Yesterday I got to babysit four of my favourite little people. Because I'm the world's most insane BEST babysitter, I told them I would let them stay up past their bedtime and watch a Christmas movie with me on the condition that they go straight to bed the minute the credits started rolling.

Obviously they agreed. What kid wouldn't?

We popped in Elf, and about halfway through the movie, six year old Austin looked at me.

"How do you spell the word 'friend'?"
"F-R-I-E-N-D."
"Okay. I need to go downstairs to do something."

Austin ran down the stairs, and about ten minutes later came back up holding a piece of paper. He thrust it into my hands and said, "I wrote a letter to Santa for you."

Yeah, yeah, I know. Every white person has a gallery wall. Whatever.

One of the big reasons I have a gallery wall is that I inherited this room with an impressive amount of holes in the wall. Plus, I had a LOT of stuff to hang, and I didn't want it to look like a mess. On another note, I think one of the hallmarks of adulthood is when you stop using sticky tack to hang up artwork on your walls and instead put everything in frames. I guess I'm somewhere in between because as you'll see, some of these are hung using washi tape a.k.a. my one true love. God bless washi tape.

Disclaimer: My room doesn't have great lighting. You've been warned.
 My friend Ben made me this cross-stich for Christmas one year. He free handed it, so unfortunately I can't give you a link to a pattern or anything.

Some of you might know that the biggest New Year's Resolution I made this year was to eat absolutely ZERO added or refined sugars or sweeteners. Yeeaaah. I've been having a lot of people ask how things are going, so I'm going to answer some of the most common questions people have.

1. "WHY?!?!?!"
Mostly just to prove to myself that I can. I really don't have a better reason. I just wanted to try it to see if it could be done Also I watched some super spooky documentaries about sugar that got me like:
2. "Well what about fruit? Fruit has sugars."
You're right. It does. But it also has a lot of fibre, and that helps digest the sugar properly. Plus, I need SOMETHING fun to eat or I'm going to go insane. I don't drink fruit juice, because all the fibre is gone so it's pretty much just fruit sugars and water, but I think eating fruit is fine.

3. "So... What DO you eat?"
Basically, my eating hasn't changed that much except that I'm more careful. Lots of things have sugar hidden in them (I'm looking at you mayonnaise!). I can eat vegetables and fruit and meat and dairy and grains. Bread is harder because most of it is processed, but I can do French bread because it doesn't have any sweetener in it. Most recently the meals I eat the most are soup or homemade veggie burgers.

4. "What about restaurants?"
I've eaten out like maybe 4 times since the beginning of the year, and all of those times I've gotten a salad with no dressing because that's pretty much the only thing with no sugar on the menu. It gets pretty old. As for fast food, all I can get is fries, and I'll admit, I've some here and there, but they start tasting kind of gross after awhile. So generally, I avoid restaurants. It's just easier. Then I don't have to ask about the ingredients of EVERY thing on the menu.

5. "Do you pretty much hate life?"
Haha sometimes! It depends on the day. You can get pretty creative and make a lot of things with no sugar, but the one thing you can't really replace is chocolate. There's no good substitute. I miss chocolate, but like, I don't need it anymore. I've been off sugar since just after Christmas so I'm kind of used to it now. It's more annoying to have to ask about every ingredient than anything else.

6. And you're doing this for a WHOLE year?"
Yep! I'm giving myself a couple of breaks. For example, I just booked tickets for my spring vacation to Savannah and Charleston, and I'm still going to eat healthy, but you can bet your bottom dollar I'm going to have a couple treats while I'm there. Also for my birthday I'm getting ice cream as my birthday gift to me. Past that I haven't really thought much of it.

7. How do you feel? Have you noticed any changes?
SO many changes! Here's a short list:
-I feel so much better. Historically, winter is the death of me, but this year there have been little to no depressive episodes. My mood is crazy better and I'm so grateful. That's probably been the biggest change.
-I sleep super well. It doesn't take me long to fall asleep and I stay asleep on average for 7-8 hours.
-I've lost a little bit of weight without even really trying.
-Food has so much more flavour. Fruit tastes sweeter. I can have like half an orange and be done.
-I get full faster.
-I can eat salads and vegetables with no dressing and they don't taste terrible. I know that's a weird one, but seriously. The exception is celery. Celery always tastes bland no matter what you do.
-NO MIGRAINES!!!! You guys, I was getting debilitating migraines every other week. They were so bad that I would get sick to my stomach, get earaches, and have to stay in bed. I haven't had a migraine since December!

So yeah. That's me right now. The Sugar Vigilante. Feel free to ask me any other questions you have!

I guess a little bit of a backstory is needed before we continue. My roommate loves the movie Ratatouille. LOVES it. She has a Remy the Rat snowglobe that lives in the back of her car. It's broken and has to sit in a dish so it doesn't leak everywhere, but she just can't bring herself to throw it out. If you say the word "Ratatouille" around her, she'll make that face that most women make when they see a cute baby or some particularly charming puppies and sigh.

One day, we were discussing travel, and she brought up the fact that she'd been to Europe more than I had, which made me cranky. And when I get cranky, I get mean. So I shot back, "Oh yeah? Well have you ever been to Paris? I have. And I went up the Eiffel Tower. And you know what I saw? A tiny rat. Waving at me."

She still hasn't forgiven me.

But I digress.

One year ago today I phoned my mom.

It's my favourite day of the week again! I loved sharing those printable quotes last week, so I've decided that I'm going to make it a weekly tradition. It's probably a much better way to keep the Sabbath Day holy than napping and scrolling through the same 25 Instagram posts. (Guilty.)

WEEKEEEEEEND.

Well, maybe for you. I'll be spending most of mine in the theatre at the university. I'm set designer for a student-run show, and our play opens this coming Thursday. And that means TECH WEEK. Woof. Lots of hours painting, moving sets, rehearsals, early mornings, and late nights. In honour of my imprisonment in the Fine Arts Building, I present to you some of my favourite musical theatre songs. Enjoy!

Here are a couple of pictures from the last few weeks!

Happy 2017!

Some of these I'm really excited for. Like my big trip (!!!) to Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina this spring. Also graduating university. I guess that's kind of exciting. (weeps with ecstatic relief)

My biggest project this year is a doozy. I'm going one whole year with no sugar. None. No sugar, no honey, no artificial sweeteners, nothing. So far it's been going alright! I went a couple weeks in December with no sugar so it hasn't been that big of a shock to my system.

Project No Sugar is proving to be difficult in other ways. For starters, I can't really eat at restaurants. Or friends' houses. Or church functions. There's just way to much sugar in stuff and no way to know about it. I think that might be the hardest part. So many of our church activities revolve around food...

Another thing that's challenging is that it takes a MILLION years to go grocery shopping because you have to read every. single. label. And sugar has something like 61 different names it goes by. Woof. Basically every trip to the store looks like this: