Woah hey there, it’s already Wednesday! Apologizes for the lack of posts, I’ll give a more in depth break down to what I’ve been up to in a hot second, but basically I had a quick but rough case of the “Corbin Fever.” Corbin is the name of the residence hall (fun fact: KU doesn’t believe in the term “dorm” and I think it is kinda funny. They encourage our usage of the term “residence hall”)  and it is, generously, very old. Old as in they’re knocking it down to do renovations next year old. Old as in there is A LOT of dirt and grime and getting sick is more of a hobby than a rare occurrence. Starting around 5:30 am on Saturday, I was down for the count and literally did not leave my bed all weekend. Thank goodness for the JCrew website and Gossip Girl to keep me sane. Thankfully I am feeling almost fully better and have been trekking it to all my classes this week!

Speaking of classes…haha welcome to midterms!! I actually only have one real midterm exam this semester but have plenty of projects and Spring Break assignments to make up for that. I don’t mind the assignments keeping me busy, but I am more than ready for a nice break back home.

BEFORE I got sick, my cousin Sam got to come down and hang with me last Thursday! I actually only have one class on Thursday and it ended up getting cancelled which gave us an entire day to just explore campus and downtown. It was 70 degrees, sunny, and the best day. We ate lunch at my sorority, got homemade waffle cones at Sylas and Maddy’s: the best local ice cream stop, got fries and limeade at my favorite pizza place, and got some delish Chinese for dinner. Between all that food, we napped a bit and did a bit of shopping which was SO fun. Lawrence may be a huge college town, but downtown for sure has such a charming and fun personality to just walk and explore.

I am on the membership programming (sisterhood) committee at Alpha Chi and we have been meeting and discussing so many fun events for the spring such as Mom’s Weekend, Finals week, and so many more bonding. Shoot me an email or leave a comment if your sorority does anything super fun I should look into!

Lastly, I have been really trying to go to more daily masses as part of my Lenten promise and last night the campus parish had a surprise birthday party after the 9pm mass for one of our priests! He was so excited to see so many people there to appreciate him, which we really do, he’s the best. 9pm mass is also one of my favorites because the church turns a lot of the lights off and it is just so serene and calming. How are your Lenten promises going if you’re Catholic or practice Lent?

Well I think that’s about it for what I have been up to. I am planning on heading home this weekend after cheering on my Jayhawks in their first March Madness game Friday (fingers crossed for my multiple brackets!) 

Until next time, dream big, xoxo,  Ally

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am writing this and per usual haven’t titled it yet, because the way this usually works is that I have a bunch of things I want to say and know how I want to say them, but don’t really understand the entire theme or moral of my story. Literally I am a walking, talking, breathing, children’s story book friends; lots of pretty pictures and a story that takes you through tons of twists and turns before you find out the lesson at the end. lol, would it even be a blog post if I didn’t make a cringe worthy and cheesy as heck metaphor?

February started out FANTASTIC for me. Seriously, Feb 1st was a KU home basketball game v. Baylor (sorry about that, Baylor), I met Chip Gaines from Fixer Upper at the game (and he held my phone to take a video to send to my dad!!! hahah AHHHHH!!!!!), I had stellar seats for the game, the student section was crazy fun during a big season game, I made my ESPN debut (twice!), AND on top of all of that got to briefly hang with a fellow future Jayhawk from my high school who I seriously cannot wait to get to know better & become friends with next year. (Hi Brenna if you’re reading this let’s be friends.) Greatest night of my life thus far at KU. I was dead set on February being the best month of my life, haha, not so much. At least it is the shortest of them all, right??!?!?!

I won’t lie, I spent A LOT of February pouting over things that weren’t going my way or that weren’t working out exactly as I wanted to. I spent more time complaining about my situations rather than working to fix them. Basically, I was not having the best of luck, but also not doing anything to improve that. Moral of the story: I was being very immature and zero help to myself or my bad mood. Sure, a few things happened that I had every right to be upset about, but not for more than an hour max. I saw a quote yesterday that said, “was it really a bad day? Or just a bad 10 minutes that you milked all day?” and it really hit me how negative I was acting about a few downfalls and making it seem like the entire month had to therefore be awful. Quite frankly, just like the very start of the month, a lot of good things happened during February! But I was too busy being so gosh darn caught up in the small mishaps that I didn’t even take time to recognize the good. Big mistake, Ally.

