1) My vacation to Puerto Rico. Spending five days in Puerto Rico was exactly what I needed. My mom and I have taken a vacation together in May every year since I graduated college in 2011. While I missed doing our usual cruise vacation, it was nice to switch things up and actually explore an island we’d stopped on a cruise once. We hiked to a waterfall, rode horses, did a walking tour, explored one of the forts, and relaxed at the beach, so we definitely enjoyed ourselves to the fullest! (But next year, we’re doing a cruise and I’ve already started pricing it out, ha!)

2) Flying for only the second time. Since I’m within driving distance of five major cruise ports and have so many wonderful cities also within driving distance, I haven’t had the opportunity to fly much in my life. My family didn’t have the means to travel when I was a kid; the only vacation we took was to Ohio and my dad drove all 14 hours there. So I was especially excited to fly to Puerto Rico and found the whole experience thrilling. I know, I know, those of you experienced flyers are probably rolling your eyes at me, but I can’t help it! I loved being in the airport, waiting on the ground to ascend into the clouds, the take-off and landing… it all made me so grateful. I’ll actually be flying again later this year when I take a weekend trip to Asheville with some girlfriends, so look at me! Multiple flights in one year. 🙂

3) Finding a new dentist and being cavity free, despite not having had a cleaning in 5+ years. I really hate going to the dentist. I have so much anxiety about it that I haven’t had a proper cleaning in at least five years. Maybe longer. And yet… I pay for dental insurance. I should use it, right? Well, I finally booked a consultation with a new dentist (using ZocDoc – man, I love that site!) and I really loved the dentist I found. The office is just 15 minutes from my work, they do Friday afternoon appointments, and the dentist was super friendly. Plus, I didn’t have any cavities! The reason I finally booked this appointment was because I was having some minor tooth sensitivity whenever I drank cold water, and I was worried I had cavities or some sort of gum disease, but nope. Guys, if you have had a lot of cavities in your life, please don’t think it has anything to do with anything you are or aren’t doing. It has a lot to do with genetics, in my opinion. I take care of my teeth, but I don’t floss daily and sometimes I’m too tired at night to brush them (I’m sorry, this is gross), so it’s alllll genetics for why I didn’t have any cavities after not having a proper dental cleaning in half a decade. I’ll go in for an official cleaning next month, which I’m already nervous about, but I’m glad I finally found a dentist I like and this means I am all caught up with all my medical visits! I have an OB/GYN, a primary doc, a dermatologist, and now a dentist. Woohoo!

4) Mother’s Day brunch. For Mother’s Day, my mom requested brunch and asked me for some recommendations. We ended up at Metro Diner. We had a pretty long wait since everyone and their mother (ha) was celebrating the day, but it was well worth it. I ordered cinnamon raisin pecan French toast that was out of this world. My brother came with my nephews, and my stepdad was in town, so it was nice for all of us to get together and celebrate Mom!

5) Taking a week off social media and reading the news. Last week (starting the 22nd), I decided to take a full week off social media and reading the news. I was starting to feel upset every time I opened up Instagram to see another cute couple photo or scrolled through Twitter to read terrible news stories. I just needed a little break to quiet my mind. So, spur of the moment on Sunday evening, after sending a slew of tweets that I promptly deleted, I removed Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook from my phone. It was the best decision. By Monday afternoon, my mind felt silent for the first time in weeks and it just felt so good to take time away from this need to document my life. I get into this mindset where I think in terms of tweets (as in, how to reframe this thought into 140 characters?!) or in terms of how to Instagram the different moments of my life. I started missing social media by Friday, but it was really nice to just get away and focus on living life off-screen for a bit.

6) Spending a day documenting my life through #lifecaptcha. Erin, someone I’ve known through blogging for a very long time, started this really cool social media experiment called #lifecaptcha. On the 19th of every month, you document your life hour-by-hour. At the 44th minute of every hour, you take a picture and post it to your Instagram. I opted to use Instagram Stories because I didn’t want to clog up my feed with photos and since Instagram doesn’t display photos chronologically anymore, I didn’t want my photos getting out of order. But it was so much fun! I hope I remember to play along again in June.

7) Taking a half-day after a night of miserable sleep. Okay, anyone who is a mother can go right ahead and roll your eyes at me, but indeed I did take a half-sick day after only getting four hours of sleep the night before. First, Dutch didn’t settle down until close to 11:30. There were some extra trips outside and then a lot of him whining and rustling around on the bed. It happens at least a few times a week, so I’m used to it. What I am not used to is waking up at 3:30 to the sound of him peeing on my bed. Isn’t that lovely, huh? I had to get up, strip the bed and immediately put my sheets in the washer. I also had to clean the mattress as best I could. Sigh. And then since I couldn’t exactly sleep on my bed, I was basically up for the day. I felt like a zombie during the morning and I decided I just needed to go home, take a nap, and try to do a little work from home in the evening. Which is exactly what I did and I have no regrets!

