My favorite recipes: Body Buttercream

This winter air has been foe to my skin and hair, so like the hair butter that I make to moisturize mine and my son's hair, I did something similar for our skin.

My son has eczema, so this winter air definitely has the potential to instigate more dry patches.  Up until this time, he'd been using an Aloe and Shea based body butter that I had made specifically for his condition because I felt that the cream that his doctor prescribed was not effective.  My son hadn't had an eczema breakout since he started using what we called "Aloe Butter", that is until the winter air really hit home, so I purchased some products that were good for the skin and decided to adjust the recipe of the Aloe Butter as well as incorporate some oils that I'd used in the Oil Cleansing Method, to make a stronger and more effective product.  Here is my recipe.

• 2 cups raw shea butter
• 1 tbsp castor oil
• 2 tbsp aloe vera jelly
• 1tbsp sweet almond oil
• 10 drops lavender essential oil
• 10 drops geranium essential oil
• 70 drops tea tree essential oil

Mix all of these ingredients together using an electric hand mixer, and you have yourself a strong moisturizer that you can use on your body right after you get out of the shower and pat yourself dry (the standard method for locking in moisture to the skin) as well as a face moisturizer that can also help with acne, hyper-pigmentation and dryness.

Acknowledging Failure

Even though the new year has just hit and I was all celebratory, drinking my lemon juice spritzer (I'm 'cleansing' this weekend so no alcohol for me) and singing along with Frank Sinatra's New York, New York, my son and I watching Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest emcee the moment - reality hit me hard less than 10 hours later.  Interestingly, once the ball drop my son immediately became a sour puss and it made me angry because that's how I used to be but I had worked so hard over the years to learn to see the glass as half full as opposed to half empty.  And seeing the look on his face was like being smacked in the face with the ghost of Christmas past.  When he wouldn't snap out of it I sent him to bed - I didn't want him killing my buzz, even if it was simply inspired by homemade lemonade and seltzer water.  A half hour later I went to bed, and did not want to crawl out of the bed when the sun rays blasting through my blinds wouldn't leave me the heck alone.

I have spent most of the day - which I had very early on deemed my 'lazy day' - reading short romance novellas, scanning the internet for everything from Master Cleanse recipes to skin moisturizers to 2-strand twist hairstyles, and letting my son watch anything he wanted - including the unrated version of Old School.  I finally rolled out of bed a few hours ago, brushed my teeth, slathered some shea butter on my dry skin (damn this Winter air) and trimmed some of my hair (I'll finish up tomorrow), and have come to conclusion that I am in a funk because I keep trying to pretend that my failures in life don't exist.

Know how I do that?  Here is my go to line.... "hey, at least I'm alive!"  It's a great line, and also a very true line, but I think I have been using that line as a band aid over the pain and disappointment that I feel toward myself when faced with acknowledging and NOT dealing with my failures.  I make excuses where I try to inject a positive spin to.  It's a cop out method that I have damn near perfected, but right now (I don't know about tomorrow, but right now), I want to be able to acknowledge my failures no matter how enormous or minor, for what they are, without making myself feel like the scum of the Earth.  Is that even possible?  Who knows, but I know that turning the other cheek to the things that I haven't done so well, or not done at all, isn't doing me any good, and I suspect, will not help me grow as a person. And it is this 'stuck on E at the worst truck stop in the universe' feeling that I have to move from.