You know, one of my favorite things about taking time out for myself is the way my mind is able to wander. An extremely high percentage of my best ideas come to me while I’m in the shower, or doing henna, or during that trance that I’m in while I bake… Baths and showers are probably one of my favorite daydreaming places, though. Relaxing music… or just silence and the sound of the water, spending time thinking about whatever while I do a bit of pampering (because, let’s face it- every bathing experience is an opportunity for some pampering.) It’s really quite heavenly.

So today, while in the bath with my sore muscle salt soak, I pondered this Nurture-Me-November thing a little more. It’s amazing to me how motivated I’ve been to find little things to tweet about or take a quick photo of. (side note: having a super fancypants smartphone REALLY has done wonders for my motivation as well).  When I decided to make November a month to nurture myself, I didn’t really think about how many other people would get behind the idea. I must say, the feedback so far has been really exciting! I’ve been trying to post to Facebook here and there, but mostly I’ve been using Twitter (#nurturemenov) to share my little moments of self-care.  I’ve been playing with Instagram and having oodles of fun tweeting things like this:

by the way, if you want to follow me on Instagram, search for Knacknack- but I warn you, I post many pictures of food and kittens.

As fun as this has been so far, I’m finding myself hoping that I don’t lose steam. I’m sure I’ll have a busy day here and there this month where I won’t be bombarding the interwebs with whatever silly girly things I may be doing, so I’m trying to come up with a few ways to keep myself motivated…

Getting the feedback for N.M.N. that I’ve received so far has been SO encouraging and SO exciting. I just want to keep hearing about all of the little things that you guys are doing for yourselves too! So I thought to myself: “how can I get people to share/tweet more?”

duy. A giveaway. What else motivates people like free stuff? Not much.

But what to give away??? Well, thanks to the lovely ladies over at Henna Caravan and their awesome Golden Elephant Gift Exchange, I’m going to be putting together a fantastic little box of goodies! I won’t say specifically what’s going to be in it, but it might have something to do with chocolate… and henna… and maybe some other pampering goodies also… So I thought, HEY! I’ll just make two and give the extra one to the winner!!

Awesome, right?! so here are the rules: Read my mini-soapbox-babble about Nurture Me November and learn a bit about why I’m doing this, then tweet your own recipes/ideas/thoughts/feelings/moments (really, this could be just about anything so long as it makes you feel good about yourself) with the tag #nurturemenov, and at the end of November, I’ll draw a winner. Every time you tweet, you get an entry. Did you spend time smelling the roses? Tweet it. Delicious, nutritious dinner? Tweet it. Did you power through your to-do list with time to spare? Tweet it. Like I said, NMN is about building awareness of the things that you already do, not making a bunch of added effort to do new things. The more we share; the more we encourage each other. And the more we encourage each other; the more we encourage ourselves. And the more we’re encouraged; the more likely we are to spend our time doing things that help us cultivate the people that we truly want to be.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve prepared a lovely bedroom to sleep in.