8) Buying some new summer clothes at Old Navy. My wardrobe was basically begging for some new summer clothes because I don’t really own tank tops and all of my shorts feel a little too tight to wear comfortably right now. And we’re already hitting 90 degrees here in Florida, so I basically needed some summer clothes in order to walk outside without feeling like dying. Off to Old Navy I went and they were having a 30% off shorts and 40% off tanks sale! I got myself a new pair of jean shorts and three new tanks – all stuff I feel great in. I don’t wear tanks a ton because I don’t like the way my arms look in them, but I’ve decided to say to hell with that and wear them anyway. My comfort > society’s standards for beauty.

9) Healthy lady dates. My friend, B., and I try to get together once a week for a “lady date.” (B. is also my former roomie!) Usually, we end up eating something entirely unhealthy, but B. was the first person I told about my 30×30 challenge and she was completely on board and told me that we’d just have to switch our lady dates from “going to X restaurant and ordering something unhealthy” to healthy lady dates. Two weeks ago, we picked up subs from Publix and went to a local park for a picnic and then a two-mile walk. And last week, she came to my place and we cooked a healthy dinner and dessert. Hooray for healthy lady dates and friends who support your crazy goals!

10) Steam cleaning my carpet. This is so boringly adult, but it has made me so happy. My apartment only has carpet in the bedroom, but after just eight months of living here, it has become really gross thanks to a little senior sausage who has a lot of accidents. There were dark spots all over the bedroom and they seriously stressed me out. I just hated looking at them! So my mom brought over her steam vacuum last weekend and we proceeded to clean the heck out of my carpet. I was skeptical it would work – the stains have been there for months – but it did! There are certain areas that I’ll need to go over again, but it looks so much better. Check out this before and after!

What was a shining moment for you in May?

And it’s May! April was a pretty crazy month – my apartment was fumigated, I got a nasty stomach bug, and it was my first full month on anxiety meds. But throughout all of that, there were a ton of great moments and happiness. I really, really loved April and it was truly a great month for me. Here are the 10 best things about my month:

1. A sleepover at my mom’s. My apartment was fumigated early in the month, so Dutch and I stayed with my mom for a few days. And it was really fun to have a sleepover with her! We made dinner together one night, we watched a lot of TV, and having a helping hand with Dutch was soooo nice. (Mom also got to witness Dutch’s middle-of-the-night restlessness, as he was up from midnight – 2:30AM the first night. Yay.)

2. Breakfast dates with my friend, A., exploring coffee shops around the area. My friend, A., wanted to start exploring all of the different coffee shops around our area and invited me along on her journey. In April, we went to three coffee shops: Banyan Cafe, Mity Nice Cafe, and Bandit Coffee Company. So far, Banyan has my heart for its delicious food and even better coffee. Mity Nice was okay, but Bandit was a little too hipster for my liking. We’ve also had some of our friends join us for the dates. Coffee + good food + girl talk? Perfect!

3. One month on Lexapro. I’ve been on Lexapro, an antidepressant that’s also used for generalized anxiety disorder, for a little over a month now. I’ve been hesitant to seek out meds for my anxiety, not because I think there’s anything wrong with taking meds, but because I thought that maybe my anxiety wasn’t “bad enough” and maybe I was being a drama queen. I also worried that because I wasn’t a nervous wreck every single moment of every single day that it wouldn’t work for me. Well, I finally spoke to a doctor and got a prescription because my anxiety was getting progressively worse and I wanted to see if it would make me feel even a tiny bit better. And yes. YES. This stuff works. I feel more stable and able to handle life. Little things that used to send me into a tailspin no longer do. I don’t feel as if there’s an elephant sitting on my chest anymore. So, three cheers to Lexapro and lessened anxiety symptoms!

4. Teaching my nephew how to play Clue. Clue is one of my favorite board games and at a recent Family Game Night, my nephew pulled this game out and asked to play it. When I said it might be too complicated for him, he looked at me and said sweetly, “But you can teach me.” Well, all right then! So, I’ve been trying to teach him how to play the game and it’s been so much fun. He even won a game and was so thrilled! It was adorable. Of course, it’s a little weird to say, “So, there’s been a murder…” to your eight-year-old nephew, but alas, I don’t think I’ve given him any nightmares.

