Loepsie’s Life In January

Greetings, my lovely readers, and welcome to a new year of monthly photo diaries! There was no Loepsie’s Life last month as I vlogged all of December during Vlogmas, but we’re up and running again now and back with the first diary of 2020.

Januaries are usually a bit of a struggle for me. The holiday festivities are over, my beloved decorations need to be taken down, the weather is cold, dark and terrible and there isn’t really much to look forward to for a while. This year it’s been quite different, though. I haven’t experienced any winter blues at all this season, which is remarkable as it used to hit me pretty hard. It’s been a mild winter with fairly warm temperatures which I’m sure has helped, but I also partially credit the high doses of vitamin D I’ve been taking. Whatever the reason is though, days are getting noticeably longer again and I feel surprisingly energetic. It’s been a good January. Let’s take a look at what this past month was like!

New Year’s morning, and the traditional bowl of lentils that are supposed to bring prosperity in the year to come. I was surprised to learn that eating lentils as the first New Year’s meal is a tradition in quite a few cultures and not just in Czechia and Slovakia.

I prepare mine with onion, oregano and ketchup. Fully realising how odd that sounds, don’t knock it ’till you’ve tried it! It’s one of my all-time favourite foods.

The first OOTD of the year. A comfy fuzzy sweater, cigarette pants and some jewellery to dress it up.

When the new year comes around, I always feel super motivated to start decluttering. Our small home tends to feel quite crowded when the Christmas decorations are up, and the holidays are a time of year when a bunch of new things tend to enter the house. January is the perfect time to put everything away and do a thorough declutter and re-organisation. I started out by decluttering my tea collection.

For the first time ever, I’m actually starting to feel fed up with having so much tea. I love having plenty to choose from, but I’ve come to a point now where I’d like to only own teas I adore, rather than owning as many as possible. I’m trying to get through some of the teas I’m no longer crazy about to minimize my collection, as throwing tea away is still not an option to me. I consolidated some, re-organised others, and was able to make more room in my tea cabinet.

Next up: sewing supplies. Now that I sew more frequently, my old organisation system wasn’t really working anymore. I took some items out of their packaging, re-grouped like items, and organised everything in a much more practical way.

Decluttering always takes longer than I think so I’ll probably be at it for a while. I’m hoping to eventually go through all the categories on my decluttering challenge list. Maybe I’ll finish in time to follow it up with a spring cleaning session straight away :)

Robbert and I headed out to the market at the Westergasfabriek on a quest to find him a nice hat. One of our friends tipped us off about that market and lo and behold, we found the perfect one! Feeling some serious hat envy over here. I’m not allowed to borrow it off him lest I stretch it out with my big round head, haha!

Hanging with grandpa Diarmuid. The oldest boys have passed their second birthday and Diarmuid here is really becoming a little old man. He’s still healthy and energetic (especially when there’s food involved), but you can tell he’s slowing down and gets tired more quickly. I think it’ll be time to re-arrange the cage into a more senior friendly setup in a few weeks.

I was gifted Just Dance 2020 for Christmas and I’ve really enjoyed playing. The 2019 edition wasn’t my favourite, but this one’s more to my taste.

I’ve especially been enjoying playing against real people in online mode. For some reason I’d never tried that before, but it’s so much fun! I get super competitive and even though I can never win from the hard-core players who practice a lot more, I usually don’t do too badly. I’m Robbert, by the way, haha!

Next up in my decluttering sweep: my closet. I’m getting rid of a few items that no longer suit my taste or were never that flattering on me to begin with.

I posted about having decluttered a bunch of clothes on Instagram, and was surprised by how many people asked if I was going to sell them. Selling clothing online was one of my new year’s resolutions, so I figured now’s as good a time as ever. When I decided I was going to sell my clothing rather than donate, I actually found it easier to part with my items and ended up adding a bunch more that I hadn’t initially decluttered.

I’m still trying to figure out a way to go about this. The best option at the moment seems to be to go through Instagram and PayPal, so I’ll probably be setting that up sometime soon. Will keep you updated!

Ohh, soup. Can’t beat a warm bowl of soup and freshly baked seedy bread after a long, cold day.

January was also the month when I ordered my own bangs off Amazon. More or less. There’s a seller who has been using my photos to sell faux bangs for years, so I went ahead, ordered them and filmed a video about it. It was a lot of fun to do, but some aspects of the whole thing were rather concerning.

After the video went live I got contacted by one of my viewers who works at Amazon. She alerted someone in the right department to the existence of this listing, so action’s underway to have it taken down. I’ll keep you updated on this as well.

Little rattie snoot <3

This is where we have a week-long gap in the diary. I tackled another one of my new year’s resolutions with a challenge and went without my phone for a week. I didn’t think to bring a camera with me everywhere, so I ended up with no photos of this week. If you want to get an idea of what I was up to though, you can check out this video.

