As you guys may or may not know I shaved off all my relaxed hair two years ago and let my natural hair grow in. Let me tell you it was quite an adventure.
While I enjoy my hair in its natural state I wash my hair quite often and it’s getting expensive continuously buying Shampoo, Conditioner, Deep Conditioner, and Leave-in Conditioner. Hair oil can last me a few months so there’s no problem on that front.
I keep seeing reviews of Dry Shampoo and some of them have not gotten very good reviews from other women of color. The one that did have good reviews was the DevaCurl No-Poo Original Zero Lather Conditioning Cream it’s not exactly a Dry Shampoo but it seems the Quick Cleanser is no longer available. This poses a problem for me because of 1. DevaCurl not shipping to France and 2. Buying it on the French Amazon is expensive as hell DevaCurl No-Poo-Cleanser. On the DevaCurl website, the cleanser is just $10, and Amazon.fr it is 38,00€ which is a $32.97 increase. I understand importing can be expensive but $32.97?!
With DevaCurl out of the running I turned to Dry Shampoos that would be readily available in the stores around me, they include the likes of Batiste, Garnier Ultra Doux, and U by Super U.
Yes, I live in a very small town and our offerings are very limited!
I was not going to pick up any Batiste because of all the reviews I’ve seen where it does nothing but makes natural hair greasy and leaves a white residue. That left me with Garnier Ultra Doux and U by Super U, I’m well acquainted with the brands having used Shampoo, Conditioner, Leave-in Conditioner, and Deep conditioner from both the Ultra Doux line and U by Super U, I’ve also used hair oil, Micellaire water, and facial moisturizers by U.
With this in mind, I think I will buy both the Garnier Ultra Doux Dry Shampoo and the U by Super U to test out which one I like better.
What about you? Do you have a brand of Dry Shampoo that you like?
I don’t know if I ever mentioned before that I took a DNA test with 23andMe on here but I took one back in June 2018. The main reason I took it was to discover who my father’s family was, my father was adopted when he was young, and while we knew the names of his parents I didn’t know anything else. My paternal grandfather passed away when I was 13 years old and in all that time I had never even met him, my two older sisters stayed over at his house but never me. I’m always told that I look like his side of the family so it was a pretty hard blow to never know him or about his family and wish that I had been given that chance. I have no pictures and very few stories to even remember him by so I took to genealogy to try to learn something.
My grandfather was born in Gustavia, Saint-Barthélemy, Antilles françaises in 1920. He was the son of Vitalis LaPlace and Marie Josephine Turbé. My grandfather left his home to stay with an aunt in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands where a lot of French people migrated to in the late 1800s. While my father was born in St. Thomas he grew up in St. Croix where I was born and I didn’t visit St. Thomas until I was well into my 20s thanks to one of my older sisters.
One of my younger brothers did an Ancestry DNA test in I want to say 2017 but Ancestry doesn’t ship to France so I went with 23andMe. Looking at my brother’s results I had an idea of what my Ancestry Composition could look like and I was excited waiting for my results.
I got my results back on June 18, 2018:
The African portion was pretty underwhelming and my French & German was pretty small for someone whose grandfather was a French man. What I have since learned is that some of the British & Irish, Iberian, Italian, and Broadly categories were hiding a good portion of my French DNA and it was nearly impossible for 23andMe to separate it from the other areas of Europe because of migrations over the ages.
Sometime around October 23andMe updated their African categories and I had a brand new Ancestry Composition to look at:
My West African was broken down into Nigerian, Coastal West African, Senegambian &Guinean, Congolese, and Sudanese. My African Hunter-Gatherer category disappeared. My British & Irish went up, Italian went up, Iberian went down, and Scandinavian appeared. Western Asian & North African categories appeared. Everything else remained more or less the same.
In December 23andMe once again updated their categories:
The Coastal West African category was broken down into Ghanaian, Liberian, & Sierra Leonean. Iberian was changed to Spanish & Portuguese. Everything else remained the same.
Yesterday 23andMe invited their V5 customers to try out a Beta Update to their composition:
My Ancestry Composition went through a lot of changes!
Central Asian & South Asian was added
My African categories were all decreased with the exception of Congolese and Sudanese. I gained a new category as well, Southern East African. My European increased Spanish & Portuguese now being my highest category at 6.6% British & Irish decreased from 8.9% to 6.0% my French & Geerman went from 3.3% to 5.6% I completely lost the Italian I had which doesn’t worry me much since I never had any Italian paper trail. My Native American remains unchanged through all of these updates.
It has been so fascinating watching all of these changes and I can’t wait to see what other changes happen later on.
