38th Birthday Wishes
I turned 38 last week! To celebrate, I’m reflecting back on the past year of being 37 and sharing my intentions for the year ahead. I’m sharing my personal updates and insights, along with inspiration for doing this practice in your own life.
Why Reflecting Helps You Look Ahead
I have found that it’s helpful (and enjoyable!) to look back and reflect on the past year before you set intentions for the year ahead. Here are a few reasons why:
Cultivating Gratitude. Looking back helps to cultivate a sense of gratitude for what you experienced, overcame, and accomplished. Gratitude helps shift your energy towards appreciation and abundance as you head into the year ahead.
Gathering Insights. Reflecting on the past year gives you the perspective to gather insights on what worked well, what no longer serves you, and how you want to move forward.
Finding Clarity. By looking at the past year, you can gain clarity on what you desire for the future. This will help you set intentions that are in alignment with what you really want.
Here are a few highlights and insights from the past year:
What a difference a year makes. When I turned 37, my youngest was just 6 months old. He has grown and changed so much this past year. This year, are no longer in the tiny baby phase! He’s walking, running, talking a ton, and copying everything his older siblings do.
Flowing through illness. This past year was filled with lots of “immunity building” and sickness. I got Covid twice and took the kids to the pediatrician more than ever before.
We started traveling again!!! I went to Arizona twice, North Carolina twice, Florida, Ohio, and Napa this past year. It felt so good to get on planes and visit people and places we love!
People came to visit. We hosted friends and family for the holidays and just-for-fun visits.
Live music is magic. I went to a bunch of amazing concerts including John Mayer, Dave Matthews Band, The Killers, Harry Styles, Lizzo, and Florence and the Machine.
Our home is so beautiful and feels like us. We finished a big redesign / redecoration project with Jenna Barton Interiors.
I found a new love for getting dressed and treating myself. I elevated my wardrobe and style with the help of stylist Natalie Frazier.
Here are the intentions I set when I turned 37 —
Give my children space to learn and grow.
Expand with ease in my business.
Appreciate and find strength within my body.
Be a work in progress.
Allow all the different pieces to come together.
My two words were Progress + Alchemy.
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My 38th Birthday Wishes and Intentions
After reflecting back and looking ahead at how I want to feel a year from now, here are the intentions I’m setting for being 38.
Give myself space to breathe.
Less effort and less expenses in my business.
Let my body and intuition guide my wellness.
Tend to my beautiful home and clothing.
Update photos in the house and Adam’s office.
Create photo books and digital archives.
Refine skincare and elevate makeup. (Less is luxury!)
Continue to cultivate and define digital minimalism.
Birthday Wishes from the Past
More than a decade ago, I started sharing my birthday wishes and intentions here. It still surprises me how some things have changed as I’ve gotten older and other things have stayed the same.
On my 25th birthday, I wrote, “I'm planning some artist dates and journal writing sessions to help me set my intentions and inspiration for the year ahead. I wish to continue to nurture my dreams and live with intention. I wish to connect more with you, my inner artist, and spiritual self. I wish to rock this year and make it the best one yet.” I also shared one of my favorite quotes from Oprah, “The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.” (Want more great quotes? Go to: 44 Intuition Quotes to Help You Trust Your Gut in Motherhood.)
While I’m no longer trying to “rock this year,” I’m still a big fan of setting intentions, journaling, and connecting with this community!
37th Birthday Wishes from 2022
36th Birthday Wishes from 2021
35th Birthday Wishes from 2020
Being 31 and Becoming 32 from 2017
Thirty Before Thirty from 2014
25th Birthday Wishes from 2010
Making this Practice Your Own
Birthdays are a wonderful time to embrace new beginnings. If you want to create your own practice of setting intentions and making birthday wishes, here are a few ideas to explore:
Reflect on the past year. Look back at your photos and calendar entries. Think about where you’ve been and everything you’ve done. Pull out your journal and respond to these four questions, what do I want to celebrate? What do I want to cultivate? What am I ready to release? What am I ready to receive?
Create a simple ritual. Rituals are potent practices for creating meaning and intention in our lives. Choose a ritual that brings you alignment — you might light a candle, write in your journal, go for a walk, pull a card, take a bath, or meditate. Whatever you choose, your ritual will help to set the mood for your intention-setting practice.
