The Balance Plan, Barbecues, Once Upon a Time and The Royal Wedding – #LittleLoves

Ah, Little Loves I’ve missed you. It seems such a long time since I’ve shared some of my favourites on here. That said, I’ve rather enjoyed having more time to write about other things since the link up changed to monthly. Over the last few weeks I’ve had a chance to write about travel, opportunities and this little blog here celebrating its second birthday. Clouds and silver linings, eh? But for now, back to the Little Loves in hand! 🙂

READ

I spent most of this month reading Outlander, and you’ll find more about that in May’s Reading Lately post. I did manage one other piece of fiction – Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste NG (which was also very good). This week I’ve been dipping in and out of The Balance Plan by Angelique Panagos, which is all about diet and lifestyle interventions for balancing female hormones. If you’re struggling with hormonal issues, PMS, thyroid, menopause or just about anything that impacts on female health this book is definitely worth a look. It contains lots of recipes and a large section devoted to how hormones work and what can be done to keep everything in alignment. One of the biggest eye openers for me was how stress, and elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol can send feminine hormones wildly out of whack.

WATCHED

Thankfully, there are always non-stressy diversions in life like our favourite box sets. This month we’ve been going all out on fairy-tale fantasy series Once Upon a Time, which we really enjoy watching with the kids. With them staying up a bit later now, my husband and I are struggling to watch anything even remotely adult before bedtime. Thankfully, this show is a great compromise – not too scary, pretty mild on bad language, but at the same time full of great stories. Definitely one to look up if like us, you have a slightly older brood.

And of course, this month we also watched the Royal Wedding – wasn’t it just lovely? We invited the family round, settled down to tea and cucumber sandwiches and altogether just had a really lovely day.

The whole thing had me mesmerised and poking about for post-mortem snippets online and in the media for days later – in fact I’m only just getting my life back together 😉 . I admit it, I’ve even started watching a couple of episodes of Suits to keep the momentum up. And what about this good-natured spoof from one of my favourites, Tom Fletcher? You really can’t beat a Royal Wedding for promoting that sense of national pride.

HEARD

One of the best things I heard this month was David Nicholls, the author of one of my favourite books One Day being interviewed on the Creative Penn podcast. I listen to this podcast a lot and if you’re an aspiring writer like me, you should really look it up. Joanna Penn (who hosts the show) is an inspirational figure in the world of self-publishing and indie authors and I loved listening to her interview Mr Nicholls about his writing. It’s always amazing to hear established authors talking about their process – and even admitting that despite all their successes, they still struggle with self doubt.

WORE

The spell of fantastic weather lately has meant I’ve been wearing sunglasses, summer sandals and plenty of sunscreen. It’s been so lovely to enjoy some fabulous weather, eat al fresco and just generally potter about in the garden till all hours. The last week or so has been fuelled by vitamin D and barbecues – I think May is definitely my favourite. Just don’t tell the other 11 months of the year, will you? – no doubt I’ll switch allegiance soon! 🙂

MADE

The last month has been all about making lovely food on the barbecue and making progress in the garden. Weeding is the bane of my Spring/Summer existence but then again, when it’s sunny, there are worse things to have to do 😉 . May has also been about making memories on road trips, like the one we went on last weekend to Grantown-on-Spey, near Aviemore. And there’s also been a sunny school sports day, a writing retreat, a visit to my friend’s farm and a leisurely walk through the bluebells to round the month off in style.

June, it looks like you have a lot to live up to.

What do you say Little Loves readers – same time, same place next month?

G x

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As usual, I’m linking this post up to Morgana’s linky.