy, his upper lip slick with night sweat; the bed next to ours already made. I bought us some breakfast, my mother said, passing me a brötchen mit Käse right in bed. She looked fresh and concerned, Sabine’s braid still crowning her head but loosened and uneven, a little sad-looking in the light of day. I didn’t have to wait, as I usually did, to piece together what was wrong with her. She whispered to me, It’s gone, pointing to the bedside drawer. They took it, she said. I can’t believe it.
I watched my mother pace the room; I ate my brötchen quietly, letting the seeds fall between the sheets, not even catching them in my cupped hand, as I usually did. Then she sat on the ground at my feet, and I knew what she wanted me to do. I started unplaiting. I worked gently but efficiently, trying not to hurt her tender scalp. As I undid the braid, my mother’s thick hair fell into my hands and I felt it in her, the switch, the split: before and after. I might have said something then, about Philip, the sunglasses, the backpack. But I didn’t. It was her skill, but I could have it too; I already did. To decide: That’s it. To close the door on those people, that phase. To turn the page. I let her do it; I did not intervene. She got up and kissed me on the forehead. You’re a good girl, she said, but I didn’t exactly feel like one.
When the phone rang while she was out—Sabine, no doubt—I didn’t pick up, just as my mother had instructed me. And when Philip asked me what was wrong—had Mom broken up with the Scheissters?—I told him I knew what he’d done. The sunglasses. The money. He didn’t deny it. Give it to me, I said. No, he replied, and so I went into his backpack myself. I was not angry; I was satisfied. What I thought I knew was true. I counted it out loud: 780 Deutschmarks. I didn’t even ask him why. I understood. I thought for a moment, considered the different outcomes. We’ll give it back to her 20 Deutschemarks at a time, I said, as though I really was a Frank after all. I wished Sabine could see me this way, one last time: suave and certain. Making my own decisions. Taking things into my own hands.
How easy it was, just a single phone call. Our father back within two days. I pictured what my mother must have said: We need you. Come home. The kids. He had a concerned, harried look when we first saw him, an uncanny guest in the lobby of our Holiday Inn. He smelled oddly unlike himself, like the airplane and the soap from foreign hotels. The conversation between my parents, when it finally took place, happened in the bathroom of the hotel room. Philip turned the volume up on Jay Leno, but I pressed my ear to the door. She had been robbed, I heard her explain. Robbed? Where? Why hadn’t she told him over the phone? His voice like a branch snapped off in a gust of wind. You’re being very confusing; tell me exactly what happened, Sophie, he said, and I pictured him in there with one of his black-and-white reporter’s notebooks with the coil at the top, just a few words per page in his indecipherable scrawl. And then she told him everything, from the beginning. From the time at the swimming pool, to the Imbiss, to the many walks around Sabine’s neighborhood, to the trip to Treptower Park and the Hackescher Hof. She spoke the facts, the kind my father would be interested in. The exact number of times we had met up with them, the name of the village where Frank had said he was from, the name of the publication he wrote for, the exact amount of money stolen, 780 Deutschmarks. It won’t take me long to find them, he said. It might even make a good story. My mother let out a little inchoate cry. No, Joel. I didn’t hear the rest. The taps were turned on. But I imagine the particular quieting down, the thing that I had never understood—would never understand—between them, a pitch unreachable to anyone else, their quiet acquiescence; in other words, their love, or maybe simply their marriage.
We moved the next day to a cheaper hotel in the Western suburbs and found an apartment more affordable than any of the others we’d looked at. It had a brutalist charmlessness, but a room for each of us, and was walking distance from our school. School was not as different from Toronto as we expected. Every effort was made to shorten the distance between this place and North America, the school’s ethos like sliced bread: comforting but not especially nutritious. Philip made friends quickly there, and I found two boys—the son of a Nigerian diplomat and the son of a Bostonian violinist at the Berlin Philharmonic—who didn’t mind spending time with me. My mother stayed mostly in the apartment, doing penance, although for what, exactly, I wasn’t sure. Philip and I returned the money one 20-deutsche-mark bill at a time, and there was a certain pleasure in watching my mother’s little flash of joy at finding more than she’d thought was hers. When we did venture into Berlin for the odd concert or for an exhibit or to visit some expat my father had been put in touch with, she always wore her prettiest clothes, the silk blouse and trousers from the boutique in Charlottenburg. In them, she had that expectant sense about her, as though at any point she might be recognized.
Our stay in Berlin lasted only one year. My father was called back to Toronto before his posting was over. Budget cuts, the newspaper gave as an explanation. He would make editor within the year. I was not wrong about my mother. She was, I must have sensed it even then, with my child’s prescience, destined for rupture, scorched-earth cycles. Within two years of our return, my parents would be divorced, my mother gone to live in Vancouver with her second husband, an insurance salesman with a face as smooth and supple as a child’s. My brother and I saw her, after that, only during holidays, which merely solidified what she’d always felt like to me: a scarce resource, on loan from another life. I hated her for six months, maybe a year, as any teenager would, but it was a feeling that was impossible, constitutionally speaking, for me to sustain for very long. My father reacted to his heartbreak with a similar composure: He was sad and forlorn until he couldn’t stand to be that way anymore. It was Philip who took the divorce most to heart. He pointed the finger at my father: He had been the one to upend our lives, had been the real absence all along. He pointed the finger at me: I had no character, followed others around like a dog. Philip punished us by disappearing for days at a time, showing up drunk at our high school, getting into fistfights at the smallest slight. It would take him nearly a decade to recover from the bomb my mother’s departure detonated in his fragile life. But that was all much later. That year in Berlin, at least as I remember it now, had the pleasant, suspended quality in our family’s history of an entre-guerre, a détente.
]]>Pros:
Cons:
If you’ve been following along on my hair journey, then you’re likely well aware that I’m a big fan of R+Co. The brand is the brainchild of three of the most renowned stylists in the industry: Thom Priano, Garren, and Howard McLaren. Since launching the brand in 2014, this trio of hair wizards has blessed beauty lovers with product after product of high-performing formulas, many of which smell fabulous and all of which look like little pieces of kitschy art thanks to truly unique packaging.
The R+Co Rodeo Star Thickening Foam is not your average mousse. It pumps out in hefty dollops, one or two of which is plenty to primp my entire head of hair. The foam has the same scent as the brand’s Dallas line, which has citrus undertones with what I register as hints of licorice. Is it my favorite scent in the world? No. Is it too overpowering for my sensitive nose? Also, no.
From a formula stance, this thickening foam is infused with a bunch of effective ingredients. Where Moroccan lava clay helps to absorb any excess oil from the strands, aloe vera leaf extract deeply conditions hair to leave it looking shiny and hydrated all day long. Meanwhile, hydrolyzed soy protein helps to strengthen strands for a thicker appearance.
Where some styling products don’t show off their results until the end look, I found that this foam started thickening my strands from the moment I massaged it in. While this might sound like a good thing, it’s not without a downside. Since I applied it to unparted, towel-dried hair, I found that my hair was difficult to comb through post-application while damp. After using my Wet Brush to work it through and situate my hair for drying, I switched to my Dyson and found that the thin bristles of the round volumizing brush also had trouble maneuvering my newly thickened tresses. Eventually, though, once my strands started to dry a bit, the brush passed through with ease and the end results were well worth it. My hair looked and felt thicker, and my blown-out ends held their shape.
With this in mind, I recommend rough drying your strands (ie: without a brush) until your hair is roughly 90 percent dry, then going in with your brush and dryer (or Dyson if you have one).
]]>Also, Friday’s Amazon Summer in Color post malfunctioned and several links were wrong when the post went live. They are all corrected now, thank you for letting me know about the issue!
Creating as stylish and inviting home doesn’t have to break the bank. Thanks to the huge selection of affordable and on trend home decor items available on Amazon, you can transform your living space without draining your wallet.
My own home is styled with several items from Amazon. In this post, I’ll take you room by room and share the budget friendly Amazon home decor finds that add warmth, personality and style to your own home.
In the photos below, I’ve tried to link everything you see, even if it’s not Amazon. If you have any questions, feel free to leave it in the comment section and I’ll be sure to respond.
Couch • Amazon Ottoman • Similar Rug • Tray • Striped Pillow • Plaid Pillow
Console Table • Vase • Cherry Blossoms • Bowls • Similar Basket • Stoneware Bowls • Candle Holders • Similar Basket • Similar Dough Bowl • Beads
Bar Stools • Amber Soap Bottles • Tray • Olive Tree
Top Shelf : Bowl
Middle Shelf: Potted Plant • Black Vase • Candle
Bottom Shelf: Marble Pedestal Bowl • Black Beads • Similar Mini Potted Plant • Candle • Faux Tulips • Rattan Vase • Bunny Cake Stand
Counter: Black Vase • Pot • Plant • Faux Artichokes • Large Black Bowl
Candle • Faux Tulips • Rattan Vase • Bunny Cake Stand
Bed • Lamps • Bedding • Lumbar Pillow • Bench
Vase • Cherry Blossom • Boxes • Mirror • Console
Drapes • Drapery Rod • Rings • Rug
Cardigan • Tank • Jeans • Watch • Amazon Rug
pink upholstered ottoman • standing vanity mirror • large gold mirror
Tall Stool • Vintage Stool • Basket • Similar Scrub Brush • Sisal Brush • Bath Bubbles • Artwork
Double Towel Rack • Towels • Wall Art
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12
Now let’s go kick Monday’s booty!
The post Affordable & Stylish Amazon Decor in My Home appeared first on Honey We're Home.
]]>The ZOE kitchen was spotted on Etsy and has AMAZING reviews. This is the kitchen most likely to get me to play for hours. I love all the hand crafted accessories and the design element makes me swoon. And the artist is willing to CUSTOMIZE this design.
The surface has enough space for them to make a 'bake' which can then be popped in the oven (with magnetic door) or set on the hob to 'cook'. Utensils and equipment can then be packed away in the handy cupboard or placed on the rack above the sink.
I'm sold on the overall sweetness of this play kitchen. The colors and design harken back to a simpler time when bakers could be found in every home. With an oven and integral microwave and plate rack, this kitchen range is made extra special with a multitude of original accessories.
Two wicker baskets provide lots of storage space for other pretend play food within the mini chef range, two wooden jars, three racks of herbs, three pretty plates, a printed gingham potholder, a printed mini chef tea towel and three cooking utensils. Pretend play food here is a delightful two-part fish with garnishes in an oval fish pan. Lastly but not least, don't forget to wash your hands at the sink with a handy soap dispenser.
Get the on Maisonette here ($249)
I love the simplicity of the Hape Play Kitchen. It has all a little cook needs with a sink, stove, oven with window, cabinet, spice shelf, and turn able clicking knobs. Hope kitchen and grill Playset is made from durable wood, child safe materials and non-toxic water-based paint. This toy could be passed along for generations. There's nothing trendy about it.
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The Sloan Play kitchen from West Elm will have a home in any home that errs on the side of form over substance. The clean simple lines will look good in every living room, though it's missing the bells and whistles of other brand. It's got a solid poplar frame, solid birch legs and engineered wood body and shelves. It features a pretend sink, oven, fridge and set of salt and pepper shakers.
The Ikea Duktig is our pick for the budget play. And if you want to save money and know how to quickly assemble Ikea furniture, this is the one for you! The Ikea kitchen is a dream come true for tiny master chefs and bakers. In this modern the cooktop lights can be switched on/off and give a realistic glow but do not get warm.
If you love Chip and Joanna Gaines and all things farmhouse, the Chelsea kitchen from Williams Sonoma is the one for you. It’s an all-in-one stove, oven and refrigerator with tons of interactive opportunities – knobs turn, doors open and the sink is watertight for real cleanup.
Get it from Williams Sonoma here ($499)
If you have a super small space, this Small Foot mini play kitchen is perfect. The cooking event can begin! This comprehensively equipped play kitchen, made of FSC certified wood, has everything that young chefs need for preparing a feast. Knobs on the stove and oven make realistic clicking sounds. For the price it also includes folding oven, saucepan, lid, pan, salt and pepper shakers and three small kitchen utensils. The toy measures 14.57" H x 6.5" W x 13.98" H.
Get it on Amazon here ($37.99).
If you child wants a FULL kitchen with every gadget and loads of counter space, this is the one. It's idea for a large family with a big playroom. the set up comes with an oven, microwave, refrigerator, freezer and washer doors. The burners have realistic lights and sounds and there is shelving and hanging pegs for pots, pans and accessories.
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A dream play set for any growing foodie or mini chef, the Djeco Lila’s Cooker is just under 15" wide. I personally love the tea towel. Featuring a range of accessories, your tot can stir, whisk, flip, and mix their creations before adding the finishing touches with the bird-shaped salt and pepper shakers.
If features a play oven, microwave and cupboard with magnetic doors. Plus, the reverse side features a play washing machine with sound-effect buttons and storage shelves for toy food. Includes 7 kitchen accessories.
I'm now obsessed with the PairPear Coffee Maker Espresso Playset. If you love coffee, you've got to get this for your kiddo. This wooden set comes with 13 pieces and is the perfect way to get your kids started on making latte art. Thanks to it’s functional filter, coffee beans will drop into the cup!
Get the PairPear Coffee Maker Espresso Playset on Amazon $34.99
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Maybe a your kiddos want to spend time outside cooking, if that's the case, this wooden grill set is perfect.
Get it here at Kohl's online. ($129.00)
Need more ideas on what to do with the kids? Be sure to follow our Activities to Do with the Kids board on Pinterest here.
Momtrends was not paid for this post. This post contains affiliate links.
]]>The best air hand dryers for work should be reliable, with a long work life because they are being used constantly, and should be energy efficient. Whether you are installing a hand dryer in a restroom, kitchen, or handwashing station, the units on this list will provide a valuable buying guide.
Making the switch to a commercial hand dryer indeed comes with a range of benefits, both tangible and intangible, which can greatly enhance your business’s overall functionality and reputation. To further emphasize the point, let’s delve into a few additional aspects of why this investment might be worthwhile:
Customer Perception – Believe it or not, the state of your restroom can greatly impact a customer’s overall impression of your business. A well-maintained, modern restroom with a high-quality hand dryer indicates that you care about details, hygiene, and sustainability. This can boost your company’s reputation and customer loyalty.
Long-term Savings – Despite the initial cost of installing a hand dryer, you’ll likely notice considerable long-term savings. Unlike paper towels, there’s no need to continuously buy, store, or replace anything. Moreover, many of today’s models are energy-efficient, further lowering your operating costs.
Reduced Maintenance – Hand dryers reduce the time and effort needed for janitorial services. There’s no need to replenish paper towel dispensers, clean up discarded towels, or deal with the resulting plumbing issues when these end up in toilets.
Space Optimization – Paper towel dispensers, and the storage required for their refills, take up valuable space. Hand dryers are compact, freeing up room for other amenities.
Commercial hand dryers also offer:
Overall, while the decision to install a commercial hand dryer may seem minor, its impact on your business’s operational efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and reputation can be significant
Commercial hand dryers have become increasingly popular in the past few years. Businesses are looking to replace paper towels and their dispensers in an effort to save money and be more environmentally friendly. In response, vendors have made various styles of hand dryers available with different features and options. Here are the general types of commercial hand dryers available:
Features / Model | Top Pick: Goetland Stainless Steel Commercial Hand Dryer | Runner Up: XLERATOR Automatic High-Speed Hand Dryer | Best Value: JETWELL 2Pack High-Speed Commercial Automatic Eco Hand Dryer |
---|---|---|---|
Power | 1800 Watts | 1500 Watts | 1400 Watts |
Dry Time | 10-12 seconds | 10-15 seconds | 7-10 seconds |
Speed | Air speed of 200 mph | High-velocity air stream | Not specified |
Sensor Range | 2-5.9 inches | Automatic infrared optical start/stop sensor | Up to 6 inches |
Noise Level | 70-72 decibels | Lowered by 9 decibels with noise reduction nozzle | 72 decibels |
Installation | Wall-mounted, plug-in | Surface-mounted | Not specified |
Weight | 10.1 pounds | Not specified | Not specified |
Special Features | Polished stainless steel | Brushed stainless steel cover, Noise reduction nozzle | Infrared sensor, Brush motor, Uses 80% less energy |
Warranty | Not specified | 5 years | Not specified |
Price Range | High-end | Mid-range | Budget (value for 2-pack) |
Ideal For | Commercial use | Commercial use | Commercial use where multiple hand dryers are needed |
Package Includes | 1 Hand Dryer | 1 Hand Dryer | 2 Hand Dryers |
Top Pick: The polished stainless steel Goetland hand dryer uses 1800 watts to dry hands within 10-12 seconds by moving air at 200 mph. The infrared sensing distance is set between 2-5.9 inches, with noise ranging between 70-72 decibels. Ideal for commercial use, this hand dryer weighs 10.1 pounds.
This dryer can be easily wall-mounted and may be plugged in directly to an outlet.
Goetland Stainless Steel Commercial Hand Dryer 1800w Automatic High-Speed Heavy-Duty Dull Polished
Runner Up: The XLERATOR air hand dryer is made with a brushed stainless steel cover accompanied by a noise reduction nozzle that lowers the noise by 9 decibels. This surface-mounted hand dryer with a high-velocity air stream can dry hands in 10-15 seconds.
It also has an automatic infrared optical start/stop sensor that runs the dryer for 35 seconds or until hands are removed from under the sensor. It runs on 1500 watts and comes with a five-year warranty.
XLERATOR XL-SB Automatic High-Speed Hand Dryer with Brushed Stainless Steel Cover
Best Value: The JETWELL 2Pack UL hand dryer uses 1400 Watts to dry hands within 7 to 10 seconds. It comes with an infrared sensor that works up to six inches, and it has been tested to work more than 500,000 times. The brush motor operates at 72 decibels and uses 80% less energy.
This option is a great value if your business needs multiple hand dryers.
JETWELL 2Pack UL Listed High-Speed Commercial Automatic Eco Hand Dryer with HEPA Filter
The carbon brush motor can dry your hands in 10 – 15 seconds. This dryer has a built-in HEPA filter, automatic heating that heats up to save more than 70% of energy use per day, UL approved, and 45-second overtime protection. The company guarantees the device for two years with worry-free replacement. This economical hand dryer comes highly rated by its users.
AIKE AK2903 Heavy Duty Commercial Hand Dryer with Hepa Filter Polished Stainless-Steel UL Approved
This dryer takes up less space because of its patented horizontal compact design. It dries your hands in under 12 seconds using a motor tested for more than half a million times without any issues. The noise level comes in at 70db with 76.5 cubic feet per minute airflow.
It also features temperature control for either room temperature or warm air, and a corrosion-proof stainless steel cover.
ASIALEO Commercial Hand Dryer High-Speed Automatic Electric Hand Dryers
The Dyson hand dryer is one of the fastest hand dryers you can get, but the price puts it out of reach for many small businesses. It moves air at an amazing and unmatched 420 miles an hour. A dry time of around 11 seconds, a high-grade HEPA filter, a 5-year warranty, and a long-life brushless motor make it a quality dryer. This hand dryer may not be for everyone, but it gets rave reviews from suppliers.
Dyson Airblade dB Hand Dryer AB14
The NOVA-1 by World Dryer is a cost-efficient option for smaller, lower traffic areas. It is compact and easy to install and dries hands in about 30 seconds. This model comes in a white epoxy enamel finish on die-cast aluminum for a clean and vandal-resistant surface. This dryer has a cord with a 3-prong plug, making it compatible with any 120-volt wall outlet.
This hand dryer by Excel is popular among energy-conscious small businesses mainly because it can qualify users for LEED credits. It promises to reduce paper towel waste and use 80% less energy than other commercial dryers. In addition, this model has adjustable heat and speed options and is ADA compliant. This surface-mounted hand dryer also features an anti-microbial cover and washable pre-filter.
If you like supporting small businesses and saving money, consider this stainless steel option by EnBath. This compact dryer provides 224-mph-velocity for each session and has adjustable speed and volume options. It uses only 1350 watts of electricity for heated air and 500 watts for room temperature air.
Despite its small size, this dryer is built for long-term use and has been lab-tested over half a million times.
EnBath Hand Dryer (224 mph) Automatic Electric Hand Dryers for Bathrooms, Stainless Steel
This hand dryer from Alpine Industries combines power, energy efficiency and sleek design. Its 25,000 rpm brush motor dries hands in 10 seconds, making it ideal for high-traffic, heavily used areas.
This hand dryer is corrosion-proof and lightweight and has a lower price point than some of the other commercial hand dryers. It also is one of the few models offering different color choices.
Alpine Commercial Automatic Hand Dryer – High Speed Air Hand Dryer for Home
The built-in Hepa filter is the star of the AIKE AK2903, providing clean and hygienic air for each use. Additionally, this model boasts a smart heating system, so it only uses warm air when the room temperature is below a certain level.
This hand dryer is made of corrosion-proof stainless steel, is UL approved, and comes with a two-year warranty.
AIKE AK2903 Heavy Duty Commercial Hand Dryer
A hand dryer may seem like a simple purchase, but you want to make sure you’re getting the right one for your business. There are several factors to consider before hitting the Buy Now button.
The new generation of high-speed hand dryers are fast, with 10 to 15 seconds drying times now the standard for quality devices. However, not every business needs a high-speed hand dryer, and many of them are expensive. Standard speed hand dryers are a good option for lower traffic areas.
The optimal hand dryer for your business may be automatic or push-button. An automatic dryer is more sanitary and uses less energy because they turn off as soon as the hand is removed. Push-button models have a timer cycle that continues to run until it is over. Many automatic hand dryers have an air volume regulator to help reduce stack effects on building HVAC systems. A push-button hand dryer might be ideal if your space is small.
Businesses must be careful to comply with ADA guidelines when installing hand dryers. Most hand dryers are designed to be installed lower to the ground to ensure blind users visiting don’t accidentally bump into them. Keep this in mind when choosing a model and location. Models with a slimmer design can also help keep you in compliance.
Fast, powerful hand dryers can be noisy. Think about where the dryer will be installed – if it will be in or near a noise-sensitive area, look for quiet hand dryers with adjustable motor speeds or low decibels.
Most people switch from paper towels to hand dryers in an effort to reduce paper towel mess and energy costs. Contrary to the name, high-powered automatic units are, in reality, more energy-efficient. They dry hands quicker and automatically turn off when not in service.
Depending on the location, hand dryers can be roughed up. In this case, you do not want the most expensive/high-end unit. Look into vandal-proof and corrosion-proof dryers with a lower price point if this is a concern.
Many hand dryers are listed as “easy to install,” while others recommend having an electrician assist with or complete the installation. Additionally, some hand dryers are plug-in while others are wireless. Some are designed to be either with some changes to the wiring. Think about who will install your hand dryers before choosing.
Hygiene has become more important than ever, and some dryers are more hygienic than others. Automatic hand dryers are more sanitary than push-button hand dryers since there is no need to touch them. However, most models come with hygienic accessories like washable filters, antimicrobial covers, or HEPA filters.
Hand dryers have become a standard in most public restrooms and other wash areas. Customers now expect a hand dryer in order to avoid another point of contact and to keep their time in the restroom brief. The good news is you can find hand dryers across all budgets and quickly install one in your place of business.
Qualify for discounts, special offers and more with a Business Prime account from Amazon. You can create a FREE account to get started today.
Image: Amazon
This article, "Commercial Hand Dryer: Our Top Picks For Your Business" was first published on Small Business Trends
]]>Vacuum cleaners are versatile tools that can be used for a variety of prepping tasks, from cleaning and organizing to packing and sealing. A dry vacuum cleaner is something that I like to spend a little more money on because it can last a really long time. I prefer the canister vacuum because it gets me the most uses! There are many different types of vacuum cleaners out there, but you really have to choose one of the best vacuums that will give you the most bang for your buck. If you’re a prepper, then you know you can get even more uses out of it, beyond regular cleaning.
I remember my first vacuum cleaner and how much I loved putting the carpet indentations into our 1970s shag carpet. Back then, a normal vacuum was amazing, but all of the internal parts, high speed, and different tasks a vacuum hose can suck up now are incredible.
It’s not as if the electric motor wears out quickly! I have found that newer vacuums are nice for cleaning carpets and hardwood floors, but my vacuum also is a great way to prep, and there are many surprising uses for it! Here are some tips on how to use a vacuum cleaner for prepping.
Keeping your prepping supplies and gear clean and organized is essential for staying prepared. A vacuum cleaner can help make this task easier by quickly and efficiently cleaning up dirt, dust, and debris from your storage areas.
Make sure to use the appropriate attachments for each surface, such as a crevice tool for tight spaces or an upholstery tool for soft surfaces. Regularly vacuuming your storage areas can help prevent pest infestations and help keep your gear in good condition.
Vacuum sealers are a great tool for preppers, allowing you to pack and store food, gear, and other supplies in airtight bags to protect them from moisture, pests, and other environmental factors. Using a vacuum cleaner to remove excess air from the bags ensures a tight seal and maximizes storage space.
Make sure to use high-quality vacuum sealer bags designed for prepping purposes, as regular plastic bags may not hold up over time. Label each bag with the contents and date to make it easy to find what you need when you need it.
In a survival situation, keeping your living space clean and sanitary can be crucial for avoiding illness and maintaining morale. A vacuum cleaner can be used to quickly and efficiently clean up dirt, debris, and other messes.
Consider having a backup power source, such as a generator, Goal Zero Yeti Home Backup System, or solar panels, in case of a power outage. Also, keep extra vacuum bags and filters on hand in case they need to be replaced if your vacuum uses bags. Bagless vacuums are very common now but they still use a filter.