These first few days of March have been pretty good to me. I have realized one big lesson that I keep attempting to learn, but then being scared to fully commit to: you can’t get other people to love you unless you love yourself first. Which goes right alongside: people are going to love you for your best version of yourself, don’t stop being him/her to impress people.

Basically, I’ve learned that pouting about something because it isn’t how you wanted it to be isn’t going to change literally anything, ever. I find myself phsycially letting myself get upset and don’t take care of myself as well as I should be. Aka I won’t dress as nice as I do (yeah tshirts are comfy for class, but sometimes dressing nice is a mentality booster for me, try it!) I will let my desk get messy, won’t consistently make my bed, will find myself not as motivated to do homework, etc. I’m sure you can think of a time in your life where being in a bad mood almost made you feel like you didn’t deserve to be the best version of yourself; as if pouting and not doing the things that make you happy would somehow reverse all of the bad things and fix all your problems. Yeah, as easy and nice as that sounds, that isn’t quite how it works.

Let’s stop waiting around to be the best version of yourself. Back to what I said about people not loving you unless you love yourself. You know what people DON’T wanna be around? Someone who is negative and constantly complaining (guilty as charged on occasion, shoutout to my friends for putting up with me!) You know what people DO want to be around? Someone who is confident in themselves, who doesn’t let little problems knock them down, and who always strives to do their best. We are a compilation of the 5 people we spend the most time with, whether we like it or not. Ask yourself if you would want to spend time around yourself…and let that put your bad mood into perspective.

I know it isn’t always easy to look on the bright side of things. As I said, a few things that made me upset this month were TOTALLY worthy of being upset over! That’s life! That’s being a human! That is having healthy emotions and understanding that life isn’t always going to go our way. However, it is when we let these situations control our daily routine that we then need to take a step back and reevaluate the situation at hand and how we are reacting. Is what we are upset over seriously going to change the person that we are? Probably not, so let’s stop acting like it.

For me, this means forgiving easily. Sometimes it is a downfall, and sometimes I let people walk all over me because of it. But I have learned that staying mad at someone, usually for something they didn’t mean to hurt me because of, isn’t worth it. Your friends are your friends for a reason, and as cheesy as it is, we never know how long we get to have them in our lives, so why wait to hug them and apologize?

For me this also means doing things that make me happy. People are going to love you for you. Your friends became friends with the person that you are when you are happiest. Sure, they are going to be there for you when you’re low as well, but as I can’t seem to reiterate enough this post, allow that to be temporary. Friends encourage each other to be the best versions of themselves. Encourage each other to drink more water (lol, but true.) Encourage each other to laugh and have fun. Encourage each other to pursue passions. Be the kind of friend that is the best version of themselves in order for your friends to be inspired to do so as well.

I have spent so much of my life dreaming about what I will be like when I am older. Seriously, I have had my future home planned out the second I discovered Pottery Barn catalogs. It’s the reason I have a Pinterest board dedicated to ideas for my future kindergarten classroom and organization tips for my junior year at KU when I share a house with my friends. I like to plan things out and dream of the future, when I am eventually the “best version of myself.” However, one thing I realized while evaluating February, was that I need to stop putting off being the best version of myself. I need to stop thinking that one day when I have these certain things and these certain clothes and this certain income and these certain accomplishments, that I will THEN be the best version of myself. Why can’t the best version of myself be the one that does things daily that make her happy? The best version of myself exercises in ways she enjoys every day, such as runs around the campus lake. The best version of herself pushes the dream of going somewhere with this blog and setting aside time to write. The best version of myself compliments my friends and writes them little notes because gifts and surprises are my love language. The best version of myself wears bright colors on cloudy days and always dresses for success. The best version of myself never goes without reminding people I love them, and understands sometimes she needs to work on matching her actions along with that statement. The best version of myself is learning to see the positive in every day, and learning that staying negative improves nobody.

So let’s stop waiting around to finally reach that end goal of the best version of ourself. I promise you, if we keep waiting, we will always find something new we want to wait for. Understand that life gets better when you let it, and that no situation can’t be fixed by your own attitude. You have full power over how you feel, and with a little feel good music, a few personal dance parties, a few good laughs with good friends, and a good mindset, you’ll slowly find yourself having more and more good days.

Let’s show March who is boss, friends.

