If you are anything like me you enjoy helping others. You are always on the look out for an opportunity to lend advice or assist in some way. This is a great quality to have but... there is a reason the flight attendant tells you to put your oxygen mask on first in an emergency. We have to remember that we have nothing to give if our cup is empty. We should set up a daily wellness routine to make sure that we always feel our best, preform our best, and are able to share with others when they need us.

Everyone is different, my daily wellness routine will not look like yours. In this post I will provide a general guideline, with details about each section, and give advice about setting up your routine. If you would like assistance setting up a daily wellness routine please e-mail me!

Your daily routine should be comprised of the following:
Physical needs: Hygiene, diet, exercise, and sleep.
Mental/emotional needs: Mood stabilization, focus, and thought patterns.
Spiritual/emotional needs: self-love (meditation, therapy, soul searching, creative therapy, etc), gratitude, and rest (not sleep).

Physical Needs:

After reading about how to make a diffuser necklace and seeing one of my favorite bloggers write an article about them a while back I thought I would give it a try!

Diffuser charms are very interesting but simple to make.

When you wear the Terracotta against your skin and your body heats up the clay, it diffuses the scent of the essential oil into the air.
Terracotta sculpting clay is extremely inexpensive and easy to work with.

The first thing you have to do when working with the terracotta clay is to warm it up by squeezing it in your hands like a stress ball. Then when the clay is easily mold-able you will lay it out on an old cookie sheet.

Use cookie cutters or an X-acto knife to cut the shape you plan to work with.Then use a small straw or instrument to make the hole at the top, where you will later place the string.

Here is the fun part, the design! You can use rubber stamps, the x-acto knife, a regular pencil with
sharpened point or just use your fingers to create the perfect charm for you!

You can press tiny shells or crystals into your charm as well!

Pre-heat your oven to 275 degrees. Then place the cookie sheet you used to make the charms into the oven for 3 minutes. *Please keep a close eye on your charms to ensure they do not burn*

From my experience you may want to use bake a test charm. Make sure the thickness of the charms you are not testing are the same size as the test charm and you should be good!

Once your charms are out of the oven give them a few minutes to cool, pop them off of the tray, and add your hemp cord or string to turn it into a necklace!

Drop one drop of your favorite essential oil onto the grooves of the charm. Allow the oils to soak into the clay for a few minutes.

Then all you have to do is wear it and bask in your cleverness and aromatherapy all day!

I'm sure you have heard the old saying: "A place for everything and everything in its place"! Do you know why this phrase is so important? Let me tell you!

When you begin the switch to all holistic products, and you plan to create your own having all of your tools, ingredients, and containers in one place makes a huge difference.

At our last house my wonderful husband built me a custom desk with little nooks and crannies for ingredients and tools. I also had an Italian built cabinet that displayed my collection of tiny vintage bottles.

Since we are moving into our camper over the next two weeks I have had to really consider the space I will have to store my apothecary goods. I have narrowed my bottles/ containers down to a small box.

A photo of my old desk

All of my ingredients are in one huge Rubbermaid tote and will have to be organized to fit in the few spare cabinets we will have left.

While I may not have a lot of space I feel it is very important to keep all of these items organized because when I need to find the ingredients for my all natural stomach soother in the middle of the night I don't want to have to dig through every cabinet.

There are also times when I have friends or family around and I am so excited to share holistic remedies with them that I find out what ailment I can provide a remedy for and head straight to my apothecary station.  

In my book, the first thing I recommend is to set up your space.  I also give a complete list of the tools I like to keep on hand and suggestions for setting up your own space.

I wanted to talk specifically about organization though.

When you begin thinking of a place you plan to keep your apothecary station think of a temperate location that is out of direct sunlight. Exposure to sunlight will decrease the shelf life of natural ingredients and essential oils.

If you have small children or pets you will want to keep your items out of reach, or inside of cabinets if you have cats like we do!

My vintage bottle collection, at our last house.

Start collecting small containers to corral small items. Install small hooks for things like measuring spoons and pot holders.

I asked my awesome husband to install bookshelf's on my desk for reference books, this really came in handy.

I also have office supplies on hand for labeling purposes; like labels, stickers, and permanent markers.

A spare notepad comes in handy when you are experimenting with a new recipe and want to write it down in-case it is a winner!

