Life Lately | Plot Twists, Healing, and Happy Planner Spreads

My Happy Planner layouts and Life Lately blog posts are finally back! Hehehe! Life and health happened, so I ended up missing three weeks of this series, but I’m happy to say that I’m back now, probably feeling my best since the year started! Hahaha. So yes, let’s just say the first two months of the year were practice.

One thing I learned (or maybe re-learned), and something a close friend has always told me, is that we really need to listen to our bodies. I’ve always thought my body had its own way of manifesting the stress I keep bottled up, but this time it turned out to be something different.

To cut the long story short, I thought it was just my asthma weighing me down. There’s been a lot of construction going on around our apartment building, and I even thought maybe the house, especially my craft room, just needed a good dusting. But it turned out to be more than that.

We scheduled a doctor’s appointment just to get a prescription and refill of my inhaler and other meds. During the usual triage checks, the nurses noticed that my pulse was quite high and flagged it to my doctor. He then asked me to get a blood test (ugh, I hate being pricked!).

When we came back for the results, it turned out that I was low on iron and had high uric acid.

Because of that, my doctor arranged for me to receive iron through IV every two weeks this month. Yes… more pricking!

One little moment from that day still makes me smile. Before we left for the hospital, Lucky suddenly plopped himself between my legs while I was sitting down. He rarely does that to me—he usually does that to my husband—so I was really surprised that night. Looking back now, I like to think he somehow knew I was about to have an IV hooked to me later that evening and decided to comfort me in advance. Cats really do have their own way of knowing when we need a little extra love.

The good news is that since starting the treatment, I’ve been feeling so much better. Imagine discovering all of that just because I needed to refill my inhaler and medications.

Anyway, here are my layouts from the past three weeks.

February 23 – March 1

For this spread, I used some stickers I got online, washi, and the Happy Planner Indigo sticker book. I chose the blue Indigo stickers because I was feeling a bit low that week, but I added flowers because I was hopeful about getting better (this was before the check-up!). Sadly, I wasn’t able to finish my journaling for this spread because after Wednesday I started feeling worse. At that time, I thought it was because of my new inhaler, which was stronger than my usual pink one.

March 2 – 8

This was mostly a sick week, but I still worked on the spread using Traci Reed’s new collection, Plot Twist, because it felt very fitting. I added some photos and will include short journaling for the week later on. This spread has some mixed media, and honestly, it was very therapeutic just splashing color around and gluing things together. I’ll also be making a separate post just for this spread.

March 9 – 15

This is my “I’m back” spread! For this layout, I used washi and two sticker books: the Happy Planner Neutral Watercolors sticker book and the Vintage Cottage Fields stickers from Simple Stories. I mixed neutrals with florals to reflect how I’m feeling now, calmer and finally getting better.

This post is already pretty long, so I won’t be adding the other projects I’ve been working on lately. For now, this is simply a little blog update to say that I’m back… and feeling better than ever.