It's been a while since I've had any products to share with you. It's about time, right? This one is thanks to the generosity of Holly Rutt of Little Flower Soap Company. She offers "all natural soap, lip balm, massage balm and bath salts made in Michigan from scratch with the highest quality ingredients. Naturally colored, Naturally scented soothing aromatherapy bath and body care." These are great products, and you can even buy them through Anthro!

Holly sent me one of the spa gifts sets to try, which included grapefruit bath salt, almond lip balm, lavender lemongrass soap, and skin and muscle rescue balms. 

It's hard for me to pick my favorites, but I think I'd have to choose the lip balm and soap. The almond lip balm (containing beeswax, coconut oil, shea butter, almond oil, jojoba oil, zinc oxide, aloe vera, and vitamin E oil) doesn't tingle like Burt's Bee's (although she does have a peppermint one, if that's what floats your lip balm boat), but it does feel good on your lips and has a wonderful amaretto-like fragrance that I cannot get enough of. 

I'm also a sucker for lemongrass anything, so I was a huge fan of the soap. According to Holly, "Little Flower Soaps are cold processed in small batches using traditional techniques handed down for 3 generations. We use only the best essential oils, botanicals, and minerals including organic rosemary leaf, organic lavender flowers, organic cocoa butter, Shea butter and many more." Alan and I liked this one so much that we shared the bar and have already used it up!

I'm not a huge bath salt person (I would probably never buy any of my own volition) but if you like bath salts, you will like this one. It contains Himalayan pink salts, epsom salt, baking soda, and pink grapefruit essential oil. The grapefruit smell is truly wonderful, it softens your bath water, and is full of trace minerals which your body can absorb through your skin.

I know I should like solid lotions more since they're usually the ones with the best and most natural ingredients, but I really prefer creamy lotions. That said, I do like the skin rescue balm for elbows and cuticles, and while I didn't get to give the muscle rescue balm a fair trial (no sore muscles! I guess I should count myself lucky!), it smells really good and cinnamony. These contain ingredients like beeswax, coconut oil, jojoba, shea butter, almond oil, cassia oil, menthol, arnica oil, st johns wort oil, cocoa butter, lanolin, peppermint oil, and lavender oil.

Holly is also offering a complete spa gift set for giveaway (a $25 value), so you can try out some Little Flower Soap Co. products for yourself! Like this post to unlock the rest of the entries, and remember that you can do as many or as few as you would like!

I'm back! Sorry about the hiatus. I was busy on vacation version 2.0 (Miller-style) - pictures to come. Before we left to head to northern Michigan for the second time, this time with Alan's family, we made sure to squeeze in some apple picking. This is the fourth year I have joined in on what has been a long time Miller family tradition (see 2011 and 2012). In the past we have always gone on a Saturday, but busy schedules left us with only a Friday open this year, which meant the place was a bit of a ghost town (brat shop and cider barn were closed), but I didn't mind the quiet. We quietly came, were still able to have a cider shake and stock up on smoked cheese, doughnuts, and Jonathan and Macintosh apples, and headed home in time for Friday fire night.

Aunt Bethy shared her caramel apple - result: caramel mustache and goatee.

Indy helped by picking apples, carrying bags. . . and eating them.

Tenny helped by looking cute and drooling.

The orchard store keeps hives behind their building, and one of their honeybees visited our car for a while!

I love all of the seasons (I would never be able to live somewhere without the changing seasons), but I truly and especially love fall. Nothing quite compares to the intensity of color that it brings, it brings both warm sunny days where you can play in the leaves in jeans and a t-shirt, and cold rainy days where you fire up the kettle and go digging for that one sweater. Seasons always invoke such specific memories. Alan and I were married in the fall and I remember that time fondly, newly married, homing into our tiny bed-in-the-closet studio apartment, constant french presses, and the sound of clanging up the metal stairs in the back of the building.

When I was single my love of fall oscillated between bursts of joy at the beauty of the leaves and a sort of self-satisfying melancholy. It was always a productive time for me spiritually and creatively, especially for writing. If you're a creative type you'll probably get this. There's just something about parking in front of a window on a rainy fall day with something hot to sip on and a blank page and probably some recent relationship drama that can inspire a good poem like nothing else. To be honest, marriage sort of upset my spiritual and creative mojo. Like a lot of things in life, I developed certain habits, and in this case it was dependence upon a little melancholy for inspiration, though I suppose it's really just a positive testament to my marriage that I'm not very often melancholy anymore these days. But its left me feeling a little uninspired, and only recently have I realized that the solution is to pave new pathways of inspiration and find my new creative, rather than trying and failing and getting frustrated when old modes of operation just don't seem to click for me anymore. I'm not sure what all this means yet or what it will look like. A lot of thoughts from a simple apple picking post, right? It's good. Hopefully it's a step towards a new mode of thoughtfulness and creativity that's inspired by beauty and thankfulness.