On the paper genealogy front, I had a really big breakthrough yesterday as well. I have a brick wall 3x great-grandmother Anne Louise Chapelain who I couldn’t find any information on her parents or siblings but yesterday I decided to go back over my work to see if I missed anything and while going through my 2x great-grandfather’s second marriage I found an uncle named Joseph Chaplain in the witness section. This Joseph Chaplain would have been 35 in 1888 so born around 1853 give or take, I think he might be a half brother because Anne Louise was born around 1835, that’s a good 18 years older and depending on her mother’s age might have been way after her childbearing age. I haven’t found anything on him so far but I have hope.
Usually, I spend February celebrating my birthday and when I was back home in St. Croix going to the Agricultural & Food Fair, I have not found anything over here that can be an annual birthday event. I spend my birthday either taking my son to school or staying home with him and doing nothing. I wish there were things for us to do but if it requires us interacting with others I don’t find that a suitable birthday enjoyment. If I’m lucky I go to a movie with my husband but we haven’t done that in a while.
This year was my 32nd birthday and honestly, I was numb during the whole thing. I didn’t get a video call from my family, I didn’t get to go out, and my son fractured his elbow two nights before and we spent all night and the next day going from hospital to the next to get his elbow attended to. I was wiped out and would have been fine to stay home and do nothing but we went to the movies and I did enjoy it even though it was in French and I understood less than half of what was going on.
I want more out of my 32nd year but I am stuck in figuring out just what I want.
I picked back up my crocheting and successfully completed some small projects while continuing to work on a scarf I decided to make.
My scarf in progress:
Snickers keeping me company while I work on my rows.
I am almost finished with a little teddy bear I am making, it just needs to be stuffed and have the final touches done:
Now for my completed works, I recently picked up a French Knitter, a French Knitter is also known as Spool Knitting, Corking, or Tomboy Knitting. It’s a form of knitting that uses a spool with a number of nails around the rim to produce a narrow tube of fabric, similar to i-cord. The spools usually have four or five nails mine had four bendy things lol, here’s a picture so you can see what I am referring to:
If you look closely in the background you can see the frustratingly difficult instructions I was supposed to follow to create a mouse. I was close to pulling my hair out when I looked on Youtube for a video to help me understand those impossible-to-decipher depictions. I was successful in following along with the video and made my first mouse. It was supposed to be for Snickers but…
It was way too cute! I also didn’t want her swallowing the eyes if she got too rough with the little thing. I decided to crochet her a mouse that she can be rough with and set out to find a good pattern.
I made her this:
It honestly looks more like a Rat than a mouse but meh she likes those kinds of critters. I made some embellishments on the pattern so my Rat is special lol. Hopefully, Snickers likes her Rat friend and I can move onto finishing my scarf and another project I started (Mesh Hat).
Before I forget, Naveen only had to wear his cast for three weeks, initially, they said four weeks but his elbow healed really fast and well, and last week Friday he got it removed.
This year in September will make four years since I moved to France and I still don’t have any friends, not really anyway. There’s nobody I feel relaxed enough to send a text message to or call and just sit around talk and laugh almost everyone I know over here is through my husband and your husband’s friends are not always your friends.
There is one woman who I occasionally share a “Bonjour” with that has no ties to my husband but that’s basically the extent of my French in public, “Bonjour”… I managed a “ça va” today because she and her son were not at school since last week Thursday and I did miss them. I wish so much that I can articulate what I want to say but at that moment I don’t even know what to say. I am honestly content just to walk beside them on our way to school and from school because it’s the loneliest feeling walking your child to school knowing you have nobody.
I’m trying to change that by taking one step at a time because a giant leap is likely to do some real damage to the progress I’ve made and let’s face it I’m a cautious person and I need to be comfortable talking to someone or it will never happen.
Moving on to another subject, years back I had another blog that I only used once because I didn’t understand how to use it, I finally merged it to this one so you can see my old blog post here My Hiking Experience. I kind of wish that I had more hikes to post about but we rarely go anywhere anymore. I suppose I could go out to the park when it’s warmer and beg to visit the castle since we haven’t been there since last year. I swear I’m going to be a chatty Cathy until I go to the lake and other nature sites.
If I do get my way and I probably will I’ll be sure to post pictures so you can enjoy the scenery with us.
As you will no doubt notice I have changed the name of my blog to better reflect the stage in my life I’m in right now. There’s no longer a baby in there and there hasn’t been for a while so it was time to change it.
Once Upon a Dovy was the hashtag I would have used if we had had a huge wedding with ceremony and invitations but life has a way of changing in a quickness so I’m using it here now since this is who I am now.
I know many people make new years resolutions and whatnots, I have never seen a point in doing this, this year I think I will. I want to go into 2019 not feeling depressed every day, I want to be able to sit down and work on my crafts whether it’s writing, photography, or crochet. I want to be able to enjoy the things I used to love and maybe pick up some new ones.