In the event of a flood or other water-related emergency, a wet/dry vacuum can be a lifesaver. These vacuums are designed to remove spills, crumbs, and standing water from carpets, area rugs, wood and tile flooring, and other surfaces, something a prepper appreciates as they try to stay prepared for emergencies.
Make sure to wear protective gear, such as rubber gloves and boots, when using a wet/dry vacuum. Make sure to dispose of the water properly to avoid contamination and health risks when you are emptying the unit. You’ll probably need to wipe down the area with a sponge, rag, microfiber cloth, or paper towel after the liquids are removed as a final step. Be sure to through away items in your trash that were used for such cleaning since they could become contaminated unless they can be run through the clothes washer for soapy water treatment. Scrub down the sink area if water was poured down the drain.
Indoor air pollution can be a serious health hazard, especially in a survival situation where ventilation may be limited. A vacuum cleaner with a HEPA filter can help remove allergens, dust, and other pollutants from the air. Some areas in your home to be sure and clean since they tend to collect dust and dirt are window blinds, curtains, window sills, screens, and furnace and AC air vents. When cleaning those curtains be careful that any bristles from the brushes and the general heavy suction of the vacuum don’t damage the fabric.
Make sure to clean or replace the filter regularly to ensure that it’s functioning properly. Consider investing in a portable air purifier or ventilation system to further improve indoor air quality.
In conclusion, a vacuum cleaner can be a valuable tool for preppers, serving a variety of purposes from cleaning and organizing to packing and sealing. By utilizing these tips, you can make the most out of your vacuum cleaner and stay prepared for any situation.
In a survival situation, pests like rodents and insects can be a serious health hazard and cause damage to your supplies and gear. A vacuum cleaner can be used to quickly and efficiently remove pest droppings, webs, and other debris.
Make sure to wear protective gear, such as gloves and a mask, when cleaning up pest debris to avoid exposure to harmful bacteria or allergens. Consider using a vacuum cleaner with a HEPA filter to further reduce the risk of exposure.
Keeping your living space free of flammable materials can help prevent fires, especially in a survival situation where access to emergency services may be limited. A vacuum cleaner can be used to remove dust, lint, and other flammable debris from carpets, upholstery, work areas, storage areas that don’t get much attention, and other surfaces.
Make sure to clean the vacuum dustbin or bag regularly to avoid the risk of damage inside the vacuum cleaner itself from overheating. Inspect the vacuum cord, any vacuum attachment, and components for signs of wear or damage before use. Fire Extinguisher Post
In a survival situation, repairing damaged clothing can be essential for staying warm and dry. A vacuum cleaner with an attachment can be used to clean out your sewing machines. Then you can always have it available to repair tears or holes in clothing or gear, sew your own clothing, or piece materials together for a shelter. A sewing machine is a great appliance that we all should learn to use. When my girls were little I made most of their clothes and gained a great deal of pleasure doing so. Keeping it in good working order is critical.
Make sure to follow the manufacturer’s instructions for the sewing machine vacuum attachment carefully to avoid damaging the fabric or injuring yourself. Keep spare thread and needles on hand for quick repairs. Micro Vacuum
Having access to reliable transportation is crucial in a survival situation, making vehicle maintenance an important task. A vacuum cleaner can be used to clean your vehicle’s interior, removing dirt, dust, and other debris that can clog air filters or cause mechanical issues.
Make sure to use appropriate attachments for different surfaces, such as a crevice tool for tight spaces or an upholstery tool for seats and carpets. Keep spare vacuum bags and filters in your vehicle in case of an emergency.
Maintaining personal hygiene is important for avoiding illness and staying healthy in a survival situation. A vacuum cleaner can be used to clean hair clippers, razors, and other personal grooming tools, removing dirt, hair, and other debris that can harbor bacteria or other pathogens.
You also want to make sure those furry friends you have at home are kept clean and free from loose hair, bugs, thistles, and so on. You can buy attachments to use as you do some minor “grooming” of pets. Depending on the length of the hair, razors and scissors can leave a real mess if not vacuumed up when the job is done.
Make sure to use appropriate cleaning solutions and follow the instructions for each grooming tool carefully to avoid damaging the device or injuring yourself. Consider investing in portable showers or washing facilities to maintain personal hygiene in a survival situation.
A vacuum cleaner can be a versatile tool for preppers, serving a variety of purposes from pest control and fire prevention, to keeping your sewing equipment clean and ready for clothing repair and personal hygiene. By utilizing these additional tips, you can make the most out of your vacuum cleaner and stay prepared for any situation. Whether sweeping up dust particles or cleaning up pet hair to make it into a fire starter, there are tons of uses for vacuum cleaners.
Some of the best vacuum cleaners can be expensive, but you better believe that you’ll get those dust mites cleaned up and also find many surprising uses for the vacuum to use for prepping. If you can find additional uses for your washing machine, then you are surely going to find many other great ways to use your upright vacuum. What uses would you add to this list? May God Bless this World, Linda
Copyright Images: Woman Vacuuming Carpet Depositphotos_102613416_S, Woman in Jeans Vacuuming Depositphotos_232573890_S
The post How to Use a Vacuum Cleaner for Prepping appeared first on Food Storage Moms.
]]>You can’t go far without hearing about “miracle” products that zap pimples, dissolve wrinkles and reduce swelling in the face.
Though there certainly are things that can help with these problems, experts say there are also key habits that can help your skin look and feel healthy.
Speaking to HuffPost, dermatologists shared some of the habits that will help your skin be its best.
“We forget that the skin is the largest organ of the body. And just like your other organs, the skin benefits when you are healthy overall,” said Dr Elma Baron, a professor of dermatology at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.
“A lot of skin conditions are associated with conditions and illnesses in other organ systems,” she said. For example, eczema and psoriasis are associated with inflammatory issues in different parts of the body.
“Psoriasis patients will also have arthritis, may also have diabetes, cardiovascular disease,” she noted. “So the skin is really not separate from the rest of our biology.”
In other words, if you notice any health problems, it’s good to get those under control for both the issues they present and any associated skin troubles.
This is generally more of a problem in the colder months, but it’s important to remember that hot water can be damaging, said Dr Danielle Tartar, a dermatologist and associate professor of dermatology at the University of California at Davis.
“I have so many patients come into my office just dry and itchy and miserable in the winter,” said Tartar. “They’re taking hot showers or soaking in hot baths because that does feel really good on dry skin, but it’s just awful for your skin.”
When you get out of the hot water, your body’s natural moisture evaporates, she added. “So short, warm showers can be really helpful,” Tartar noted.
After a shower, you should pat (not scrub) yourself dry with a towel and apply a high-quality moisturiser, which should be used daily, she said.
According to Baron, smoking is a habit that wreaks havoc on your skin (and many other parts of your body, for that matter).
“Smoking ... is well known to cause oxidative damage in many organ systems, and that includes the skin,” she said.
It can hurt the skin’s normal physiology, she noted, and “oxidative stress contributes to aging of cells and can manifest as wrinkling.”
Additionally, a 2012 study found that wounds heal at a slower pace for people who smoke, and a 2020 study showed that smoking is correlated with skin cancer.
Sleep is important for a lot of things — it can help your brain, your heart and even your skin.
“The skin is no different from other parts of the body that benefit ... from good sleep,” Baron said. “We had a study some time ago that showed us that skin function, like how the skin is able to provide a protective barrier ... gets somewhat disturbed with lack of sleep.”
For example, bad sleep patterns can impact how your skin recovers from a sunburn, she said.
Using a product with an SPF rating is “the single most important thing you can do,” said Tartar — even on overcast days.
“Clouds may block 20% of the UV light that gets through [to Earth from the sun], but there’s still UV radiation,” she noted.
You should use a daily moisturiser with an SPF rating or sunscreen with an SPF of at least 30, Tartar advised. And you should put it on more than just your face.
“Keep it by your toothbrush in the morning. Put it on sun-exposed areas — face, chest, back of the hands,” she said. “It’s just going to save you a lot of trouble down the road.”
If you are going to be outside for a while or in an area with a high UV index, you should reapply that SPF product every two hours.
The sun is strongest from the late morning to early afternoon, Baron said, which means it can do the most damage to your skin in that period.
“We shouldn’t forget the importance of just seeking shade whenever possible and avoiding the peak times,” she said. “When you’re out on vacation, maybe you don’t want to be out on the beach between 10am and 2pm.”
If you do have to be outdoors, both Tartar and Baron said that protective clothing, like hats and long-sleeved shirts, can help block the sun’s rays. This includes anything that just covers your skin or certain clothing with built-in UV protection, which you can find at sporting goods stores and online.
To keep your skin healthy — and even prevent wrinkles — Tartar said you should avoid soaps with sulphates and other products with harsh ingredients.
“I tend to prefer just gentle skin cleanser in the morning ... followed then by any other products you might be using,” Tartar said. This could include vitamin C serums, SPF moisturisers, makeup and sunscreen, she added.
If you do require more intense ingredients (like retinoids for acne), see a dermatologist first.
Everyone has different sensitivities and preferences, so it’s important that you get to know yourself to achieve your best skin health.
“Part of forming healthy habits is understanding your skin better,” Baron said. Some people may require a cleanser with salicylic acid, while other people may suffer intense irritation from the same product.
“The person should really ... try to get to know what aggravates the skin,” including by seeing how certain foods affect conditions like rosacea, Baron said.
Though Tartar said she personally doesn’t tell her patients to avoid certain foods, it is helpful to know that high-sugar foods can promote the growth of bacteria, which may result in acne and skin inflammation.
Try keeping a skin journal to track how you respond to different foods, environments and products, since what you should avoid and what you should use for skin care will depend on your own experience.
Not quite sure who ramped up the 4th of July sales a week early this year, but it feels like these things are coming in hotter than the home-made “firework” your idiot neighbor concocted in his backyard shed.
And this 30% off from Target has a couple of really, really, really good pieces on sale. There’s a few new favorites in this one. Off we go with some picks. Sale just launched and ends Saturday, so it’s shorter than the normal window Target usually uses for promotions.
These are shockingly good. While the rest of the industry flails & fails to replicate the magic of Lululemon’s best selling ABC/Commission pants, it’s Target, at forty bucks when full price, that gets the closest. Not identical to lululemon. But the closest. No gusseted crotch on these, but the fabric is awfully similar to the Warpstreme material Lululemon uses, albeit a little thinner/lighter feeling here. Great stretch, feels nice and cool, wicking/breathable/etc. More than just a pair of “golf” pants. They look great with t-shirts and sneakers, polos, and chinos, etc. These will play an enormous role in next week’s “What to pack when traveling light and in style” post. Sizing seems true, and a 32×30 is shown at the very top of the post on 5’10″/185.
Size shown: Medium on 5’10″/185lbs
Smooth, dressy but not fussy tech jersey (not pique) fabric. Moisture wicking. Breathable. Fit is trim but not tight. They don’t seem to shrink up in the wash (shown above is post machine wash/dry). Collar is EXCELLENT. It’s made from the same fabric as the body of the shirt, but it’s got just enough weight and reinforcement to make it lay right. It does not have a button down collar (hidden buttons or otherwise), so even with that substantial build to the collar, it could possible drift over jacket lapels when paired with a blazer or sportcoat. Three button placket is the sweet spot to many of our eyes. Sometimes just two buttons can look a little basic/cheap.
Basic, inexpensive, flat-front shorts with a good-for-most 9″ inseam. 13 colors to choose from.
Size shown is a small on 5’9″/160.
Tail isn’t overly short and arms aren’t overly long. And the price? Good grief the price is nice. Only issue is that the sleeve cuff buttons are functioning. Which is cost prohibitive on cheap blazers, yet an all too common feature affordable brands slap on their sleeves. It makes no sense. Still, it’s a great, easy wearing, stretch cotton blazer… as long as the sleeves hit your arms the way you want them too. Full review here if you’d like to see it.
Short sleeve button down shirts are a standard when it warms up. Getting the fit dialed in and making sure the pattern isn’t too “crazy party guy” and/or “I just got out of bowling league” is key. 10 colors/patterns to pick from.
Aptly named, they’re easy to pull on, come in a variety of colors, and hit at a great length that’s not too long nor too short. Your choice of eight colors. Size shown above are a small on 5’9″/160.
A cheap alternative to the J. Crew bestselling slub jersey polo. Three button placket and chest pocket make it look substantially less “basic” than some of the other cotton polos. Slub fabric feels quite nice. Not cheap or paper thin, not blanket/bath-towel thick either. Five colors and one floral print. Here’s how a size medium fits on 5’10″/185.
Possibly a cheaper alternative to the adidas Tiro? Unlike the Tiro these have elastic at the cuffs, but like the Tiro they come with ankle zippers. Makes for much easier on/off. 71% Nylon, 29% Spandex
More interesting than a tee, not dressed up like a polo. All cotton, so if you sweat it may hold onto that moisture. Just know that before you wear it in blazing hot summer heat.