Set your intentions. Setting intentions on your birthday (or any other time) is a personal practice. Choose a word, group of words, feelings or ideas to act as anchors to yourself and your desires. There’s no right or wrong way to set intentions. Let your intuition guide you. Click here to learn more about setting intentions.
Whether you’re celebrating a birthday, entering a new season, celebrating the new year, or embracing a different kind of new beginning, I hope these ideas inspire you to reflect back and set intentions for the beauty, joy, and magic that lies ahead!
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Listen to the Celebrate Cultivate Podcast
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Welcome to Celebrate Cultivate a podcast about celebrating the good in life and cultivating more of what you want. I'm your host Kaileen Elise. My intention is to offer deep breaths and ideas for appreciating the magic in everyday life. I'm here to help you listen to your intuition, trust your inner wisdom, and act with inspiration. Let's get to it. Hello, hello. Hello. Welcome back to Celebrate Cultivate podcast. I'm your host Kaileen Elise Sues. And this is episode 142. Today, we are going to get into my 38th birthday wishes. And also take a little look back at this past year. So last week, I celebrated my 38th birthday in style. My husband and I went away for a tiny trip to New Orleans where my grandparents live for half of the year. And so we spent time with them, which was such a treat. They are incredible hosts and have lived in New Orleans on and off for many years now. So when I was a kid, we would go down to New Orleans for Thanksgiving and Christmas. And they used to live in the French Quarter was very fancy and cool and fun. And still now today they are still very cool and fancy and fun. Even though we are all getting older. And our weekend... it wasn't actually a weekend but it felt like a weekend because we went on a Tuesday. My birthday was Wednesday, and then we came back on Thursday. So it very much had a weekend quick trip vibe to it. But we had wonderful dinners, we did a tiny bit of shopping my husband and I also made it to the casino and played video poker and a lot of craps. And I ended up winning like a fair amount of money on the craps table, which is so much fun. If you don't know if you haven't been around here for long enough on the podcast, I used to live in Las Vegas. That's where I went to college, I got my bachelor's degree in education and swam for the team at UNLV in college. And I you know, actually, when you live in Las Vegas as a college student, you don't get to gamble, because they're very serious about fake IDs. And I couldn't just like waltz into a casino when I was under age. But my husband and I fell in love with Las Vegas and each other in our 20s. And for a good number of years, we went back and forth to Vegas quite a bit. And he's a gambler. I love to gamble. It's definitely one of our like, favorite things to do. And it's a very takes me back to our younger years. And it's I don't know, it's just so much fun, especially when you're winning. It's not very fun when you lose. So anyways, in this little tiny trip, when we were planning it, I had really didn't even think about the fact that there was a casino and we we just kind of bumped into it. We had a pocket of time when my grandparents wanted to go back to the apartment and rest. And I was my birthday. And I didn't really feel I felt like if I went back and took a nap I might not wake up, you know. So we went to the casino, we had a great time. And overall, the birthday trip was just a blast and a great way to start the year of being 38. But I did not record an episode last week. So we did skip a week. I'm here today and we're going to talk a little bit about what this last year has been like and some of my reflections and takeaways and then what intentions I am setting for this new year. And my hope is that by sharing this with you, you can take a little bit of inspiration or an insight to you know, for yourself that you can apply to where you are right now. If you're 38 or older, younger doesn't matter right like it's just I feel a very fun thing to do is to look back to look ahead. So before I sat down to record this, I how do we look back these days, I just looked through my camera on our my photos on my phone. And this is a funny weird thing about me, I think is that I am really determined not to upgrade to the next level of iCloud storage. I don't know if I've talked about this on the podcast yet but I have 1000s of photos and videos of my children mostly and have you know content for Instagram, of course, and all these different things on my phone. And for the last few months, my phone keeps telling me I'm getting very close to exceeding the amount of storage that I have on my iCloud plan, whatever that is, however much it is, I don't know, I don't want terabytes of storage, I really don't. Like I don't, I don't personally want that many photos to hold on to forever. So one of the things which I'll share later is I have an interest, I'm by no means an expert, but I have an interest in digital minimalism, and in keeping what is sparking joy and what serves me or what I want to hold on to, but releasing the rest digitally. But that takes effort and time nowadays, like it is so much easier to just let all of the photos and videos pile up forever. Like there's no limit to what we can compile on our phones nowadays. I mean, believe me, my phone keeps telling me to upgrade my storage because it wants me to take care of, you know, having we can just have more storage if we want it. So anyways, I wanted to look back at this past year. And I used to do this in my calendar. But it is easier to scroll through visually and look at