I aim to crochet a temperature blanket, an afghan is way too ambitious for a beginner like myself so I want to start off small. For those of you who don’t know what a temperature blanket is, it’s a blanket where you crochet a row or two in the color that represents the temperature of that specific day, the aim is to have a row or two for every day of the year and you’ll have a unique and interesting blanket with many colors. If I was living back home in the Virgin Islands I’d no doubt have a blanket with maybe just two colors for the whole year but since I’m living in France with its changing seasons I’ll have so many colors, I think I want to add in a little break so I know when the months change, a line of white or something and possibly a heart applique for February since it will be Valentines and my birthday.
Other than the temperature blanket I want to write more, this year has been terrible for my writing and I’m kind of ashamed of this, I also want to pick up my camera more, there is nothing around me that captures my interest but maybe I can start doing animal photography more since it’s more linked to nature than an old building is.
Well, I have a pie to bake, Christmas parties and the such which I am not looking forward to…
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, I wish you all have a joyous time and if you suffer from Depression like me I hope you find something that’s worth holding on to.
You know that feeling when you open your mailbox and there’s something in there with your name on it? I don’t really experience that feeling, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve ever received anything, I don’t really order anything online, I’ve gotten some books in the mail, some clothes as well but that’s about it. Every time I go out to the box I am not really expecting anything but still feel a little disappointed that everything is for my husband, he gets packages all the time, sometimes I have to sign for them and that is a tale for another day.
So imagine my joy when I opened my mailbox yesterday and inside was a package with my name on it, I was overjoyed, I ripped it open with quickness and inside was a box that said Marc Jacobs Beauty. Let me back up just a bit and tell you about this package. I’ve been a member of a website called Influenster (it’s a website that sends you products to test for your honest review) I think it’s been about three to four years, so right around the time when I was pregnant, if you’re new to my blog I suffered from Hyperemesis Gravidarum (severe nausea and vomiting during pregnancy) which basically made me an invalid for nine months, I then went through postpartum depression and post-traumatic stress disorder which lasted for about a year. In 2015, I moved from my Caribbean home and went through a series of terrible events. The loss of my puppy, finding out my mother was in the hospital, I was taking punches left and right but the worst one was losing my second baby. What should have been the happiest time of my life was stained with dark spots that I couldn’t find a way out from.
I’ve always been weak to dark moods and Expat depression added itself to my growing pile, while I always seemed to find myself out of my foul moods this one seemed enormous. What helped was finally being able to talk to my mother online, she hates the internet but there was no other way for us to communicate. My days seemed a little sunnier, one of my brothers who had a distaste for social media also joined and I found myself happy.
I got off-topic, my apologies, I can ramble on and on sometimes, anyway I was very sick and couldn’t do much with my Influenster account so it laid dormant for years. This year I decided to get more active on it, I reviewed products I had already used, I answered questions, I followed accounts, I was enjoying myself, out of nowhere I got a survey asking if I wanted to be sent a product to review, I answered yes and about two weeks later I got a message saying I was chosen!
I was thrilled, along with no interest in my Influenster account I hadn’t been using my makeup kit much, so I relished the chance to go back to something that gave me a little joy in life, I’m nowhere near to being MUA status, not even close I just enjoy enhancing my features. I have to be honest when I say my happiness was wearing off a bit when I saw everyone else reviewing their VoxBoxes and I was still without my product, see the way my mind works it immediately jumped to the worst scenarios, I swore my box got lost or someone stole it, I questioned whether I put the right address in, my mind was whirling and then yesterday there it was.
Disbelief and exhilaration, I wanted to do everything right to make sure I did the review right and they would choose me again.
Marc Jacobs Velvet Noir Mascara Volume Spectaculaire VoxBox
Testing out my new mascara.
A little eyeliner and mascara make me feel pretty!
I’ve been testing the mascara now for three days and have to say that I’m pretty much in love with it, the mascara goes on smoothly and gives an instant boost to my lashes, and let’s not joke about it but my lashes are not the best, they are short, thin, and not at all impressive which is why I was shocked to see how long and luscious it got from the mascara. There is just one thing I don’t care for about the mascara, it is on the heavier side, if I use three swipes of mascara my lashes will clump horribly so what I did to fix this issue was to go over it with another mascara brush, I was able to separate the lashes to fully enjoy the length and dark color the mascara provided.
In the picture above I applied the mascara to just my right eye and you can see for yourself the difference the mascara has made to my pitiful lashes. I don’t think I will ever leave the house again without using my Velvet Noir mascara even if I use nothing else.