5. An Easter picnic. My mom organized a picnic at a local park with my family for Easter, and it was a ton of fun! We had nearly 20 people, so it was a great turnout. We used to do picnics at this park all the time and it’s one of my more fond memories. Grandma’s presence was definitely missed – with any family gathering, she is – but we enjoyed eating tons of yummy food and catching up with one another. My mom even had an egg hunt for the littles!

6. A great haircut. My hairstylist of nearly 15 years left to pursue a different career path, and I was really, really bummed about it. She was someone who took my hair from dark brown to blonde in one sitting, cut my hair to donate to Locks of Love, and dealt with all my different hair moods. I was worried about getting a new hairstylist because it felt like nobody could make my hair look as good as Hailey did (seriously – every time I went to a different stylist over the past 15 years, it turned out awful!) Well, I had my first haircut with my new stylist, someone Hailey recommended to me, and she did a fantastic job! It is a huge sigh of relief to know that I have another great hairstylist to go to, someone I can trust with my hair. My hair is such a defining feature of me, and if that makes me sound shallow, so be it. But I’m glad to know I don’t have to worry about terrible haircuts anytime soon.

7. Lovett or Leave It. This is the only podcast I listen to the minute it’s downloaded on my podcast app. It’s a game-show-style podcast that talks about what’s going on in the news in a way that doesn’t make you want to cry or throw things (which is basically what I want to do every time I open up Twitter). Jon Lovett, one of the hosts of Pod Save America, is the host of this podcast (hence the name) and brings on three guests to play games like “OK Stop,” in which they watch a news clip and stop it at various times to talk about what’s being said and the “Rant Wheel,” which has various news-worthy topics (everything from Jared Kushner to S-Town) for Jon to rant about. It’s fantastic and makes me laugh and Jon Lovett is everything to me.

8. My mom taking care of me. It’s true what they say, you’re never too old to need your mom. This month, my mom took care of me in myriad ways: letting me stay with her while my apartment was fumigated, bringing me soup and taking me to urgent care when I got sick, and helping me out by lending me her car while mine was in the shop for a day. The thing about being single is that you don’t have that person to help you out when things get hairy. It means you have to rely on the kindness of other people, and while I have plenty of friends who are willing to help me out, there’s truly nothing like family, and knowing I still have my mom to be there for me, even though I’m 29 and independent, is one of the most comforting feelings in the world.

9. A picnic with my work ladies. I am grateful that I have a handful of coworkers that have become good friends of mine, and one such friend recently went to France and came back with wine for us to share. So, last Friday afternoon, we went down to the little beach near where we work and enjoyed wine from France, as well as an assortment of delicious treats, like fruit, Nutella, cheese, crackers, and cookies. I’m not much of a wino, so I can’t tell you if the wine was any good (ha), but what I loved most was just gathering with my friends and enjoying the sunshine, ocean breeze, and conversation.

10. Sportsfest 2017. Sportsfest was incredibly fun and incredibly challenging. I spent the month leading up to the event trying to talk myself into going because I knew it wasn’t really my “scene” (hot beach, loud music, crowds, doing athletic events, etc.), but I also wanted to kick my social anxiety in the teeth and go do something I wouldn’t normally do. Thankfully, two of my close girlfriends were going to the event, so that helped ease my anxiety a bit. And it ended up being so much fun! I don’t think I was very much help due to my lack of athletic ability (my strategy for dodgeball was just “don’t get hit”), but I was an extra body and a good cheerleader. I was there for six hours, walked over 11,000 steps, and even though I meticulously applied sunscreen, got a bit burnt. At the end of the day, my feet and ankles were trashed from walking barefoot in the hot sand for the entire day. But I did it and I showed my social anxiety who is boss and I had fun and I cannot WAIT for Sportsfest 2018.

What are some highlights of April for you?

It’s hard to believe it, but the first quarter of the year is behind us. Quarter two for me will involve some travel and hopefully fewer vet appointments for Dutch, ha. March was an interesting month because half of it was wonderful and the other half was not. But April feels like a fresh start and I’m feeling better than I have in a while. I can’t wait to see what this month has in store for me, but before that happens, let’s take a look back on the good moments of March:

1) Celebrating Dutch’s 15th birthday. Dutch turned 15 at the beginning of March, and it was an especially happy birthday because the day before, my mom and I took him in for an ultrasound to diagnose what was causing his high liver levels. We could have been given horrid news, like liver failure, but it turned out to be simple “gallbladder sludge” that will hopefully clear up after a round of meds. For Dutch’s birthday, my mom and I took him to Tijuana Flats and then sang happy birthday to him and let him eat part of a vanilla cupcake. Yes, we are those kind of dog parents.