Our power was supposed to be shut down for a day due to maintenance. I was fully prepared: I lit a candle in the window-less bathroom, had a pot of tea prepared in a tea cozy, planned to spend the majority of the day out of the house… But the power outage only ended up lasting a little over three hours, haha! Much ado about nothing.

Meet my new plant baby. He’s a pretty little guy, and a very active one. He closes up his leaves every night and opens again in the morning.

I’m very happy with where my plant collection is at right now. It’s still slowly growing, and I just love having all these living things in the house.

I got invited out to join an Art Night, a painting workshop held at restaurants around the country. You pick a date, location, and the art piece you want to make on their website, and everything else is taken care of. The workshops are held in medium-sized groups with a knowledgeable instructor, and there are lots of paintings to choose from. Tools and supplies are provided. I brought my brother along to an Art Night in Amsterdam and we chose Klimt’s Kiss to paint.

Before we went I was wondering how we were going to produce a piece that complicated in three hours. The trick was revealed early on: you start out with a template provided by the instructor. I was a little bummed at first as using a template kind of feels like cheating, however given the limited time, it makes sense to take away the most time-consuming element of painting. I must say though, I very quickly came to realise it was actually really nice to not have to worry about the base of my painting and to just… paint. It was a very different, much more calming and relaxed experience to how I’m used to painting and I actually really enjoyed it.

Three hours is still way too little for a painting like The Kiss, but we were going for a simplified version of course and I’m surprised by how far I got and how alright it looks, haha! It definitely still needs a lot of work but the base is there.

I really enjoyed the experience! As I mentioned, it was super relaxing to just follow instructions and not have to come up with something original if you don’t feel like it, and I loved having a paintbrush in my hand again after a long time. I can definitely recommend visiting an Art Night if this sounds like something you’d enjoy. Check out their website here. Thanks for having us, Art Night!

The following day was the start of my mini camp with the explorer scouts. We stayed at the clubhouse all weekend and did a bunch of fun activities.

We also went bowling! I’m very, very bad at bowling, but I do enjoy it and we had a great time. Afterwards the kids stayed up watching movies until the wee hours, and even though I was the first to go to bed, I think it was still a bit too much for me. I came down with a cold that I haven’t recovered from to this day, oops!

Diarmuid loved to listen to Robbert playing the guitar. He’ll often come up to him and sit by his side enjoying the music, and it’s the cutest thing in the world. I believe I’ve posted similar photos in diaries before but I just can’t get over it.

This is a reference photo I took for a video that’s coming up soon. Can’t say too much about it yet, but it’ll be here before you know it.

Last Friday I headed over to Haarlem to spend the day there with a friend. Haarlem is one of my favourite cities in the Netherlands, they have some amazing architecture, a fantastic museum and the best loose leaf tea store I’ve ever been to.

We started with some sushi and then went about our day with round, stuffed bellies, haha!

We hopped into the tea store to buy some gifts for our D&D friends, and then headed over to the Teylers Museum.

If you ask me, the Teylers Museum has everything a museum should have. It’s housed in a 1784 building and a visit here is like stepping into that time period. The collections are displayed in beautiful wood and glass cabinets, and everything looks original.

They have everything from fossils…

to early science objects, as well as a beautiful collection of crystals, art and books. I highly recommend a visit there if you’re ever in the neighbourhood.

This is my favourite thing we saw, by the way. It’s a painting of a megatherium (giant ground sloth) skeleton and it’s just the cutes freaky creature. It’s currently part of an expo about dinosaurs at the Teylers.

Also, we came upon this lovely specimen of 1830s hairstyling. I still haven’t attempted to recreate something from this time period on YouTube, and I believe it’s about time I gave it a go, don’t you think?

In the evening I met up with the explorer scouts at the Haarlem ice rink. I’m a very inexperienced ice skater and I needed a bit of practice for sure, but it turns out ice skating isn’t so different from skiing. I got the hang of it pretty quickly and it was a lot of fun.

All in all it was an amazing but very tiring day, which was a bit too much for my body that was just recovering from a cold. I developed a nasty cough, but it was worth it ;)

The next day I took it much slower. Our friends came over for an all-day D&D session, which was a lot of fun but made me lose what was left of my voice.

On Sunday I finally decided to listen to my body and stay in bed, not speaking a word. I went on a Netflix binge, drank a lot of tea and didn’t do anything else that day, which was a very good idea.

There’s a new member in our vacuum family! I found this little guy on sale at the supermarket and he’s been a tremendous help. Diarmuid still eats his food on the sofa and even though he eats on a blanket, crumbs end up on the sofa every time nonetheless. This makes those so much easier to clean up, as well as all the other stuff that the rats knock out of their cage on a daily basis, haha! Paired with our robot vacuum, we’re all set for a clean and dust-free home.

And that brings us to February. I have a few fun things planned this month; Robbert and I are going away for a weekend, we’ll be visiting the Efteling (!!!), and my birthday is coming up. Can’t wait to share all of that with you next month.

I hope you’re all doing well, guys. Talk to you soon!