How'd I wind up here?! (pt. 1)

Ever ask yourself that? I have. Oh, not because I'm unhappy with where I am. Quite to the contrary, I'm loving every minute of it. (ok...not every minute. Bathing the dogs after they roll in something disgusting isn't high on my list of great moments. Neither is dusting.) But I have had to wonder just how I wound up here, making natural bath and skincare, because it's usually the first question people ask after they find out what I do.

So. How did I wind up here? My usual smart ass answer is boredom. And it's true. But it's also more than that. It's a combination of different moments throughout my life. The earliest being when I was just a kid and trying to combine shampoo and conditioner into one product (yeah...mom...sorry. That's probably why we were always running out of hair products and bathroom cups) in order to make hair washing quicker and more efficient. I had soaking to do and stories to read, and hair washing got in the way. I continued to mess about with combining products through my teens. Mixing moisturizer and foundation, trying to combine lotion and soap, or mix different facial cleansers to make the perfect one step morning face wash. After all, at this point in my life I had some serious sleeping in and loafing around to do - but I needed to look good doing it. They say necessity is the mother of invention. In my case, laziness was.

Of course, most of these things were unmitigated disasters - although the moisturizer and foundation combo was pretty nice. And obviously, all these products exist now. So why do I make my own? Where does 'for the busy, stressed out woman' come in? What does boredom have to do with it? And what up with tea?

It's a longish story, and chances are high your coffee would be cold (or wine glass empty, depending on time of day) before I was done telling it. Not to mention those pesky people that you're hiding from so you can just have five minutes of peace and quiet and a good piece of chocolate would find you. So in the interests of hot coffee, full wine glasses, peace, quiet, and chocolate we'll break this up into parts. In the next post, I'll tell you about my bathtub epiphany. (it's not as dirty as it sounds)