Until next time, xoxo, Ally

UGH has this post taken me forever to write or WHAT? (answer: yes. literally ages. or a few weeks. but I exaggerate a lot.) Basically I am still not ready to really write it all out, but I am forcing myself to because I really want to get on with some fun posts I have planned out but don’t feel like I can hop straight to “getting good sleep in college” or “books you NEED to read” (both real posts coming hehe stick around) after a couple weeks of zero posts and no explanation. So here we are, I’m back and trying my hardest to phrase all of this so you ca maybe somewhat understand where I am coming from or maybe even relate.

Coming back from Christmas break was great, I had a whole new semester ahead of me with some classes I thought I would absolutely love, I was ready to be back with my friends I rarely or not at all got to see over break, and I am one of those nerds who actually likes the learning aspect of school (nerdy is not a bad thing learning is so cool and fun) so I was ready to come back. And the first few weeks? Great! I loved being back just like I thought I would, okay the classes starting getting less exciting the more and more work I was assigned, but I knew I had signed up for that, I joined a food blog organization on campus (!!! more to come on that) and yet was feeling just, well for lack of a better and fancier term: not myself.

Although I am an introvert at heart, I thrive in social situations where I get to lead (aka group projects scare me but just let me do the whole thing and I’m fine with it) and take charge. I usually love alone time and am pretty (not always) good at time management and getting the things I need to done and then having time for an extra long shower or a few episodes of my current Netflix series (Glee, ALWAYS!). However, the past few weeks, I have simply been in a rut. A little funk if you will. I went home for a weekend and being with my family was the best way to cure it for a small period of time, and my mom made it down for a little mid-week adventure yesterday to spend some time with me (see above picture of my desk after she left. Trips to target and my parent’s spoiling me with even Valentine’s Day plates and napkins. Even a cute cookie from the sweetest neighbor girlies!) Things like that have made me realize how truly thankful and blessed I am to have the family that I do.

Honestly, nothing majorly bad happened in my life to make me feel off like I have. Sure I face everyday challenges like everyone else does. I don’t do as well on an assignment as I should have because I spent more time on pointless things, (may or may not have forgotten to do a few questions on my online math homework because of a OT KU game…but hey, it’s the game I’ll remember, not the .0001% off on my math grade.) (Not saying school doesn’t matter! school so matters! learning = so good!) I am not always the best friend in the world, I can be selfish, I have days where I am too absorbed in myself that I forget to talk to God, I have days where all I do is complain to God and ask for help and totally forget to THANK HIM for the simple things that I take for granted like being healthy and being able to live the wonderfully blessed life that I do!

Yeah, I still kinda feel funky, but yeah, I am realizing that there is no way anyone can go through life without a few funky periods. Because quite frankly, a life full of happiness would be pretty boring because all those happy moments would just blend together. The rough days make the good days ten times better. I’ve felt crazy guilty for not posting (trust me I had so many Valentine’s Day plans and ideas ready to go) but it just felt weird writing on love and life and happiness when that is something I am still figuring out myself as well and I would never ever wanna steer you in the wrong direction in terms of any of that good stuff. But here I am, telling you that mistakes happen, bad days happen, pity parties are allowed. But in the end, YOU are what changes that. YOU are gonna be with yourself your entire life, so fall the heck in love with yourself. Find what makes you happy. I am still on a search for the things in life that will forever make me happy (lattes and flowers are great, but temporary!) and ya know what? I am okay being picky with that. I have got a lot of people in my life that I love big time, and my big heart loves to love others and don’t get me wrong, I know that is a great quality and I will never ever stop loving others. But learning to take some of that energy to love myself is really crazy important. I emphasis finding your people a lot around here, but it is because in order to sustain health within yourself, you’ve gotta surround yourself with other people too. Sometimes not always literally, days to yourself are good too, but find those people who will be your “constants” even with all the “new” in your life. They’re real good. Even if they’re a facetime away or just a few floors up. Those people will get ya through the rough days, and you’ll get them through theirs. And then together you’ll celebrate the good days even more!

So there’s my little life update! My pal and I are headed out to a late Valentine’s Day night in KC tonight which I am super stoked about and will for sure have plenty of snaps to share so make sure @xoxoallisonnicole is followed on your Insta feed!

Until next time, stay happy, find your people, love big time,

xoxo, Ally