each month. So what I did is I went back and I looked at March 2022. And then April May all the way through the year, and just kind of got a little tiny snapshot of where I have been and what I have done this past year. And I also was able to clean up my photo archives in the process and delete photos that are duplicates, and delete videos that are ridiculous. And you know, take all the clutter out. And believe me, I still kept hundreds and videos and photos. But it's a little cleaner now, which feels really good. So when I look through this past year, some things that stand out to me, are that a year ago, Neil, our youngest was just a five month old little baby. And he is now this robust little critter who can talk and walk and is doing so many things all by himself and is dipping his toes into the tantrums and you he's just like so much more of a person than he was a year ago. And when I think about what it's like to have a five month old, versus now this like, Oh, he's a toddler like he's a full on toddler. It is so much growth in a year's time. And he did all of that, of course he grew. But in thinking about who I am as a mother, like I was still breastfeeding a year ago. So a lot has changed in this past year. And I feel very excited about what this next year will entail. When I look forward. Like we've got potty training on the horizon, my daughter's gonna start kindergarten. So we'll have two kids in elementary school with one drop off and one pickup location. And so in motherhood and in my role in this family, it a lot has changed in this past year, and then a lot will continue to change. And so many years in the past seven years of my life have been focused on family in a very like dependent on me sort of way from trying to get pregnant to having a miscarriage to getting pregnant, and then having a baby and breastfeeding and getting pregnant again, having another baby more breastfeeding. Like it has been a huge journey having three kids and a relatively short period of time. I definitely know people have had kids closer together than I have and Oh, bless them. But you know, it is it's still we have a lot of a lot of little children in a short period of time three, under whatever it is now it's six and under. It's a lot. And I don't think that in my day to day life, I don't make me my husband, we have a full time nanny, you know, all of us kind of acknowledge, like, gosh, this is a lot from time to time. But until you zoom out and really look at that. I mean, just thinking about the fact that I had a five month old a year ago is astonishing to me. So that's where it started. And then as I was looking through something else that I thought was very interesting is that a year ago, my husband's office or his desk, so his work desk that he works at which he works a lot of hours and all sorts of hours of the day was it's still in our bedroom. So he still had a desk in our bedroom at in March of last year, which I don't remember when we kicked him out of the room and put him back down in the office and when he started going back and working at the office. It was probably around that same time. But that also is like, wow, in our bedroom, we had a baby and his desk. And that's a lot. And I'm so so grateful that he now works out of the office again, and that when he works at home, he's downstairs in our office. Hurray, hurray, hurray. So last summer, Merritt, our daughter turned five and Owen, our son turned six. And we also had these big projects that we we did in the house. So we hired a designer, and she helped us redecorate the whole house. And we also had the whole house painted last year, we got almost all new light fixtures, a lot of new mirrors. And so the house and tons of new furniture, we got window treatments. And the whole home feels incredibly different than it did at the beginning of last year, March springtime whenever like the transformation that it took many, many months to go through. But last summer we left and for vacation, and the whole house got painted. And so looking kind of at the transformation and the photos of the house over the last year is incredible. And it makes me really want to appreciate and enjoy and take care of the house the way it is now because it feels like me feels like home in an elevated way. That a year ago, we were still very much working towards but hadn't arrived to. And now we're here like there isn't any other to-do's on the list for the house. Like it's a big project that has been marked complete, which is something to celebrate, for sure. Because anybody who's gone through redecorating, or renovations or any moving all of that stuff, you know, it almost feels like it will never end. And of course in some ways it does never end. But in in this case like we are not. We are no longer on contract with our designer, right? Like she's moved on. She's working on other projects. And we're living here. So yeah, here and there. There's like things to tweak and change. But the project itself is complete, which feels incredible. Something else that happened last year, and in this last year is that we got COVID twice, so once in August, and then once again in February. And so being 37, this past year included getting COVID twice, and after, you know 2020, 2021, not getting COVID and then getting it twice, it was very taxing on our families just existence. And anybody's had COVID, which many many people have, I mean, we had it in a not so severe way but in, not in, not in a not severe way. Like it was something for sure. We were all pretty sick and August. And then when we got it in February, we weren't too sick. But it was extreme inconvenience for our family because my husband had this big work trip that he couldn't get COVID for like he had give a speech and he had to travel. And so once half of