New Blog Look, Theme, and More

The theme from this blog is now Money Mindfulness and More. I’ve been mulling over a theme change already for years, and narrowed it down to this. Money Mindfulness and More has two main meanings.

 1) Money Mindfulness, meaning being conscious of where your money is being spent and making sure that it is being used in ways that fit your values- spending more on things that matter to you, and saving money on things that do not, while keeping your expenditures less than your income.

2) Money. Mindfulness. and More. 3 separate things. This blog talks about all sorts of money related things. Mindfulness is a very important tool in therapy, especially DBT and other trauma and anxiety therapy and it is something I use regularly. Mindfulness in the theme represents, therefore, my focus on mental health in my life and in this blog as well. And then more. Because there is so much more I talk about.

As for the images I chose for the header:

The background image is a wild area near me where I teach foraging classes, and it represents the foraging aspects of this blog. 

The image of my kids is from a vacation we took, and it represents the frugal adventures and excitement I try to include in mine and my kids’ lives, not to mention the fact that parenting them is one of the main and most cherished aspects of my life.

The image of me is from a wonderful trip I took with my kids, and was snapped by my son as we zipped across a lake in a motor boat. I was in a state of pure bliss, doing that with my children. (My daughter was next to me in the picture but I cropped her out because I wasn’t going to put any of my children twice in the header; I don’t play favorites like that.)

And the last picture is a picture from my foraging cookbook, Penniless Foodie in the Wild, unfortunately now out of print. It was taken outside, presenting my beautiful dish in nature. It is dairy free panna cotta made from homemade cashew milk and wind edible flowers. It represents foraging, my love of good and beautiful food, my love of feeding people, my love of writing, my emotional resilience and fortitude when I worked on getting out of the deep dark depression I got into not long after the book was published, when I saw how many obstacles got in my way of my book being the bestseller I’d dreamed of…

Basically, I couldn’t think of pictures and ideas that better represent me and my life and what I value and what I share on this blog than those.

While not penniless, I still have financial struggles and couldn’t afford to pay a graphic artist to make it for me, so I made it in Canva, and I think it is good enough, even if not perfect. And that, of all things, represents my efforts to accept that it is ok for me to be less than perfect, that it’s ok for things to be good enough.