The 30% off Men’s Clothing sale at Target is set to end this Saturday, 6/24/23.
Please now enjoy contributor DeJuan, wearing the All in Motion golf pants in “stone,” lying in the grass staring at things…
What a time to be alive.
That’s all.
Now you may all carry on.
]]>Ugh. I know…lice, yuck. My 13-year-old daughter had lice a couple of months ago. And as you can probably guess, it didn’t end there. I found lice in my hair and two of my boys. Yep, I wanted to cry!
Thankfully, I was able to come up with a natural lice treatment at home that worked really well with no chemicals. All we used was common household supplies and essential oils.
There are a ton of natural lice treatment ideas out there. Some people say they work while others don’t have good luck. The option I’m sharing today is what worked well for us.
I’m not saying this is the ONLY option or even the best option, but this is what worked for my family. It was simple, inexpensive, and less scary than dousing my child’s head full of chemicals!
First, let’s address some common misconceptions and questions about lice. I learned a lot about these little critters and am only happy to pass along any info I have in hopes that it’s helpful and enlightening.
The best way I can describe what lice look like is to show you a picture (sorry!). This is an adult louse:
Nits, aka baby lice eggs, are smaller, oval, and generally a tannish-brown color. Like this:
The most common way lice are spread is through head-to-head contact. If your child is a hugger (like mine is), that is probably how they ended up with lice in the first place.
While it is possible to spread lice by sharing hats, hairbrushes, hair accessories, etc., they’re actually far less likely to spread that way than through head-to-head contact, despite popular belief.
That’s not to say that you don’t have to worry at all about inanimate objects spreading lice, but it’s not as common as most people think.
This is because lice MUST stay on a head to survive. They only lay eggs ON a head and cannot survive elsewhere.
Additionally, lice also do not jump or fly like other pests (fleas, bedbugs, etc). Instead, they move by using their claws to crawl into another piece of hair. Yes, it’s gross! But so much less gross than the thought of them jumping freely all over!
Think about how much your child loves to cuddle, snuggle, hug you, lay their head on you, put his/her head together with a friend or sibling while looking at a device, etc. All those are opportunities to share lice.
No, lice won’t detach from one child’s head in water and float to your child’s head. There is a slight risk of spreading lice from rubbing heads with the same towel though, so if you think someone has lice, don’t share towels at the pool.
Lice can live for up to 30 days on someone’s head but no more than 24-48 hours OFF their host’s head. See the cleaning tips below for more info!
No, lice are human-only pests; they cannot survive on dogs, cats, or other pets.
Think you might have an infestation? Don’t panic! First things first – before you do a lice treatment at home, confirm that you are actually dealing with lice.
Doing this is fairly simple. Make sure you do this in an area with good lighting – I recommend a bright bathroom or next to a bright sunny window.
You will also need a good lice comb – this is the one we use and recommend. It’s inexpensive and works really well. I personally bought this comb about 3 years ago and never needed it other than for occasional checks up until a couple of months ago when my daughter DID have lice.
I was thankful to have it in the house already and didn’t have to run out and buy one!
You will also want to have white paper towels.
Lice are VERY good at hiding, so you will want to take some time to carefully comb through your child’s hair.
The most important thing in a natural lice treatment is to comb your child’s head carefully and then comb it again – you do not want to rush through “nit picking.” (This brings a whole new meaning to the term nit-picking!)
Unfortunately, this does take time, and you cannot skip or rush this step.
My daughter was pretty sure she had lice (she said she had one fall onto her book – YUCK!), and it still took me about 20 minutes of combing before I had a definite louse on the comb.
Comb carefully, starting at the scalp, and comb all the way down the hair shaft. Wipe the comb on the paper towel. Lice are tricky to see in hair, and it can be even trickier to spot eggs (also called nits).
If your child has long hair, use hair clips or ties to section off the hair as you slowly go through section by section.
The most common places to find nits are near and above the ears and at the base of the neck. So be sure to pay extra attention to those areas.
If your child has dandruff, it can be even trickier. (Yep, my daughter has dandruff too.) How do you tell what’s dandruff and what’s the icky bugs?
This is where the paper towel comes in handy.
Dandruff is white, and lice and eggs are a more tan color. They may look white in the hair, but when you wipe them onto a paper towel, you can see them if you look closely, while any dandruff flakes will blend right into the paper towel.
Dandruff will also flake off the scalp and hair easily. Lice eggs will be firmly stuck onto the hair shaft, usually just above the scalp.
Here are some photos to help you compare:
If you’re not sure, use a magnifying glass to look more closely, or take a picture with your phone and zoom in.
When we were first getting started with our natural lice treatment at home in our family, I relied on the picture method to help me confirm lice many times as they are really small to see by eye.
You hope it’s not lice, and sometimes it’s so nice to see that that little piece of something was actually just a tiny bit of fuzz… but once you magnify or zoom in, you will see little feet, and you can’t miss that it is definitely lice. GROSS!
This process does take time.
For my boys, who have very short buzzed hair, it took me about 45-60 minutes to comb through each boy’s head.
My daughter, again with long, very, very thick hair, took me about 4 hours to comb through every section.
And when I found lice in my own hair, my husband helped me painstakingly comb through my hair the first time (now that’s love!), and I think it took 4-5 hours.
I wish there was a magic way to make this process go faster, but there isn’t.
As I said, it brings new meaning to the term nit-picking!
There are many MANY opinions for getting rid of lice. I’ve had some friends share that the traditional chemicals did a ‘decent’ job (though maybe not getting all the lice), while others had good luck with other natural ways of doing a lice treatment at home.
The truth is I don’t think there is ANY lice treatment that will kill 100% of all lice and eggs in one go.
The best way to get rid of lice is to spend the time nitpicking and combing through with a good lice comb.
But it does help make your life easier to do a couple of at-home ways to kill as many lice as you can.
We used the mayonnaise and apple cider vinegar method.
You will need:
I have heard some people reporting that regular white distilled vinegar worked well too. We had apple cider vinegar in the house already, so I used that. You can try either and see what works.
Yup, mayonnaise is a welcome alley in the battle against lice. Here’s how to use it as part of your natural lice treatment.
How much depends on how much hair your child has. My daughter has very thick, medium-length hair, and we used a good 2 cups of mayo or more for each mayo treatment.
I added 5 drops each of tea tree oil, rosemary, and peppermint essential oils and stirred them in.
You’ll need to make sure to cover every bit of the scalp.
Two hours is better, but one seemed to work well for us too. Do not leave it on overnight, as the mayo will begin to melt and would probably make a terrible, smelly mess!
Wash out the mayo mixture, then allow your child’s hair to dry a little bit before going on to the next step.
The reason this step is important is that vinegar helps to soak in and kill the eggs. On the other hand, mayonnaise helps to smother and kill young and adult lice.
Neither will kill all stages of lice, which is why both are important.
The vinegar is acidic, and from what I’ve read, the acidity is what can help dissolve the shell of the egg. As an added bonus, it helps loosen the eggs and makes combing through easier and less painful all around.
Pour apple cider vinegar into a spray bottle and spray over your child’s hair at the roots. You want it to saturate your child’s scalp as much as possible, paying extra attention to make sure you soak hair at the base of the neck and near the ears (the most common places for nits.)
You may want to lay a towel over your child’s shoulder to prevent them from getting all wet.
I will say my daughter did complain a couple of times that it ‘stung’ a little, but it wasn’t so terrible we had to stop. I’m not sure if it was the vinegar itself or more that her scalp was sore from the combing I did while I was first checking for lice.
If your child complains, you can try diluting the apple cider vinegar to a more tolerable level.
DO NOT get the vinegar in your child’s eyes, as it WILL STING! So BE careful! I had my kids hold a washcloth over their eyes.
Allow the vinegar to sit on their head for 30-60 minutes under the shower cap. Do NOT rinse yet.
Again, take your time. Section off the hair and comb small 1” sections so you don’t miss anything.
It’s best to go over each section multiple times as part of your natural lice treatment. If you find an egg or a louse, keep combing that section until you can comb it several times without finding anything. Use a paper towel to wipe off anything you find from the comb.
Make sure you comb extra in areas where nits are most likely to be found – near the ears and at the neck.
If you run into tangles, use a conditioner to help work through them.
When you are finally done, wash the hair again well.
You might need to go through the whole mayonnaise and vinegar process a couple more times.
For my daughter, I found 0 live lice after the mayonnaise and vinegar treatment the first time. We did a second treatment the second day to be safe (it was thankfully the weekend.)
I combed out her hair again a few days later and found 1 live lice. We went through the mayo and vinegar treatment again.
A few days later and she was clean. The next week she was still clean.
For myself and my boys, I managed to kill everything with 2 treatments in 2 days. We checked every few days for several weeks and, thankfully, were clear.
The key is taking the time – as difficult and frustrating as it is – to comb through every strand of hair carefully. It is the cornerstone to this (or any) natural lice treatment! Put on your child’s favorite TV show and watch it together, or watch a movie to help pass the time.
I have read that some people try to use flat irons or hair dryers to kill lice. I personally do not think hair dryers are a safe or effective way to kill lice and nits. It would need to be too hot for far too long in order to completely kill lice and their eggs. The same for flat irons.
I do use a flat iron for my hair, but I can’t say that it helped kill any eggs or nits. Hopefully, we had already gotten everything out of my hair by combing, and I think we did.
Because I had 3 kids with lice, I tried a couple of different methods. For my youngest son, I coated his hair in olive oil for several hours, then combed it out.
I do not think it works as well as mayonnaise because I picked out 2 LIVE lice after the olive oil treatment, whereas we found 0 lice the 3 times we used mayonnaise.
I suspect it’s because olive oil is thinner and runs more easily, making it less likely to fully coat and stick to each lice. Mayonnaise is thicker and stays in place better.
So your child has lice. It’s not fun, but don’t panic. You will get through it with this simple lice treatment at home!
First, let’s address cleaning:
You may have heard horror stories about people throwing away their children’s belongings, including favorite stuffed animals, because of lice.
Let me calm your fears. You do not have to throw everything away or sterilize your home from top to bottom.
Remember: lice cannot survive for more than 2 days off a human head. It’s actually in their best interest to stay ON the head as much as possible, so they will not be burrowing into your child’s pillow and infesting his/her bed, your couch, etc.
You can actually do fairly minimal cleaning. It is far more important that you spend time nitpicking lice and eggs from your child’s head than cleaning. Many people spend more time cleaning their house/vacuuming/washing bedding etc., and not as much on their child’s head, only to have continued lice issues for long periods of time.
For my family, 4 of the 6 of us had lice (yes, including myself.) We did very minimal cleaning while I spent HOURS combing hair and applying our lice treatment at home. We were 100% clear of lice within 2 weeks.
Here is what I recommend you focus on for cleaning with lice:
What about hair brushes and combs? First, remove as many hairs as you can from the brush. Then you can do one of these options:
Personally, I put my daughter’s brush in a bag for a few days and used simple combs only for a few days.
For combs and cleaning the lice comb, I would put not-quite-boiling water in our 2-cup measuring glass and soak the combs in that for a few minutes to kill any possible nits or lice. Same for some of the hair clips.
I threw away a few hair ties I knew my daughter had used while her hair was ‘contaminated,’ but most hair ties, I didn’t worry about because they were unused for long enough that any possible live lice would have long since died.
If you feel more comfortable doing more thorough cleaning, go for it. Just know that you really don’t HAVE to.
Again, for a natural lice treatment, it is more important that you spend time combing out your child’s hair.
The best way to deal with lice is to prevent them in the first place. Lice dislike certain smells and that’s where a simple lice prevention spray can come in handy.
If your child’s hair smells bad to lice, they are much less likely to want to crawl on over in the first place. Try my simple lice prevention spray here.
And there you have it – the natural way to get rid of lice at home. You’ve got this!
Pin it below to find the instructions later!
The post How to Get Rid of Lice Without Chemicals (Natural Lice Treatment) appeared first on Living Well Mom.
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]]>Do you ever sit around and think, “man I’d love to tackle some DIY home projects this weekend but I’m not sure where to start”? Because I do. Sometimes I’m in the mood to DIY but I just don’t have the inspiration. It can be hard to know where to get started when the entire world of possibilities is open to you!
I’m here to help. I’m rounding up sixty simple, affordable, and accessible DIY home decor and home improvement projects that you can tackle this weekend. They’re all beginner-friendly, and they’re all a TON of fun!
I’m organizing the list by room, but of course most of the these can be done in any room! Just browse around and see if any of these DIY home projects speak to you, then do it in whatever room you want.
You can get supplies for pretty much all of these DIY home decor projects at the hardware store, and you can find step by step instructions at the links below.
And there you have it. SIXTY simple, affordable DIY home decor and home improvement projects that you can tackle this weekend. Can’t wait to hear what you try first – you should have plenty of inspiration to get you started with all these step by step tutorials!