our family got it, he got an Airbnb and a hotel, and was staying away with our oldest who also wasn't positive. And it was just this like rolling disaster of like positive, not positive, you know, the whole thing. So that was a significant piece of this past year of being 37. And just sickness in general, has been a huge aspect of the everyday operations of our household. And as a mom, I have made more trips to the pediatrician being 37 than I ever had before. Oftentimes, many, you know, in one week when it was kind of going through it we've had somebody in my house has had pinkeye for literally a whole month like it's rolled through all of our kids, one of our kid got pinkeye twice and our nanny had it like it is a whole thing. So sickness is also a piece of the equation and this past year and what that what I'm taking away from that is that we on the whole like as I scroll through all these photos, and I look back at this whole year, we've had so many adventures and so many great memories and accomplished so much along with being like pretty sick on and off or someone being pretty sick, the kids being pretty sick. And so I really just want to tell myself, and you as well, like when you're when there is a sickness in the house or if you're really sick like it is such a drag and sometimes it's scary but most of the time it's just like the whole life goes on pause and you gotta cancel all your appointments and do all that and it's just miserable at the same time Um, if I one of the things I really would like to do is just kind of lay off the pressure and just let myself or let my kids or whoever be sick and trust and know that the stuff that gets cancelled, it's totally fine. Everything's gonna work out and be okay and to not fight it not to resist it. And then also to just take care, you know, the biggest ways to stay healthy are to get enough sleep to drink enough water to take your vitamins, you know, like to eat healthy, like, all of that is stuff that you can do. And then a lot of us just again, we have these little kids who are building their immune systems. And so rather than like fighting it, just kind of allowing it is a big piece for me in this past year of looking at all of that. Last fall, our son Neil turned one, which is always a fun celebration, and he started walking and he walked kind of late compared to my other two children. So which was welcome. Totally, totally fine, like, hurray, you know, a little bit more time with the third baby being stationary was totally fine by me. We also hosted Thanksgiving dinner, which was really fun. My in-laws stayed with us. And we did the whole thing. And it was so delicious, and just the best little celebration, and I returned back to Instagram after a few months away. So last year, I took a handful of months off of Instagram. And it's so funny, like, it just feels like a blip in the radar. So again, like sickness in a way, like making the decision to pause and not be on Instagram for many months felt like this, like big thing. And now it's like, nothing right? Like it, it didn't make a huge impact on me one way or another, or on my business really, like it was just I listened to my intuition, it's what I felt guided to do is to step away and take a break coming back was really seamless and easy for me. And now my current relationship with social media feels a little bit like, Hmm, maybe sometimes I'm on my phone a little bit more than I want to be when I want to be present with my kids. That's like the main piece is like really just learning that. I don't want to use my phone as a way to escape from everyday life. But at the same time, I find a lot of joy and connection on social media, especially Instagram, I enjoy being on that platform. And so rather than get tied up in the stories that we sometimes are told about that the algorithm and blah, blah, blah, like I'm really just trying to focus on the joy, the connection, the creativity and the inspiration that I find on there. And you know, my explore feed is beautiful these days, because it's just so the algorithm knows what I like to see. And I've been very intentional about that curation process. And like really going out of my way to just spend time looking at sharing, liking, commenting on beautiful sunsets and beautiful clothing and just the things that I like to look at. And so that has been kind of a fun experience and result, I think from stepping away from a little while. So in being 37, the themes that kind of stand out to me are a few one I really spent time and money elevating my clothing style and my wardrobe. A year ago, I had probably a fourth a quarter of the clothing that I have right now. I was again, I had a five month old I was just starting to like decide, okay, I think I want to dress myself again. And I hired a personal stylist and her name's Natalie, she's wonderful. And I have spent a lot again like a lot of time a lot of money and built up my sense of style again, like reconnected to that piece of me that likes to get dressed that likes were pretty close, and found a style that works for me in my body now. And I'm just loving it. Like I love my clothes. It's I love coming into my closet, it's like my favorite store in the world is my closet, which is a really amazing feeling that I don't think I've ever felt before. It's taken me 37 years to get here 38 years to get here. And I'm excited about where things will grow from in this place. And of course I know that it's like a huge privilege to be able to say that. And at the same time I know there's a lot of women other people out there who don't feel good about their clothes and don't and I mean I was like that right or it's just an I was so focused on minimalism because I didn't want to buy a bunch of clothes that didn't fit me in didn't suit my style. And