2) Joining the gym. One of the brightest parts of March for me was finally joining the gym. It’s something I have wanted to do for a few months, and I can’t express enough how it is changing my life. I get to do spin again, which is my favorite way to work out, and I’ve even braved the scary weights area of the gym to do some strength training. (I stick to times when the gym is not as busy, usually Friday evenings and Sunday mornings.) I am so, so happy to be a gym goer!

3) Beauty and the Beast. You guys. YOU GUYS. I cannot get over this movie. I cried when it was over because I was so overcome by how perfect it was. Belle has always been my favorite Disney princess, and the songs were such an integral part of my childhood. I loved seeing them performed live-action on the screen. Emma Watson was perfection, and so was Josh Freaking Gad (love him). It lived up to my every expectation. I can’t wait to own it and watch it again and again and again.

4) Booking a flight to Puerto Rico. So, a lot happened in March and one of those things was that I decided I needed to cancel my trip to NYC. It was going to be a really expensive trip and it was making me anxious. But I still had a flight credit due to a flight I had booked but then couldn’t go on. I figured I was just going to have to eat the cost until a coworker mentioned that she was going to Puerto Rico for her honeymoon and how cheap the flights are. And so I looked it up, liked the price, texted my mom, and booked the tickets! I am way more excited to go to Puerto Rico than I ever was to visit NYC (tropical locales > busy cities). I still want to visit NYC, but I’m also really excited to explore Puerto Rico (and spend lots of time sipping fruity drinks on the beach).

5) S-Town. This was an interesting podcast series, though it was definitely way different than what I was expecting. I listened to the whole thing in three days, and I think it was much better in binge form than if they had released the episodes week by week. I really loved Brian Reed and his melodic voice, as well as the perfectly placed music cues. That reminded me a lot of Serial season one. I also could get enough of John B., though at times, he reminded me way too much of my father (eeks). What I liked most about this podcast was that three coworkers listened to it alongside me, so we had a lot of discussions about it. But it definitely wasn’t a Serial replacement and Sarah needs to release season three sooooooon.

6) A new primary care doctor. I finally, finally, finally found a great primary care doctor. I haven’t had one for well over a year. This doctor is young and very personable and I felt so comfortable talking to her, especially about the anxiety I experience. And she sees patients on Friday afternoons, which means no missing work for a doctor’s appointment (unless I’m legit sick, of course). I found her through ZocDoc, which allowed me to look for doctors in my area that accepted my insurance, as well as book the appointment online. I hate calling to book appointments because I get really tongue twisted and just say yes to any appointment they give me (10am on a Tuesday? I’ll be there!), so this was super convenient for me. (And no, I am not sponsored by them. Just telling you about a cool way to book medical appointments!)

7) Celebrating International Women’s Day with my girlfriends. It was so nice to celebrate International Women’s Day with some of my girlfriends! We met up at a restaurant downtown after work and had the best time catching up. The restaurant was super eclectic with a really diverse menu, but I had a hamburger because I’m so not an adventurous eater! It was a really good time and left me feeling so grateful for the people I have in my life.

8) Fiction writing. I’m not freelancing right now, which is giving me a whole lot more time to work on my fiction novel. I didn’t keep track of how many words I wrote in my novel in March, but I think I’m writing close to 5,000 words a week. It’s been so enjoyable and such a fun way to stretch my creative muscles. 2017 is the year I finally finish writing my novel, I know it!

9) A new windshield. So, randomly one Monday morning, I noticed that a small crack had appeared on my windshield. It started at the top of my windshield in the middle and traveled down. It was small, but I knew I’d need to get it fixed ASAP. Well, being the super adult I am, I kept putting off scheduling the glass repair, and every week, I noticed the crack got a tiny bit longer. It was nearing the driver’s side of the windshield, too, and I knew I had to stop putting it off and get it repaired. Well, it was probably the easiest car repair ever! I just filed a claim using my car insurance’s app and was able to schedule the service right from the app. (Living in the future is amazing.) The glass repair tech came Friday afternoon and within an hour, I had a new windshield! The tech also vacuumed my car and cleaned all of my windows (!). All in all, a supremely pleasant experience. (Made even better that glass repair/replacement is covered under my insurance. First time I’ve ever needed to use my insurance!)

10) My tribe. It’s easy for me to forget that I have a tribe. I didn’t always have a support system to lean on; I spent a lot of my early twenties pretty solitary. But March was a rough month for me and I wrote a vulnerable Instagram post about my struggles, the kind of post where I woke up the next day and desperately wanted to delete it. But in doing so, friends reached out to me and said, “Hey, I’m here.” I didn’t write that post so that my friends would do that. I wrote that post to share my struggle and to let other people who are struggling know it is okay and they will get through this. But the post helped me realize I need to be better about reaching out and that I have a solid support system to get me through the rough times.

What was a good thing that happened in March for you?