When you have a home for every item you will be more likely to return that item to its home so that you and your family (if they are allowed to use your space without supervision) will know where to find the goods!


I can't wait to share my new apothecary space with you all. It will be tiny, but it will also be efficient. I will make sure of that.

Do you have a personal apothecary space? Share it with me on my facebook page I would love to see it!

Thanks for reading and let me know your favorite organization tips in the comments section. I may just use one of them in my new space! -Kayla

This may be a very random post, but it is one that I wish I had read before we went to the beach last summer. I have several essential oils and home made toiletries but which ones are important enough to carry with me to the beach for family vacation and which ones would be useful in an emergency situation?


You never know which oil you will need but if you know your families health well enough you can plan ahead and pack for things that you, your husband, or your kids experience often (such as heartburn, nausea, sunburn, headaches, etc). Each family will be different because we all have different needs.

This is the list I made:

Single Oils: Eucalyptus Oil, Wintergreen Oil, & Peppermint Oil (email me to find out where I buy my oils).

Oil Blends: Stomach Soother (Includes Peppermint, Lemon, and Rosemary) which works wonders for nausea, upset stomach, diarrhea, constipation, acid reflux, and helps my husband if he has a gallstone attack (literally stops the attack from happening).

I also carry: Healing Salve, Dandy Oil, Hemp lippie, and mineral makeup(for a light sunscreen on my face and because I love it)!

I carry the basics as well; homemade fluoride-free toothpaste, deodorant, hairspray, perfume, & soap (recipe coming soon).

Believe it or not all of these items fit in a very small space. I want to continue making conscious choices while we travel as well as at home. Last summer I forgot to bring any oils and we had to leave the family trip early to come home to get my oils... not fun.

I could also condense these items down into travel sized containers, but for the most part I make small batches of everything to ensure it doesn't spoil (no problems with that so far).

I guess I should quit blogging and start packing, I may not have internet access so if I'm quiet for a few days you know why!

Thanks for reading, remember.. "Sharing is Caring"!

Two months before our wedding, on March 28th 2010, an EF3 tornado ripped down our street. Luckily we made it out alright, but I would never know that in the fifteen seconds it took for this storm to condemn our home my life would change forever.

Sunday, March 28th 2010 started out like any normal day. At this time in my life I only checked the weather when we were going to be outside for the day or I would catch it while Robert was getting ready for work. While we were eating dinner that night, a fierce thunderstorm came up. We had employed a new Sunday tradition where we would eat dinner at the table without television, and because I didn't think to look at the weather forecast we had absolutely no warning what-so-ever...


After dinner, while the storm was still raging outside I went upstairs to set up a family card game and the power went out. Immediately I heard what sounded like a train and starting yelling: "TORNADO.. GET IN THE BATHROOM, GET IN THE BATHROOM". My family made it to the bathroom under the stairs just in the nick of time and for at-least 15 seconds while the tornado was coming down our street directly towards our home we heard the loudest noise I've ever heard in my entire life.

The scariest part about the entire tornado was the unexpected. Once the violent noise ceased we didn't know what we would find when we opened the bathroom door. Because the uproar was so loud it literally sounded like part of our house was being ripped off.

We did come out of it alive, and to our surprise the tornado that was headed towards our home like a magnet made a b-line around our home and continued through our backyard. In the video below, which I found online a few months after the tornado, at 1:05 you see transformers blow, those were in our neighborhood.

You cannot tell by looking at the "tornado damage" photo but every single glass pane was broken, the back side of our garage was blown off, my mothers car (sitting in the top photo on the left side with the blue tarp over it) had been picked up by the tornado and spun around. The trees on the roof fell directly into our teenaged sons room and water immediately began seeping into the walls of our home (which eventually led to black mold).

click photo to enlarge

We moved from this home into a hotel room that our home owners insurance paid for and because the contractors moved so slowly we ended up living in that hotel for two months (up until the week before our wedding).

Little did I know the worst was yet to come. While the tornado only lasted for 15 seconds my life would continue to be in turmoil.

I didn't realize that tornadoes could form inside of any super-cell thunderstorm if the conditions were right and I had also never heard of a tornado in North Carolina, I thought tornadoes only happened in tornado alley...