The post 60 DIY Home Decor Projects You Can Tackle This Weekend appeared first on Love & Renovations.
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The humble bath towel is easy to overlook. A good one will dry you off and be forgotten till tomorrow. A great one is luxurious, a cozy bright spot in an otherwise mundane routine. We’ve researched hundreds of towels and tested dozens, and we’ve recommended the Frontgate Resort Cotton Bath Towel since 2017 because it’s the softest, warmest, and most durable we’ve found. If plush terry isn’t for you, we also have other options.
When I mentioned that I needed a watch with a second hand for nursing school, a reader let me know about the Speidel brand of watches that are made specifically for medical professionals.
The watches aren’t terribly expensive as is, but I found one that was marked down (because of course).
Then I clicked the button to sign up for their email newsletter, and I got another 10% off.
Someone on a Facebook group was getting rid of some, which was very fortunate timing for me because several of the bulbs in my basement boiler room are on their way out.
I’m delighted to not have to buy any!
I had two knives that were very dull (one being a paring knife I’ve had since 1997!), plus I had a paring knife from the abandoned house that was pretty dull.
So, I stopped by the knife-sharpening truck that’s in my area once a week, and I got them sharpened.
The price was $5 cheaper if you pay in cash, so OBVIOUSLY that’s what I did.
And now I’m gonna have to remember to be a little more careful with my knives. I’ve probably developed a carelessly cavalier attitude towards them because they’ve been so not-sharp.
(I know that sharp knives are actually safer because they don’t slip and slide. But still: I’m gonna need to be mindful as I adjust!)
Relevant: maintaining items that I already own is ultimately cheaper than paying for new items. And it’s better for the environment.
Also, also: cheap items are frequently not worth maintaining or are not possible to maintain/fix. But if you buy good stuff to begin with, it’s usually possible to fix/maintain it!
These are classics for me!
And while both of them do require a lot of time from start to finish, they don’t require a whole lot in the way of hands-on time.
So I’m hoping that maybe I can keep these two habits going even when I start school. Maybe on a day when I’m studying at home, I can pop in and out of the kitchen and get some yogurt and bread made.
Here’s how I make yogurt, with no special equipment required.
And here’s how I make whole wheat bread.
I have entirely lost count of how many times I’ve done this for my kitchen and bath towels. These end seams seem to come apart so often in the wash.
And it’s important to catch it and fix it promptly because otherwise the small problem morphs into a larger one.
Happily, it’s a super quick fix; it takes more time to get the machine out than it does to do the actual fix.
And I am grateful I know how to do these easy fixes; they’ve extended the life of my towels so, so many times.
Like I always say, if you want to save big money with your sewing skills, learn how to mend! You get the most bang for your buck that way.
The post Five Frugal Things | a medical watch discount appeared first on The Frugal Girl.
]]>Spicy Sausage Orecchiette
Ingredients
Pasta:
400g fine semolina
a pinch fine salt
200ml lukewarm water
Sauce:
3 tbsp olive oil
2 inch piece of chorizo, skinned and finely diced
6 sausages, squeezed out of their skins
2 large shallots, sliced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tbsp tomato puree
1 small glass white wine
400ml good quality tinned tomatoes
115g n’duja
70g butter
60g parmesan, grated
Crispy Sage:
a handful sage leaves
2 tbsp olive oil
a sprinkle flaked sea salt
Method
Thoroughly clean your worksurface. Whisk the salt into the semolina then pour it onto the surface in a big pile. Use your fingers to make a well with deep high sides.
Pour the water into the well and use a fork or your fingers to gradually incorporate the flour into the water in the middle. Keep it up until you have a shaggy mess, then start kneading it together until you’ve got a smooth dough.
Knead for a further 15 minutes. The dough will be stiff – don’t worry as it’ll hydrate when it rests. Wrap it in clingfilm and leave it to sit for 30 mins.
When ready to use, slice off a quarter and roll it into a snake. Cut 2cm pieces and roll them flat with a knife, dragging the blade towards you and pushing down slightly until you have a dome shape – use a thumb to deepen the dome. Repeat with the remaining dough and set aside on a lightly floured board so they don’t stick.
Meanwhile, to make the sauce! Heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan and fry the chorizo pieces until crisp. The oil should have turned a beautiful crimson. Remove the chorizo pieces with a slotted spoon and set aside to garnish with later.
Add the sausage pieces and fry until browned, breaking them up with a wooden spoon, then remove and set aside. Add the shallots and garlic then cook for a further 5 minutes until soft, then add the tomato puree and cook for a further 2 minutes.
Add the white wine, allow to reduce for a few minutes then add the tomatoes. Reduce for around 10 – 15 minutes over a medium heat and add the n’duja, stirring to make sure it’s completely combined. Pop the sausages back in and cook over a low heat for another 30 – 40 minutes until they’ve softened and everything have combined to make a delicious sauce. Add the butter and stir for a final 10 minutes.
Make the crispy sage leaves by gently frying whole leaves in olive oil for around 20 seconds until crisp. Blot with kitchen towel then set aside and season with salt.
Cook the orecchiette in boiling salted water until cooked through with a little bit of bite – they’ll rise to the top of the water when done, but try a few to make sure they are cooked to your liking. Reserve some of the water then toss the sauce through the pasta. Add the grated parmesan then serve up with the sage leaves.
Shadows lengthen from us all. Hard places in our persons block the sun and wither us before our time.
A part of us doesn’t go to the infant crying.
A part of us longs for other work not because the work we have is meaningless or too hard but because we have something else we’d rather be doing. We’d rather be defining that idea we’ve nursed in our darkness on the cliff edge of what’s possible.
Part of us pursues a fantasy over the familiar peck of the love we have—a bird that comes to feed from our hands and has for years. She’s an amazement no matter how time has changed her, the bird we forget to see and sometimes, forget to feed.
So what do we do then with these parts, embodied in the long shadow-person sown with unseen stitching to our soles?
We can fly firm and gentle love to the child. We can turn for now from the abyss of our fancy, back to the tilling we know, releasing that grudge sinking us into an early grave. No more supposing that grudge is an amulet to evoke the muses. The wondrous beyond mingles in our toiling.
Clad in autumn leaves and cobwebs, we can steal a kiss from the silken head of our sparrow before she flies. She keeps a thimble we can fill with our soul. Our shadow and all can fly with her to that place where, since we never age, we’ll have time to figure out how to pin down our shadows long enough to become friends.
I found it on an ocean shore on a sunny day when I was nine, at a campground lost to me now on the other side of the watery body of time. Charcoal-colored, piranha-shaped, and shocked by veins of white, with one side ridged, the other side straight as a razor to cut across the waves.
The stone, if flicked just right by the wrist, could skip across to the far shore, and in that way, unite me with the happiness I felt unfair fathoms had separated me from.
I pocketed it—stowed it safely away, this perfect stone for the perfect day. When I felt all was most right in my life, when the sun slanted through outstretched boughs ever so sublimely, I’d skip it across a body of water, to the other side and be complete.
The rest of my life is waiting for the day to skip my perfect stone.
This day? Our wedding guests on the shore, wringing their hands over when my bride and I would return from our impromptu rowboat getaway.
This day? The head pediatric surgeon at Swedish, a fierce Columbian, wrenching my son out of my wife at dawn. My shrieking the news HE’S HERE, HE’S HERE, muffled his phlegmy cry. I played the part of mad Messianic devotee raving that I was glad to have lived to see his arrival.
Though these were perfect days, my stone remains unskipped, waiting for a more perfect day I know will never be. The stone then isn’t a hope for a better day, but a charm in my pocket that I thumb through hours wan and drab, knowing I have already lived.
In ancient Rome, those who would inherit the land were given an amulet, complete with the family seal. Called the Bulla, this medallion symbolized a child’s unalterable place in the family’s future.
How did the felt figures of very Anglo-Saxon looking Jewish- Palestinian shepherds and the magical Sunday School stories of my tender years harden into a belief so ardent, I can almost feel its weight hang down as I tie my son’s shoes and set to rest upon my chest as I rise again to greet the day with him?
I could give it away or lose it. But I would awake to find this amulet of belief reaffixed around my neck, restored in the night, the way a father drapes the fallen blanket over his sleeping child, the way my aging father would when I would arrive jetlagged and red-eyed to collapse on his sofa. The blanket’s settle over me was as comforting as those Bullas must have been. I leaned into that tenderness the way a child leans into a rainbow parachute which reassures them that they are loved.
What else could home be for us except a little red house on the corner—two dormers, white trim, picket fence? A place where, for better or worse, I am known. And I know the story of every nick and stain, the joys, the pains of the little red house on the corner.
What else could home be for us except a place neglected by its former owner? Ivy chokes the garden, flaking tiles scale the dormers. The gates never latch at the little red house on the corner, the slightest breeze letting in each draft. The problems slipping in unknown send my hands into an all-thumb fumble.
What else could home be for us except a playground for our little explorer, Pucky Prince of trains, planes, and tunnels of enthusiasms: hand dryers, puppies, Christmas tunes, kisses from Mommy—obsessions that delight us and terrify me because in the clutter of cuteness and whirlwind of his tears, I don’t feel known as fully, nor does my knowing circumscribe all in sight as a warm palm around a broken-winged sparrow. My hobbies, my whimsy, drowned out and decentered by my Baby Prince’s chatter. His needs diverge from what I can give. My knowing and loving fail in our little red house on the corner.
What else could home be for us other than a place that is ours for richer or poorer, in sickness and health, bound as we are to its idea long after we’ve moved, longer lasting than its imperfections which prove to be less weak spots in matter and more frailty of my heart. When we face each conundrum together, it lessens the strain. We are known. We know for better or worse.
We repair the fence, reroof the dormers, and make and remake peace with our son’s storms and morning light. When we trust that each brings what they can when the last towel of competition is thrown, we make and remake it our own, this little red house on the corner.
As a kid, I felt like a passenger in my life’s road trip, with places and faces passing by. Like this old neighbor who would holler at me Hey, Leroy!
He called every kid that. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know my name. He was happy to see me and that was enough. I didn’t care I didn’t have a name. It was enough just to be a little, happy person. This assurance assuaged my sense of being a small balloon with air seeping out, floating without aim in life’s sky.
In the driver’s seat, I still feel ill at ease. My eyes should be fixed straight, yet my gaze lists to the shoulders, wondering if I’ve missed something important that would make me certain working a job, fathering a child, loving a wife, keeping a house and my chest deflates, that little balloon again, when it should be the revving V8 of an all-terrain 4×4.
But I have hopes for the balloon and the 4×4. My son’s holding the balloon and at the wheel, I veer off-road, busting us through a guardrail and he’s giggling because we’re on our way to a new place to play.
Jack in the Box
Quiet and still
Will you come out?
Yes, I will
—English Nursery Rhyme
Marquis and I share a planning period during which we bemoan our politick, idly threatening to move to Canada the same way we threaten to punch out the copy machine.
Early on, he said my name sounded familiar. I winced. Here it comes.
Ahmaud Arbery’s murders share my last name. I don’t have many black friends. I don’t know how to explain any of this to Marquis who smiles, You the heartbreak kid, aren’t you?
Sean Michaels. And we shoot the shit about pro wrestling for the rest of lunch. But a part of me stays sunken down inside my dark little house. Place I go to—a box which, like the box I check (white), I hate.
Maybe Marquis has a box too, like we all do: a bunker where we hide our inner child from history’s burdens which quake above like the beams of a rotting, crooked house.
****
School’s getting out. He asks me what I’m doing for Juneteenth and I say what most white people probably do: Nothing. He invites me to his house for a barbeque.
Juneteenth. I learned about it only a couple of years ago.
I’m twice stung when I hear about racist events, past and present. Stung by the headlines, stung by the slogans. Silence is Violence! Yes, but I’m not sure more words from a white guy is what anyone wants, especially when it comes to race. And there I lie at the bottom of a well in my mind, pretzeled while it all goes down.
Maybe reading another book would do me good. The new woke tomes on my nightstand beckon with the promise of lonely, austere shriving.
Marquis must notice that I’ve disappeared inside myself because he reminds me about his barbeque. So, you coming out?
—
iStock image
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]]>One memorable lesson I learned about the benefits of cast iron involved a plate of truly delicious blueberry pancakes that my sister Becky made one morning while I was visiting. She explained that the only “secret” behind her fabulous pancakes was that she cooked them in a cast iron skillet, which I had never tried or even considered a possibility before that transformative experience.
But since cast iron clearly made a world of difference in those blueberry pancakes, I started wondering what other benefits of cast iron cookware I may have been missing out on. I’m now much more familiar with cast iron cooking than I was back then, and I’ve truly come to see it my trusty cast iron skillet as an indispensable part of my kitchen arsenal. ! I’ve discovered it’s the perfect tool when it comes to cooking meats, eggs, vegetables, and even baking bread!