Hello, long time no see… Entirely my own fault, I ended up in a very deep depression and I was not being truthful to myself about how deep I was, every day I would say it’s no big deal I’m not too bad, and then next I’m crying in a corner by myself. I had to take a step back and work on myself, I’m happy to say that while I’m not 100 percent better, I’m in a place where I don’t feel like everything is dark. It’s been about two years since my last post and almost three years since my move to France, I’ve been working on my French, I can understand a bit now, I can reply in my head sometimes but the words don’t seem to come out unless it’s “Bonjour/ Bonsoir/ Bonne Nuit” “Oui”, or “Je sais pas”. Pitiful I know, I’ve been doing workbooks, watching tv shows, talking to my son although he tells me I’m not supposed to speak French to him, I have also been doing some genealogy. My paternal family is French from the French Antilles so I have been using my tiny bit of French to read the birth, marriage, and death certificates, it has been so rewarding because I learned a lot of new words and I can now identify them without having to look them up or translate them, also we watched some movies in French, my absolute favorite was Coco, I was actually able to follow along with most of the storyline and understand most of the movie, a weird thing happened whenever I hear the songs in English I automatically hear them in French in my head, I find this very fascinating. I suppose it’s because I’ve never heard the songs in anything but French so I stored it away under French vs watching movies I saw in English in French. Anywho, what other updates, my little bean will soon be five years old, I shaved my head last year, I have a very nice curly Afro now, shrinkage means that it’s long but you’ll never be able to guess that unless I twist, braid, or flat iron my hair. I’ve also been working on a story, the title is a bit TBA at the moment but I can share my synopsis with you. Here is what I’ve been working on since late last year.
An Irish jeweler living in a small town buys a new journal, upon opening said journal he discovers that it’s already filled with mysterious writings. He tries to return the book to the store, but they have no records of it ever being sold by them, the jeweler decides to read the journal in the hope that there would be clues to the identity of the owner, he discovers that a young woman might be in trouble and he might possibly be her only hope.During the course of his investigation, the Jeweler uncovers an old family secret and begins questioning everything that he has ever held about the world around him. He must now find the owner of the journal and help rescue a young woman before it is too late.
Once it’s completely finished I’ll be sure to link it here for your reading pleasure, that is if you are interested in reading it…
I have so much to talk about, a lot has happened since the last time I updated the blog, Naveen turned one and then two, I started a blog post for his first birthday and got completely side tracked, I honestly don’t know what happened.
Anyway here is the piece of blog from his first birthday.
The day is finally here, I was up at 3:00 am writing this, the same time my water ruptured, it’s so strange the difference in the days. One was to bring a life into the world the other is insomnia while celebrating the life that was brought into the world. My mind has been zooming for five days it seems, always worrying, thinking, wondering, hoping, not about the birthday gifts since I got those weeks ago, more about the cupcakes and if they will be good and how I’ll make it through this day.
My baby is 1 year old, my itty bitty baby that I was still in shock about the fact that I was having one. Mama is just sitting here in the dark watching all the pictures of her little boska wondering where the time went, remembering how tiny you were, how precious your face was, it’s still precious but now I know that you are a little imp who only looks for Mama when something goes wrong.
There’s a baby in there! – 2014
Seems like….I was going to say “a year ago that I wrote that” and it was a year ago, epic fail huh!
Anyway, this update is to say that we are finally in France with Papa and have been here almost three months, can you believe that? Last time I wrote in here I was stressing and wondering if we would ever make it to France and now we’ve been here for almost three months. The journey here was not easy, it was not easy at all. It included plans gone awry, worry about being able to pay for tickets, people backing out of taking the journey with us, a trip to Canada and Florida in the US, it was wild and I’ll probably go into it at a later date.
For now I just want to say we are here and enjoying it so far!
Now I will go into detail a little bit of how our trip went. We flew out of St. Croix to Miami, my mother, youngest brother, myself and Naveen. Naveen was completely wiped out when we landed, this was only his second trip so it’s understandable.
We met up with my cousins Ellis and Joshua and also my middle brother Lucas and his girlfriend. We took the day to do some adventuring and let Naveen experience a bit of Florida. We wanted to go to the Flesh-Eating museum but it was closed, unfortunately, one day maybe.
My uncle and aunt met up with us as well and we walked around a bit and for our last day we had dinner at an Asian restaurant with all my aunts, uncles, and cousins. It was a nice family get together.
We were off to Philadelphia for our layover to Montreal, the airport has a little play area that occupied Naveen for a while so that he wouldn’t be bored while waiting for our plane.
It was finally time for us to fly over to Quebec and meet up with Marvin, I honestly can’t describe my feelings that day, I mean it had been a year and some months since we had seen each other, I missed him of course but I was dealing with a whole lot of emotions from my pregnancy and having to be single parent for a while. Looking back on it I can see where I was not in touch with my emotions and treated him in a way he didn’t deserve. I knew if he could have he would have been back to the Island.
Seeing my son and husband together again was the best feeling.
Crucianize 