so I just really focused on having a few items that I liked. And even all of those were kind of tired and worn and didn't fit well. So it was time for me to step into that place. And I'm so thankful that I did. And I'm really happy about style now in my my fashion life. So that's a huge place where I'm just like, Yeah, I'm so glad that I did that this last year. The other one is elevating the home style, which I already talked about. But again, I'm just feel so grateful and so happy in our home. And it's not the biggest home in the world for a family of five, definitely not the smallest. But you know, our two oldest share a room. And I don't know how long will be in this home. I'm really hoping many years, but part of the decision to invest in the pieces and the changes that we made into this house was to make it the house that we want to stay in for a little while. So I'm really grateful for that, and really happy about how the house feels and how it looks. And so that's a big theme from this past year. And then the other two, well, they're kind of they go together. But this last year, we had so much travel and so much hosting, compared to the previous few years like this is the first time that we've been out and doing things in in many years time because even as things started to kind of, like get back to quote unquote normal after COVID. That's when we had a brand new baby. So we kind of had a slower start to that than others. But we had three staycations while I was 37 We traveled all all over the country. We went to Arizona, I went to Arizona twice to visit my grandparents, we went to North Carolina twice to visit my dad, we went to Florida for vacation, we went to Ohio to visit my in laws. And then we went to Napa in the fall to celebrate our anniversary, we went with some friends and that was just like the best trip. So lots of travel. And then we had lots of family and friends come to visit. And so that's like, it's just so nice, again, to be able to share your home and we don't have any family that live in town or even in the state. So to have visitors and be able to share our new home, you know, new feeling home with them was really special this past year. And then another unexpected thing that happened while I was 37 is I went to a lot of concerts, which again, post-COVID we hadn't done for a few years. But I went and saw John Mayer, the Dave Matthews Band, the Killers. And then I happen to go to Harry Styles and Lizzo and I saw Florence in the Machine. So many bands, like so many concerts, and it was so so fun. That's definitely a highlight. And it wasn't really part of like I didn't know, I didn't make it my mission I guess to like go to a lot of concerts this last year, it just kind of happened. And we'll see. I don't know if that'll happen again, I just I can't even imagine. I don't know concert, I just tend to have friends that invite me to concerts and then add on my husband likes to buy concert tickets. So maybe it'll happen again, who knows. But when I set my intentions for last year for turning 37 These are these are the intentions that I said, give my children space to learn and grow, expand with ease in my business, appreciate and find strength within my body, be a work in progress, allow all the different pieces to come together. And the two words that I set for the year were progress and alchemy. Now, I haven't gone back and listened to the podcast episode that I recorded a year ago about turning 37 but a few of these kind of feel amorphous and like I don't even know what I was talking about. Like I don't know what what I meant when I said be a work in progress or allow the different pieces to come together. I understand what progress and alchemy mean. But those words don't really resonate with me anymore. I do think that giving my children space to learn and grow is part of my ethos as a mom, that is something that I hold true always expanding with ease in my business is an interesting intention. And I see as I look back on this past year, how that played out and I probably will record another episode at some point about why I'm not trying to expand my business anymore. Ease is absolutely something that I am very focused and aligned with again, but expanding is an interesting buzzword in business online having your own business. Somebody like me doing what I do. I feel like there's a lot of emphasis and attention and focus and hype around scaling, and growing. And all of these things that I did put a lot of effort and energy towards last year and didn't really see the return, to be honest, was fun, I enjoyed it. But I had a lot of expenses in my business last year, and less income. So this near moving forward, my intentions are very different, I would say that I still held true to my intentions. But if you read expand with ease, in my business, I did expand, I did make things easier in a way. But there was no intention around having more revenue. So maybe I just maybe I held true to my intention, I just set the wrong intention. Who knows. That's an interesting one. And then the appreciate and find strength within my body is another area where I've, I've really struggled and found a lot of efforts. I've made a lot of effort in my body for 38 years now and to varying degrees of quote, unquote, success. Like I was a collegiate athlete, I was ranked in the nation in swimming when I was very young, when I was 10. I've had three unmedicated natural, you know, however you want to whatever terms you want to use on medicated, vaginal births with one of my last, my last child was 10 pounds, seven ounces, like he was a huge baby. So I've I've had a lot of elements of experience with my body that have been very positive. And still, I've had a lot of challenges in my mental area with my body, like I haven't felt happy