In this post, I’m sharing 11 of the best reasons to own cast iron cookware and use it regularly. By the time you’re finished reading, you’ll know that cast iron isn’t just a useful way to cook meat, vegetables, eggs, and brand, but that it can do so much more!
Non-stick pans can be convenient, but they’re very easy to scratch up. That’s a problem, because those scratches can cause chemicals in the coating to leech into your food. Even preheating a dry non-stick pan can release toxic fumes into the air, so not having to worry about either issue is a great benefit of cast iron cookware.
Unlike other types of cookware, cast iron can withstand even the hottest cooking environments. Put it over a wood fire, on a gas range, in your oven, or anywhere else — cast iron can handle it all!
Related: 11 Things You Didn’t Know Can Ruin A Nonstick Pan
Let me clarify—food won’t stick to a pre-heated, properly seasoned cast iron pan. I’ve got a whole post on the best way to season cast iron and how to keep it seasoned so it’s non-stick and easy to clean.
Related: Problem Solved! How To Stop Food From Sticking To Stainless Steel
Cast iron is surprisingly easy to clean, especially if it’s properly seasoned. You don’t even need to wash it with soap (and you shouldn’t do it often anyway, as soap can erode the seasoning layer.) In most cases, the best way to clean a cast iron skillet is to just wipe it clean with a paper towel, but if you need a bit of scrubbing power, kosher salt and a bit of cooking oil will get the job done.
Iron plays a vital role in the human body, helping to maintain energy levels and strengthening your immune system, and cast iron adds a bit of iron to everything you cook. (Some doctors even recommend cast iron cooking to patients with iron deficiencies as a way to increase their iron intake, though according to Healthline, the amount of iron you’d get from cooking in cast iron may be limited.)
In comparison with other types of cookware, cast iron pans are relatively inexpensive. You can easily pay over $100 for a high-quality stainless steel pan, but you can get a pre-seasoned cast iron pan for less than $20! (And that $20 pan will last a lifetime if you take good care of it.)
Whether you’re looking to put a beautiful sear on a steak, or get a perfect golden-brown finish on your French toast, cast iron makes it easy! Because cast iron is so thick and heavy, it retains heat better than other materials, making it easy to brown or fry almost any food you can think of.
Another advantage of using heavy cast iron cookware is that it heats up more evenly than other materials. It’s common to experience hot spots with non-stick and stainless steel cookware, but cast iron heats up slowly and evenly. No more half-burned, half-raw cooking disasters!
Whether it’s the dead of winter or you don’t have much outdoor space to speak of, grilling outside can be impractical. But having a cast iron pan is sort of like having an indoor grill, because you can get them really hot.
You’ll have no trouble searing steaks, chicken, and anything else you cook up, and a cast iron grill pan will even give you those picture-perfect grill marks too. (There are plenty of other grilling tips and tricks where that came from!
Cast iron pans are perfect for cooking food over a fire, so they are popular with outdoorsmen and preppers alike. If you suddenly didn’t have access to your gas or electric range, your stainless steel and non-stick pans wouldn’t be of much help, but as long as you had a cast iron pan and a way to start a fire, you’d be cooking in no time!
In terms of versatility, cast iron reigns supreme over other types of cookware — you can use them to brown, sear, roast, sauté, grill, shallow-fry, deep-fry, bake, braise, and more. I especially enjoy using my cast iron skillet to bake delicious desserts like Triple Berry Cobbler and Fudge Cake (both of which are gluten free!)
What’s your favorite thing to cook in cast iron?
]]>Better yet for my sweet, sweet Splenda, whose name is a play on the fact that both her human dads are Type 1 diabetics, she’s often tasked with testing out new hotel offerings for our four-legged friends — and that’s exactly what happened earlier this year when The Plaza, New York City’s most iconic hotel, invited her to experience the “Pampered Pup Package” on an overnight stay.
Luckily for me and my fiance, we were invited as Splenda’s plus-ones (mainly because we wanted this stay to be more “Eloise at the Plaza” than “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York”).
Though the Plaza has played a significant role in the history of New York since it first opened in 1907 at a dreamy location on Fifth Avenue at the corner of Central Park, the Pampered Pup Package didn’t roll out until National Dog Day in August of last year. The package, which costs $195 as an add-on for guests traveling with pets, is designed to make your pooch feel like royalty.
The package includes a special dog bed waiting in the room, Plaza-embellished food and water bowls alongside a bottle of Evian and even a Plaza dog robe to match the human-size ones hanging in the room. Even better, if you request the package more than 30 days before arrival, you can have the dog robe, which has the Plaza crest on the back, custom fitted for your furry friend.
But the real highlight — and Splenda’s favorite part, by far — is the tiered tray of dog-friendly macarons (made from oat flour, honey, coconut oil and all-natural yogurt filings) waiting to be devoured.
We live in Brooklyn, so it’s always a treat to head uptown, especially for a staycation that gets us out of our small apartment. Splenda, the diva she is, packed her overnight bag with various outfits to look the part of a sophisticated socialite determined to channel her inner Blair Waldorf.
Unfortunately for us, though, it was absolutely pouring out. Despite our Upper East Side state of mind, our Brooklyn budget meant we opted (read: were forced) to take the subway, so after schlepping through the deluge, we arrived, unglamorously, at The Plaza soaking wet — the corgi most of all.
But walking up the literal red carpet through the gold-clad revolving doors and past one of the most immaculate floral arrangements north of 14th Street, Splenda immediately knew she was a star, no matter how wet.
“Welcome, Ms. Splenda,” a doorman announced, the attention immediately going to her fluffy head a mere 6 inches off the marbled lobby floor.
After checking in, we went up to our absolutely palatial Junior King Suite where, the staff had informed us, a special Plaza dog towel was waiting, along with her robe, to help clean up after the storm. From that moment, after getting acquainted with our room (which featured two ornate armchairs, a couch, a beautiful writing desk, a TV with streaming capabilities, a king-size bed, a walk-in closet and a spa-like bathroom), we leaned into our temporary dignified life.
To start, Splenda got a bath, a blowout and time in her robe. She’s a spa girlie — so is her dad — so the luxe bathroom with its deep soaking tub was a dream, even though Splenda got more of a power wash than a soak.
After spa hour, Splenda hit the walk-in closet where, magically, she found her numerous outfit options for her evening walk down Fifth Avenue hanging up (thanks, other dad!).
Landing on a powder blue, nautical-inspired dress with white stripes, Splenda decided the look was perfect for the walk down one of the world’s most famous shopping streets, but not before trying out the furniture and taste-testing her macarons. Safe to say, it all met her very high standards.
In the lobby, Splenda and her infectious puppy smile stopped people in their tracks — even more so when kind staff members greeted her by name, making guests sipping cocktails at The Champagne Bar think we were much more important than we’ll ever be. But that’s the great thing about Splenda; she brings so much joy to the people she encounters and makes everyone feel like a VIP. The service at The Plaza is a reflection of Splenda herself — and she felt like the most important person dog in the entire world.
After our walk past Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Bergdorf Goodman and the picturesque Gothic Revival-style St. Patrick’s Cathedral, we were all tuckered out, so we slipped into our bathrobes, streamed our family-favorite reality show (“The Real Housewives of Miami”) and ordered lobster rolls from room service for the humans to enjoy while Splenda snacked on her macarons and ate her dinner, which we had brought from home (albeit in a much fancier dog bowl).
Splenda made herself comfortable in her Plaza dog bed — and it was lights out in the City that Never Sleeps.
The next morning, famished from an incredible night’s sleep (what a hard life!), it was time for breakfast, so in true Tinsley Mortimer fashion, we ordered room service. The Plaza Continental was classic, with an assortment of pastries, bread, juice and coffee — plus a side of bacon to share. Splenda, the refined canine she is, joined us in her robe — and maybe even stole a piece of bacon (we’ll never tell!).
To wrap up our stay, we used the morning to take advantage of some of the pet-friendly places near The Plaza: Central Park and Chanel. Just across the street, Central Park is a wonderland for dogs of all sizes. It’s a place where Splenda loves to go for walks, look at the turtles at The Pond on the southwest corner right by the hotel, run away panicked by passing rollerbladers and climb up on all the rocks. For dogs that need some time sans leash, the Central Park Conservancy has a full guide with times and locations for running around.
Next, we made our way back down Fifth Avenue for a cheeky stop at NYC’s flagship Chanel store, which is not only pet-friendly but is where Splenda tends to be a star. Let’s just say that Splenda didn’t quite leave with a Boy Bag, but she did pick up a bottle of Le Vernis to remember the experience.
It was hard to say goodbye to The Plaza, partly because we had to defeat Splenda’s big head and remind her that regular life awaited us back in Brooklyn, but also because the actual process of leaving meant saying goodbye to all her new friends, including waiters at the bar, the receptionist, guests we’d met along the way and some tourists in the lobby.
Pet-friendly accommodations are on the rise, and hotels around the world are catering to people who travel with their pups, but few do it as luxuriously as The Plaza. While $195 for this package is certainly not cheap, I’ve paid $100 to bring Splenda with me in much less substantial hotels where the perks were nonexistent.
All-in-all, we had the most magical time at this iconic hotel in the Big Apple. If you want your best friend to be treated like the upper crust of NYC’s complex social fabric, take them to The Plaza to enjoy the finer things in life.
]]>Make dough an hour before you plan to make breakfast, or the night before, and put it in the fridge overnight.
Ingredients
1 cup flour
1 tsp fine salt
½ cup rolled oats
1½ tsp dried yeast
½ tsp chilli flakes
½ tsp baking soda
1½ cups milk, lukewarm
1 cup double-cream yoghurt
2 tbsp wholegrain mustard
1 tbsp chopped chives
Oil cooking spray
8 slices streaky bacon
1 tbsp honey
1 tbsp sriracha
2 tbsp olive oil
1 large avocado, sliced
8 eggs, boiled and peeled
Method
PLACE flour, salt, oats, yeast, chilli flakes, baking soda and milk together in a bowl; whisk until combined. Cover; stand in a warm place for 1 hour or until bubbly and risen.
COMBINE yoghurt, mustard and chives together in a small bowl. Mix well and season. Refrigerate until required.
PREHEAT oven to 200°C.
LINE an oven tray with foil; spray lightly with oil spray. Lay bacon on tray; brush both sides with combined honey and sriracha. Bake for 10–20 minutes or until crisp and caramelised.
HEAT the oil in a large non-stick frying pan over low heat. Spray the inside of four 7.5 cm round, 2.5 cm deep rings with oil spray, dust with a little extra flour, tap to remove excess; place in pan.
GENTLY spoon a heaped ¼ cup of crumpet mixture into each ring. Cook for 3 minutes or until bubbles appear and the surface is just set. Slide a large spatula under each crumpet and turn over. Cook for 2 minutes or until set and cooked through. Remove from pan; carefully ease off crumpet rings. Repeat in the same rings with the remaining mixture to make 8 crumpets in total.
SERVE crumpets straight away with bacon, avocado, halved eggs and mustard yoghurt.
1
Mix all the muesli ingredients together in a large bowl, cover with cling film and leave overnight in the fridge.
2
In the morning, make the compote. In a medium pan, chop the pears into chunks, grate in the zest of the clementine, and peel and chop the clementine fruit. Add the apple juice; heat over a medium heat for 5–10 min or until broken down.
3
Taste the muesli and adjust the sweetness if you need to. You might need to add a little extra oat milk.
4
Serve the muesli with the fruit compote and a little natural yogurt on the side, if you like.
1
Beat eggs and water together in a bowl with a fork until combined. Season.
2
Heat 40 g of the butter in a frying pan over medium heat. When the butter is foaming, add a quarter of the egg mixture. Using a wide spatula, gently push the set egg mixture toward the center of the pan; tilt the pan, allowing the uncooked egg mixture to run onto the base of the pan. Repeat about four times around the pan, until the egg is just set. Fold one side of the omelette over using the spatula. Slide onto a plate. Repeat, wiping out the pan with a paper towel before each addition, to make a total of 4 omelettes.
3
Heat 30 g remaining butter in a frying pan over high heat; cook mushrooms, stirring, for 5 minutes or until browned. Season. Divide mushrooms and 2 tablespoons each chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley and chives between omelettes.
4
Serve omelettes with the mushroom filling and top with chopped herbs.
Try a variation of fillings such as tomato and feta or cheese and bacon.
1
COMBINE avocado and lemon juice together in a bowl and mash coarsely.
2
CUT out a hole from the centre of each slice of bread using a 6cm cutter
3
HEAT oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Add bread to pan; cook for 1 minute or until golden underneath. Turn the bread over. Crack an egg into each hole, taking care not to break the yolk. Cook, covered, for 4 minutes or until the white is set and the yolk is cooked to your liking.
4
USING a spatula, carefully transfer toasts to plates. Top with mashed avocado and season to taste.
5
SERVE with lemon wedges.