I thought that it was my fault, because I didn't check the weather channel that morning, and every one we spoke to about it said "your area was under a tornado watch all day, didn't you realize"?

So, I found a weather radar app on my phone and quickly became obsessed with checking it everyday. This obsession turned ugly very quickly and to make a long story short within the next year I came to a point where I was checking the radar on my phone every 5
seconds when there was even a tiny speck of precipitation on the map.

This radar image was from the night of 3/28/10

We moved from the big house to a teeny tiny apartment, and when there was a 10% chance of precipitation I began planning my escape route. I would get my things ready and head out to the hospital to sit out the storm in the waiting room in-case I had a panic attack. My psychiatrist diagnosed me with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and started me on several anti-psychotic medications that were going to help me get over my fears.

I should probably back up, and give you a little bit of back-story.

When I was fourteen and after months of trying the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me (I was having severe attacks in my upper stomach) my doctor said: "she is just depressed, and wants to get out of going to school.. let's get her started on some anti-depressants".

I started the medication, and months later found out that I had gallstones... I continued taking the medication and was still on it when the storm hit.

So.. back to the present, I've now been on anti-depressants for eight years and was displaying signs of bi-polar disorder, and now the doctors are giving me extremely high doses of anti-anxiety medications that made me fall asleep behind the wheel and created a zombie version of myself. They treated me like a guinea pig and tried every possible medication prescribed for PTSD. 

When the medicine didn't help, and my husband was at his wits end with me (because of the PTSD and OCD about any type of precipitation) we had a long talk and decided that I should try living without the medications. My doctor was infuriated at this choice that I made for myself, he said if I quit taking the pills he would refuse to see me.

I was on medication that I had to be weaned off of, I had family members who tried to quit taking the same medication (Effexor) cold turkey and had mini-strokes so I knew if I was going to come off of the meds it would have to be done properly. I told the doctor if he didn't help me wean off of the meds, I would sue him when I had a stroke.. so he helped me.

It took almost a year to completely wean off of the medications and even after I had taken my last pill it took months for the fog to wear off. Today I have been anti-psychotic medication free for over two years and I display no signs of depression, bi-polar, or PTSD. (Yes this is the short version of the story) ;) I can also dance in the rain again without worrying that a tornado would pick me up and carry me to Oz...

This tornado helped me learn that not every problem can be fixed with a pill and I also learned that when we make plans of our own mother nature has a way of putting our plans in perspective.

This tornado saved my life because like a great skin cleanser it brought my true problems to the surface and I had to deal with them. It brought my husband and myself closer together than we ever imagined two people could be because we had to work through our problem, even when his family tried to convince him to divorce me, and we learned that if we could make it through this storm... our relationship could survive anything.

If you have read this far I want to say thanks for bearing with me, this was a really long post but I wanted to share this part of my story.

Thanks for reading & remember to trust yourself. Your intuition is stronger than you think!

**Update 02/18/2018: I have now been anti-psychotic medication free for six years. While the medication did not work for me, because I misdiagnosed with depression, that does not mean you should stop taking your prescriptions. Learn to listen to your body and if you believe that your depression stems from a physical condition seek help.NEVER try to come off of anti-psychotic medications without doctors supervision. This is a personal recounting of my story. This is what worked for me. Period.***

Clean it up; with simple ingredients found here: 

These recipes are SUPER simple, most only include a few ingredients.I am a beginner at all of this; and with a little help from a few of my blogger friends and a few age old recipes I have successfully been able to transform this area of my life. ... Let me tell you, this was an area I had been avoiding. But why?!? There are so many positive aspects to making your own cleaning products:

• You can craft non-toxic recipes in your home
• You probably already have the ingredients
• You can totally customize the scent
• You can take small steps by figuring out which recipes you actually need based off of the products you have been using and replace them.. as you go!

Without further adu; here are the links to the posts I wrote during the challenge. Did the challenge help others? I hope so; did they help my family. For sure! Tell me your thoughts in the comments section below!

1. Week 1 | Cleaning with Vinegar.
2. Week 2 | Simple Baking Soda Recipes.
3. Week 3 | This is a mess that calls for some serious soap.

Labels I made specifically for the challenge, feel free to save and print. If you do not have label sheets on hand, just print out the label and use packing tape to stick it on the bottle!