and positive about how my body looks, and how my body feels over the last few years, especially. And last year. At this time, I was still dealing with a lot of back pain, like I was in extreme pain. Not particularly like an injury, like I'm not I didn't have a diagnosis or anything, I was just a lot of pain. Now 10 years ago, I had back surgery on a herniated disc. So I do have experience with like a real injury and surgery in my lower back. The last year, I'm not even sure really what happened. And I don't really know how it got better. Like it just kind of happened. And I was in a lot of pain, and I got better and I wasn't in pain anymore. And so the whole body thing is is definitely a piece of the equation and in going into my style and finding my style and hiring Natalie and building out my wardrobe and dressing the body that I have really did help me appreciate myself in a way that I hadn't been doing in a long time. So that feels really good. But when I look at what I want my intentions to be for this year, it's it's a different. It's a pivot, like it's very different. So let's get into that before we wrap up the show. So you know, I said that last year, my intention was to give my children space to learn and grow. When I was reading through that and thinking about recording this episode, what came to me for this year's intention is to give myself space to breathe, I have a tendency to fill my calendar. And I have a very full life with three little children, and a business and a husband and travel and all these things. And so my intention to give myself space to breathe is multifaceted. It includes giving myself space on the calendar for me, and for empty breathing room where there isn't anything booked out or scheduled. And then it's also actually making time and space to breathe, to exhale to meditate to do beanbag releases to do the things that make my body feel good, which almost always involves breath, right? Like what we breathe all the time, right? If we stopped breathing, we're not gonna live very long. But giving myself space to breathe is is has many layers to it and feels like a really, really good intention. In my business, I want to have less effort and less expenses. So I've made a lot of measures to have less expenses already. And not, making less effort to me doesn't mean trying less, it just means efforting less like allowing more ease, allowing more flow, allowing more trust in my business to be what my business wants to be, and not mentally deciding what my business wants to be without consulting it and without engaging with it. I really believe that my business and my work has its own energy. And so I'm excited I did this year to spend more time interacting with and connecting to that energy in a way that feels supportive for me, my clients and my business as a whole. And doing projects like 21 Days to Intuition as a community, and really opening that experience up to share every day on Instagram and on the studio platform that was totally inspired by what my business wants, right. So I'm excited about that intention, having less expenses is a pretty easy done kind of thing, like, I'm just not going to sign up for as much, I'm not going to hire the help that I did last year, I'm a little bit scaling down in some ways to make space to allow others in. So if you want to engage with my work, you know where to find me, right? Like you can join The Season Sessions, you can schedule the Gift of Intuition and book yourself a single session, you can join 21 Days to Intuition and start to develop that connection to your inner voice. There's all these different ways to engage with my work, I am really trying to help make that easier and more accessible in time and money in your bandwidth. So that, you know, if you want to do the membership, it is a seamless process. So those are kind of the back end things that I'm working on. And I'm just really excited about this next year because it feels very true and good to me to be making less effort and still showing up in a way that is available and supportive to you. So when it comes to my body and my wellness this year, I'm really gonna double down on letting my body and my intuition guide my wellness and guide my health, because I have done it from the mind for so many years. And I really just hit a wall, where all of the effort that my mind has decided is worth it or not worth it or whatever. I mean, even like when I said take your vitamins like I mean only take your vitamins, if you feel intuitively guided and aligned to do that, in all honesty, I've been taking my vitamins on a very rare occasion, like when I feel that intuitive nudge. And that is very different from like different versions of me where I've been very focused and very into my, my vitamin life. So I'm really just focusing a lot of my energy and attention on what is my inner voice telling me what does my body want, and letting go of all of the pressure and the hype and the guilt and the drama that my mind has around, not working out every day, or, you know, eating something that's quote unquote bad for you. Like, there's all these different mental stories that I've picked up along the way. And probably you have to, that do not serve Me and do not feel good or right or true. And so I'm just doing what I can at the pace that feels good and natural for me to release those stories and to just really listen to my body, bite by bite, minute by minute, hour by hour, when I'm thirsty, I'm gonna get some water, you know, when I'm tired, I'm going to sleep and we're going to see where that goes, where that takes me and how it feels. So far, I've been playing with it for a few weeks now. And on paper, like if you looked at the data, I doubt that you would really notice that many significant changes in my actual