]]>Your hair gets its texture, elasticity, and density from keratin protein structures in your hair, and three different types of bonds hold these structures together. “There are disulfide bonds, which give the hair its strength and shape and can be broken by heat and chemical treatments; there are salt/ionic bonds, which are temporary, weak bonds that can be broken when hair is wet or because of a pH imbalance; and there are hydrogen bonds, which are temporary but strong bonds that can be broken by water and heat,” Nassim Belhaq, innovation director at Coco & Eve, previously told Well+Good.
When these bonds are broken, it can lead to hair damage in the form of dryness, breakage, and an overall change in texture—and that’s where bond-building technology comes in. These types of products come in to repair broken bonds, leaving you with smooth, soft, healthy hair. “Prior to bond-building products, you could only repair your hair in the salon,” says Adel Chabbi, a celebrity hairstylist in New York City. “Bond-building technology is fairly new, but has become extremely popular due to its repair abilities.”
When you apply bond-building treatments, they repair the three different types of bonds in your hair.
To experience the best bond-building serums, oils, and sprays, shop some of our favorites below.
Refresh and strengthen your strands without washing using this dry mask. Just spray on dry hair and brush through immediately before going to bed. Then, wake up, comb, and style. The formula uses bond-building tech and vegan silk extract to repair and softens hair without mess or residue.
Unlike Olaplex’s famed original formula (a rinse-out, pre-shampoo treatment), the brand’s ultra-lightweight styling oil is designed to stay in your strands. It makes hair soft, shiny, and vibrant while strengthening strands and protecting against heat damage. It’s made with bis-aminopropyl diglycol dimaleate, an ingredient that finds single sulfur hydrogen bonds and crosslinks them back together to form disulfide bonds. It’s also got nourishing grape seed oil and fermented green tea oil.
This weekly leave-in repair treatment uses 3-D Fortifying Technology, a patent-pending tech that forms a 3D network within strands to build new bonds. It also has encapsulated cellular oil to protect against thermal and UV damage (and the color fading that comes along with them) and a blend of smoothing and softening emollients. After you shampoo and condition, apply it to damp hair and let it sit for 10 minutes before adding heat or additional products.
This leave-in treatment is designed to replace the conditioning step in your wash-day routine. It’s made with the K18Peptide, an ingredient previously used in rug fiber repair, to fuse bonds back together. Apply it after you shampoo, let it sit for four minutes, and follow up with any additional leave-ins and styling products.
Instantly seal split ends, strengthen existing bonds, and repair broken ones with this fortifying treatment. It uses Granrepair Powerbond, a bonding technology that protects, strengthens, and repairs damaged hair; Prodew 500, a moisturizing, strengthening amino acid; antioxidant-rich and protective purified green tea; and more. Every three washes, apply it through the mid-lengths and ends of roughly towel-dried hair, paying close attention to the most damaged areas.
After you shampoo and condition, roughly towel dry your hair and add a few spritzes of this lightweight spray. It repairs, protects, and strengthens damaged hair with Granrepair Powerbond, a bonding technology, Crodasone P, which protects hair from thermal damage and splitting, and Betaine, which conditions hair.
Swap out your conditioner with this leave-in spray. Shampoo, towel dry, and spray from roots to ends. It uses apple acid and styling polymers to penetrate the hair cuticle and repair even damage due by creating new bonds within the hair fiber and providing volume.
This long-lasting heat protectant spray is enhanced with caviar-based tech and algae extract to seal damaged hair cuticles, protect hair from free-radical damage, and restore moisture, elasticity, and shine to hair. Spray it on towel-dried hair.
With experts predicting a hotter than usual summer in most parts of America, and scientists confirming the huge weather patterns caused by El Niño, many of us are becoming more aware of the health risks from overheating. For those who love workouts, the dangers of exercising in the sun are often underestimated.
To help people exercise safely this summer, fitness experts at Live Football Tickets discuss how to protect yourself and your furry friends from extreme heat and share eight top tips that could reduce your health risks without sacrificing your fitness goals! Pharmacist Abbas also shares how your medication may impact you in the heat.
It is estimated that your running pace will slow down by 6 to 10 seconds per km, for every five degrees increase in temperature roughly. In response to this, Stefan Balkenende, at Live Football Tickets comments:
Your heart will need to work harder when you are working out in the heat. This means you would need to expect a slower running pace than before. To maintain a safe running pace and avoid overdoing it in the heat wave, you could check a heat adjusted pace calculator by putting in the temperature, humidity and your planned running distance/time. Though the heat effects may differ based on individuals, running slower ensures your body to function healthily under the sun.
Many people tend to neglect the importance of applying external methods to stay cool and healthy during workouts, however, they could be very effective at protecting your body. Here is what Stefan suggests:
We recommend bringing a cooling face spray to cool the body. Products such as an ice towel or cooling pads can also help your body keep from overheating, which could lead to heat exhaustion and heat stroke.
Exposing yourself to the sun during workouts may impose dangers to your skin, including developing skin cancer. Therefore, it is vital to take care of your skin health by applying a sun cream with a SPF, sun protection factor ,over 30. If you are going out for a swim in the heat, water resistant sun creams may be a better choice for you.
While it could be tempting to have an outdoor workout, It is important to know your body and pick the most suitable exercising type.
If you don’t want to miss exercising outdoors, switch running and hiking to swimming, or yoga. Reduce the tensity and duration of your normal exercises too. Short sessions usually work better in hot summer, putting less stress on your body than long, cardio workouts.
Although it can be hard to resist warm weather or change your workout routine, Stefan suggest choosing your exercising time carefully:
Generally, we do not recommend exercising outside when the temperature reaches 35 degrees. With the colour – coded heatwave system being launched recently, it is easier to check heat alerts and health warnings before going out.
If you still feel the need to exercise in the sun when it’s hot, either do it earlier in the morning before sunrise or try it later in the afternoon or after sunset. Avoid doing intense exercises between 10 am to 4 pm outside as it’s usually when the sun is at its hottest.
Looking to treat yourself to new workout clothes this summer, but don’t know whether you need a tight or loose fitting? In regards to choosing the best clothes for exercising in the heat, Stefan adds:
You should always make sure to wear the most comfortable clothes no matter if they are tank tops or tight gym clothes. Avoid clothes that might restrict your movement or trap your body. When there is a heat wave, you may find light-coloured and loose-fitting clothes more comfortable as they allow air to flow over and your sweat evaporates.
Hydration is really vital to our body no matter what time of the year, but it’s even more important during summer weather. In response to this, Stefan Balkenende at Live Football Tickets provide tips on drinking and eating when exercising in the sun:
While many of us know the importance of drinking water after an exercise to restore any fluid levels you’ve lost, you should start drinking one or two hours before your workout too. This reduces your risk of becoming dehydrated faster and prepares your heart and body for your physical activity. Sports drinks with electrolytes would work more efficiently to help your body rehydrate.
Eating water-rich food alaso helps with your body’s hydration level, such as watermelon, cucumber, lettuce, strawberries, tomato or an ice lolly.
If you have accidentally overdone it, here is what you should do according to Stefan:
If you notice heat exhaustion symptoms such as dizziness, nausea and weakness, or other heat-related illnesses, pause immediately. You shold hide in the shade or perferably go to an indoor place with air cons fast. Drink a sports drink and wash your face with cold water if you can. It is unsafe to push against your limits, especially during a heat wave.
If you or anyone else is struggling to breath, experincing unconsciousness or still unwell after 30 minutes of resting in a cool place, being cooled and drinking fluids, please see medical help by contacting 111 or 999. Please find details here on NHS.uk.
With lots of people enjoying running with their dogs, here is what Stefan suggests:
Exercising in the heat may help distress your dogs, but don’t risk overdoing it. You could take your dogs to a park with trees or other outdoor areas without direct sunlight. Help them stay hydrated by carring a portable water container and wet their paws to keep them cool. During summertime exercise, dogs could get heat exhaustion too so it’s important to watch for any signs they show and make sure they stay cool in summer.
Your medication could make you more sensitive in the heat, Abbas Kanani, pharmacist at Chemist Click Online Pharmacy comments:
Some medications can increase your sensitivity to sunlight or affect your body’s response to heat so you should talk to your pharmacist about any medications you are taking and ask if they have any sun-related precautions or recommendations. Dehydration or electrolyte imbalances can also occur because of certain medications, such as oral medications for Type 2 diabetes and potassium-sparing and thiazide diuretics for high blood pressure, which can be exacerbated during exercise in the heat. Understand the side effects of your medications and be vigilant about staying hydrated and maintaining electrolyte balance while exercising. If you bring medications with you during exercise, ensure proper storage to maintain their efficacy. Extreme heat can affect medication stability. Keep medications in a cool, dry place, away from direct sunlight, and follow any specific storage instructions provided by your pharmacist.
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A version of this post was previously published on livefootballtickets.com.
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The post Expert Reveals 8 Tips to Exercise Safely in the Sun This Summer! appeared first on The Good Men Project.
]]>Clean beauty products should be a regular thing in your cleansing routine. Think about it, these are the items you’re constantly using. No matter how tedious it may be, make it a point to give them a thorough cleanse every now and then. Your future self will thank you for it!
A swipe of makeup remover on a cotton pad is all it takes to clean your eyelash curler. Also, if you see the curler’s rubber pads giving way, swap them out for new ones. That way, they’ll do a much better job at opening your eyes.
Fake lashes can be expensive, so use this trick to help you save money and reuse your lashes. If you soak your fake lashes in a bowl of warm water with a few drops of dish soap, the glue will peel off easily.
Do a weekly cotton swab cleaning with your pencil sharpener. Begin by emptying the shavings out, and getting into all the little nooks and crannies with your cotton swab soaked in rubbing alcohol.
Clean your mascara wand by letting it soak in warm water and then working through its bristles with shampoo. Rinse this off and repeat the process until you’re left with a clean wand.
Never ever forget to clean your makeup brushes because you can risk having serious acne problems if you keep using dirty makeup tools. All it takes are a few drops of gentle shampoo to take out the gunk of past makeup from your brushes.
Beauty Blenders are amazing but they can be a little expensive. To make sure you get your money’s worth, I recommend washing makeup sponges after each use to prevent the spread of germs. Also, make sure to rinse out all the soap, olive oil, or makeup remover, out of the sponge before air drying.
Turn your makeup bag inside out and wipe off any dirt or makeup residue with makeup remover wipes. Don’t forget to let it dry completely before putting your makeup back in.
Clean your hair brush once a week to reduce product buildup on the bristles. Need a hack for removing all the hair on the brush? Use a toothpick to help pick the strands out.
Hair ties are notorious for being dirty thanks to sweat, oil, and product residue. Soak your hair ties in a solution of soap and water, rinse, and then let them hang dry. It’s that simple.
Rid your flat iron of all the gunk with the help of cotton and rubbing alcohol. With just a few scrubs your flat iron will look as good as new.
Give your hair dryer a thorough cleanse by grabbing a toothbrush and running it over the vent at the back. Remember, the objective is to get as much lint out as possible.
Bet you never thought you could sharpen your tweezers using a nail file. Simply sandwich the emery board in between the tweezers, then tweeze and pull.
It’s easy to sanitize your nail tools. Place them in a bowl of warm water and dish soap for 2 minutes, dry them off with a towel, and then wipe the tools with a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol. That’s it!
Choose from either of three options when cleaning your Clarisonic brush head: dish soap, cleanser, or shampoo. To dry, push the brush head against a towel and turn the Clarisonic on for about a minute to get all the water out.
If you’re using a natural loofah, I recommend changing it every 3-4 weeks. On the other hand, if you’re using a plastic pouf, swap it for a new one every 2 months. To clean the plastic pouf, you can throw it in the washing machine with a bit of laundry detergent. Just be careful not to put in the dryer as it could melt.
The important thing when it comes to caring for a pumice stone is the location where you store it. It’s best kept in a dry place until it’s used again.
As with almost any product, beauty items have an expiration date as well. To make sure I don’t forget when my favorite products have gone beyond their lifespan, I like putting little labels on them with the help of some washi tape. I mark the date of when I first used the product so it’s easier to track and know when it’s ready to be tossed.
Interested in knowing more about how to clean beauty products? Watch this:
Clean beauty products should be the norm, because we deserve it. So don’t forget to include cleaning your beauty products in your spring cleaning to do list. It’s one of the few ways we’re able to treat our bodies with respect, care, and love.
Ready to start cleaning beauty products? Tell us about your favorite tips in the comments section!
Looking for homemade skincare recipes? Read this!
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Scientifically known as Lentinula edodes, shiitake mushrooms are a type of edible mushroom that originated in East Asia, particularly in Japan, China, and Korea. They are highly regarded for their distinct flavor and numerous health benefits.
Appearance-wise, they’re vastly different from lion’s mane mushrooms! Shiitake mushrooms have a dark brown cap and to me, they have a distinct look to them. I think it might be the fact I grew up with them my entire life, but there is something about the dark brown cap on them and the exterior texture that I can immediately tell if it’s a shiitake mushroom or not.
The name “shiitake” originates from the Japanese language. “Shii” refers a specific tree species called Castanopsis cuspidata, but it is commonly known as shii. It is on that tree that shiitake mushrooms naturally grow. “Take” means mushroom in Japanese. So with that, “shiitake” roughly translates to “mushroom that grows on shii trees.”
Shiitake mushrooms have a very unique and distinct taste to them. To me, they taste rather smoky – but not like liquid smoke smokey. They taste earthy smoky, if that makes sense. It’s a rich and savory umami flavor that you can’t replicate.
This below information is not a replacement for medical advice, treatment, or supplements!
Shiitake mushrooms contain compounds like beta-glucans, which may support immune function by protecting cells from getting damaged and boosting white blood cells. Additionally, they are a good source of B vitamins, copper, selenium, and dietary fiber. Shiitakes also contain polysaccharides which are associated with anti-inflammatory properties.
Fresh shiitake mushrooms. Like all mushrooms, they don’t need to be rinsed or washed under water. They hardly ever have dirt on them. I just knock them against the sink and the dirt falls off. I also sometimes take a damp paper towel.
Dried shiitake mushrooms. Asians love to cook with dried shiitake mushrooms. I personally think dried shiitake mushrooms have an even richer flavor than fresh. In any case, if you are using dried shiitake mushrooms, you will want to reconstitute with hot water. This softens them up and allows you to be able to chop them.
To maintain their freshness, store shiitake mushrooms in a paper bag in the refrigerator. When stored properly, they can last up to two weeks, and sometimes more. Do not store them in a plastic bag. They need to breathe and the condensation of the plastic bag will also spoil your mushrooms faster.
Fresh and dried shiitake mushrooms are readily available at many local grocery stores. They’re also available at farmer’s markets if you have a local mushroom vendor! Asian grocery stores have a large variety of dried shiitake mushrooms as we use it a lot in our cooking, but they also have fresh as well.
Shiitake mushrooms can be cooked in various ways, including sautéing, roasting, grilling, frying, or boiling. Their firm, meaty texture that makes them suitable for use in a variety of stir fries. Here are some recipes that use shiitake mushrooms:
]]>You and your friends deserve a nice break from your daily routines — you deserve a girls trip. You know, one that'll give you all those sweet, sweet laugh-out-loud moments to reminisce on when you're back at your desk next week. But with every girls trip comes one very important question: what the heck should you pack? So, while you're busy making plans for the best brunch and some supreme R&R, we've rounded up some cute essential items you'll need on your next girls trip.
A classic pair of flat-sole flip flops are a necessity for a girls trip. They're great for trekking to the beach or slipping into when those sexy stiletto heels cause your feet to ache after a couple of hours.
Alongside your makeup, you'll probably also have your cell phone charger(s), headphones, and backup batteries. This case, complete with removable dividers, makes sure everything is protected and organized in a cute way.
If you plan to bring a lot of items you can't bear to leave at home, this set of packing cubes will see you through. You can even go the extra mile by labeling them, keeping everything in its proper place.
The idea of lugging your laptop around so you can upload and edit your vlog might be fun at home, but having a portable Polaroid camera to capture instant moments is adorably nostalgic and even more convenient.
Make a pistachio green statement with this pair of sunglasses by Solid & Striped. You can wear these while sitting at the bar on the beach, sipping a yummy cocktail — tequila mockingbird anyone?
When's the last time you actually invested in a towel that didn't get ruined by wet sand? If you've had your fair share of experiences with sand getting trapped in places you weren't expecting, this beach towel can help eliminate the chance of that happening again.
This tote is the perfect beach bag! It's stylish enough to serve as a purse, but durable enough to deal with all the beachy elements. It's also got soft canvas inside so you don't have to worry about scratching your sunnies when you toss them inside.
Are you the friend who over packs or at least makes sure everyone will have what they need? Then you need this versatile, trendy bag from Red Dress. It's large enough to fit snacks, a few drinks, and that extra sunscreen you most definitely need in it.
Go retro with this pair of cute, classic sunglasses from Lisa Says Gah! While you may not be able to star in Grease, you can still invoke some modern The Pink Ladies energy.
Beat the heat with this wide-brimmed straw hat from Lisa Says Gah! Made of sisal hemp with a fedora shape, the sun won't stand a chance against this hat.
Encase your navy passport in this red and navy checkered passport sleeve. Not only is it easily recognizable (in case you happen to lose it in your bag), it's functionality makes it worth the buy.
If you and your friends plan to fly to your destination, you may be worried about it getting lost in the sea of other bags at the airport's baggage claim. To quell your fears, this red and navy checkered luggage tag from Claire V. lets you more easily spot your suitcase.
Your swimsuit sarong just received a colorful upgrade with this vibrant sarong. You can wear a nude bathing suit, or opt for warmer tones like SunKist orange or hunter green.
Not everyone likes a mini sarong. Some prefer a little more coverage, like this Show Me Your Mumu Kiran Sarong, and that's perfectly fine! When paired with a white bikini and wide-brimmed straw hat, you'll look beach-ready.
Remember what we said about storing extra drinks in your tote bag earlier? Well, this tumbler is sure to keep you cool and refreshed, regardless of what you're drinking!
Since you and your girls will be probably be in and out of the sun, wearing a full face of make-up might not sound appealing. Instead you can wear Rare Beauty's Positive Light Tinted Moisturizer. It contains SPF 20, so not only will your skin be protected from the sun, you'll also have a radiant complexion while you're at it.
Jet lag is very real and can cause your skin to look and feel dull. To help combat that, Summer Fridays formulated a mask filled with ingredients like niacinamide and hyaluronic acid to calm your pores while putting moisture back in your skin.
Looking for a lightweight sunscreen that feels as smooth as a serum does, but is also full of rich antioxidants that helps protect your skin from sun damage? Summer Fridays' ShadeDrops Broad Spectrum SPF 30 Mineral Milk Sunscreen has you covered — literally.
Are you looking for something that gives you effortless, "I just walked out of the water" hair? Try Sun Sum's Texturizing Sea Spray that's made with sea kelp. Your hair will thank you later.
Cute carry-on bags do exist — just ask Beis. Their The East To The West tote is made of recyclable material and has various compartments that can house items like your Stanley Tumbler, or your passport if you're traveling out of the country.
The oversized beach towel of your fantasies just arrived in the form of this pistachio and cream towel. You'll feel like you're sitting on a treat due to being made of Turkish long fiber cotton. Seriously, it's the ultimate soft beach towel.
If sitting or lounging on a beach towel sounds like the last thing you want to do, try bringing your own trendy beach chair. This one is portable and doesn't take up a lot of room.
If you're feeling nostalgic, you'll love carrying around a disposable camera to have developed at your local CVS.
To speed through the length of time it takes to get to wherever you're going, try investing in a neck pillow and matching eye mask. You won't have to worry about having a sore neck the next time you fall asleep on your long car or plane ride.
If you don't want to risk your tumbler spilling in your tote bag, this waterproof water bottle holder will ease your worries. It has a shoulder strap in case you don't feel like holding it with your hands and it's completely insulated.
For more inspiration that takes you beyond summer, stop by our travel Pinterest board.
Brit + Co. may at times use affiliate links to promote products sold by others, but always offers genuine editorial recommendations.
Header image via Stoney Clover Lane
]]>In our modern, super hectic lives, it can be hard to even find time to cook a proper meal and get a full eight hours, never mind getting seven whole different types of rest.
I mean, we’ve all felt like this at some point…
Just to confirm... everyone feels tired ALL the time no matter how much sleep they get or caffeine they consume, but also has trouble falling asleep / is constantly hungry but also nauseous with acid reflux / spends every second working or cleaning yet nothing gets accomplished?
— Kenyon Laing (@KenyonLaing) February 9, 2021
The theory, coined by Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith MD, a physician, researcher and the author of the book Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity, suggests that these seven types of rest can help revolutionise your life and stop you feeling mentally and physically exhausted all the time.
She held a Ted Talk on the topic, which has half a million views and people commenting, “This has really made a difference and given me permission to meet my body’s needs throughout the day” and “I’m here for this. For too long we’ve been living in a culture that encourages burnout.
“If we don’t take the time to set boundaries and rest, we will continue this awful cycle.”
Intrigued? Here are the seven different types of rest she suggests we incorporate into our life…
If the word ‘physical’ has you exhausted at the thought of getting up at 5am to go to the gym, don’t worry. Saundra describes physical rest as being either active or passive.
Passive being getting a good amount of sleep a night (seven to eight hours) and taking naps when you need them.
Active is what it says on the tin — whatever exercise or movement feels nourishing to you at that time. It could be yoga, simple stretching or a run.
The next is mental rest — getting everything out of your head so you feel less overwhelmed. This could look like writing down a to-do list instead of keeping track of things in your brain, ticking off some admin tasks that are stressing you out, meditation and setting firmer boundaries between your work time and ‘me’ time.
This calls for rebalancing your relationships and who you have around you, and asks you to spend time with those who fill your cup and less with those who steal your energy.
Schedule regular time in your diary for ‘social rest’ — coffee with your mum, drinks with your bestie. Or if you’re an introvert, this could be your time to take time to yourself and recharge.
You don’t need to be religious to enjoy spiritual rest. This could be a time to connect with your god, if you believe in one, or time to meditate and connect with yourself, learn tarot, align your chakras, or whatever helps you connect with your soul more.
Overstimulated besties, I feel you. Our social media feeds, WhatsApp group chats and the general business of modern life can have us feeling overwhelmed.
Sensory rest looks like setting boundaries with how you use your phone, turning off notifications and going offline for a while, and surrounding yourself with sensory items that make your soul sing — candles, soft lights, cosy fabrics.
Emotional rest is so important, especially if you work in an industry that requires you to be ‘on’ all the time — we’re looking at you, service staff! Use your emotional rest time to be with other people you can be authentic self around, or if you’re struggling with mental stress, this could be a time to see a therapist.
It’s also a great opportunity to get into journaling.
This is my favourite one — your time to enjoy the beauty and fun of the world. When we’re working so much and have chores to do, it’s easy to forget to carve out time to enjoy our lives.
Creative rest could look like taking a walk in nature, going to a gallery or museum, listening to a new album, going to a record shop, getting into pottery or painting… the list goes on!
I know what you’re probably thinking; that’s a LOT to incorporate into your life. It sounds like a full-time job in itself.
But maybe try one or two of these every week and build up to adding more in and see how it helps you. Some can be done in as little as 10 mins! Do what works for you.
While I’ve tried many R+Co products over the years, most recently, the Dallas Biotin Thickening Treatment earned its permanent spot on my shower shelf. And now, its post-shower styling sister, the R+Co Dallas Thickening Spray ($32), has received the same star treatment.
In the bottle, the R+Co Dallas Thickening Spray honestly looks like water. It’s a true liquid, not a serum or oil that spritzes on. It’s formulated with hydrating and smoothing aloe leaf extract, protecting and conditioning ginger root extract, volumizing pro-vitamin B5, and an amino acid complex that protects against heat damage while boosting the hair’s overall structure. While it’s infused with fragrance, it’s not heavy or overpowering—it simply smells warm and delicious like the rest of the Dallas line.
To put this spray to the test, I spritzed it onto towel-dried hair. Usually, when I apply styling products, I try to spritz them in while my hair is still quite damp, but by the time I got around to sitting down with my Dyson Airwrap ($599), my hair was probably 85 percent dry already. Because of this, I was slightly worried that spritzing on the Thickening Spray would leave a weird, product-y residue that even my Round Volumizing Brush attachment couldn’t salvage. But that was so far from the case. Instead, after spritzing my hair from roots to ends and between layers of hair—focusing primarily around my roots—I found that the styling process couldn’t have gone more smoothly, literally and figuratively.
Normally, I ward off frizz by spritzing my hair with the Color Wow Dream Coat Supernatural Spray Anti-Frizz Treatment ($28), a tried-and-true I’ve sworn by for years. But to objectively analyze the R+Co Dallas Thickening Spray’s performance, I let it be the only styler in my strands. And the results speak for themselves.
While this spray doesn’t give me va-va-voom volume reminiscent of retro rollers (I wish it were that easy!), it absolutely made my hair feel thicker and look smoother. Best of all, it gave each strand a bit of grip, which my hair normally lacks. Because of this, I found that my face-framing layers didn’t separate from the rest of my hair, which they normally do.
I’m not the only one who’s a fan of the formula—it’s earned nearly 2,000 five-star reviews on Amazon. “I have very fine thin hair and it really leaves my hair fuller and manageable,” writes one user. “I have purchased so many hair products that never work like they say. This one is awesome and worth the money. Highly recommend,” says another.
Needless to say, I will be keeping a bottle of this chicly-packaged thickening spray on my vanity from now on, and at last, I’ll be able to feel confident wearing my hair fully down.
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