actions, but the way I feel is so much more vibrant and happy and trusting and allowing. And that is all I need. Right? Like it's, it feels really good. So I'm gonna do that. And then because I have this beautiful home and all these beautiful clothing, my intention this year is to really tend to those items to really take care of my home like clean and organize and just maintain and tend to my home like you would tend to your garden. And same thing with my clothes like some of them needs to get steamed. Some of them need to get mended some things are probably ready to be you know, donated and some things need to get brought to the front of my closet so I can appreciate and wear them more. There's a lot of now that I have clothes, there's a lot more taking care of my clothes than there used to be because I used to not have very many clothes at all, like none. Very, very, very few. And now it's like I have these things so I want to take care of them. So tending to my beautiful home and my beautiful clothing is pretty high on my intentions list. And in that there's some practical things that I really am excited to do this year. One is to update all of the photos in our home because we still don't have very many pictures at all of Neil our third baby. Typical third child, but they're just not in the house. So he needs to be up on the walls. And then same thing in my husband's office, I think the pictures that he has in there, like may or may not even have our daughter. So we have photo updating that's on my intentions list. And then also creating photo books and maintaining my digital archives and kind of setting those things up and then keeping up with them. That goes with my digital minimalism intention. And so I'm excited to continue to do that as a project this year, I do not have baby books for my children. And I've felt very okay and aligned with not doing that. But now I'm kind of feeling like, Okay, this is this is my flavor, my version of baby books is maintaining these, you know, photo archives systems that work for me, and that can keep pictures and videos for the kids but not have it be so overwhelming that you know, I am not happy about it. So again, just listening to my own alignment and joy. Kind of a weird one, maybe for some, but it's something I really enjoy, like this, preparing for this episode, and looking through all the photos in the last year, and cleaning them up. Made me so so happy. And then finally, another self care item on the on the list is refining my skincare and elevating my makeup. So I am 38 and I do feel like my skin is changing. And my maturity level in terms of looks is is changing as it does and that's quite the gift I'm I'm okay with that I'm not really resisting aging too much. Now, I do think I'm like on the younger side of being worried about that anyway, but I still think that I could refresh my makeup look a little bit more. And you know, really kind of thinking about it in terms of like a less is luxury kind of viewpoint. So not trying to do too much with my skincare. And I've always been kind of a minimalist with makeup, but really just kind of listening to my skin listening to the you know, experts may be doing some YouTube and Instagram, rabbit holes. So if you have any beauty bloggers or you know, people that you really like to follow, send them my way, because it's a fun thing to explore. And I'm just looking to kind of like swap out, elevate, switch a few of those things. It feels like that's like the next next thing to do. And I'm really excited to explore that. And then I know I mentioned my words for the year last year, I don't really have a word for the year this year. I've mentioned that before in another episode, but I feel I still feel good and true about that, like I, I don't really need or want a specific word. So I'm just gonna continue to if anything, you know, alignment, and ease and breathing. Those are the things that I'm really happy and excited to focus on this year. And to see where it takes me. You know, looking at the little moments of magic in everyday life, like all the stuff that I've been talking about for years and years and years. That's the stuff I'm still excited about. And if you want to if you are curious to to look back in the archives, I have been sharing birthday wishes from past birthdays all the way back to when I turned 25. So I didn't do it every year for a while. But there are quite a few in the archives. If you want to take a peek, go over to kaileenelise.com or click the link in today's show notes. I would love love love as a birthday gift to me if you're still listening to this to rate and review the podcast. It does mean so much to me personally when you take the time to write a review and give me a rating a five star rating if you feel so inclined. And it also does help get the show in front of new listeners which is also lovely. You know if I can connect with a few new folks and help them find alignment and listening to their intuition and having inspiration in their everyday life, then that would just be such a beautiful birthday gift for me. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening for being here for being part of this community. Okay, my friend, here is what I want you to know. You are doing so well. You are guided on the path to your desires. Stay curious. Watch for magic. Keep listening to your intuition. Play with trusting the beautiful wisdom you receive. And when you act let inspiration flow through you even in the smallest ways. Thank you so much for listening. Visit kaielenelise.com For links and notes from today's episode. Connect with me on Instagram. I'm at Kaileen Elise. Please share this pod with anyone who could use a little extra magic in their everyday life. Stay tuned for the next episode. I'll talk to you then.
