Who am I?
Hi I’m Renee, I’m married to Tom and together we have a lovely little boy named Oskar! Our two cats, Andy and Mila, complete our little family. Currently we live in The Netherlands, near the Belgium and German border. As you can see on the photo below it is quite a rural area.
In this post I would like to introduce myself but where does one start. I will start at the beginning, on January 1992 I was born, I grew up and live in The Netherlands. In my youth I did not know what I wanted to be when I was grown up. The result: I graduated in three different courses. Good thing though, because during my last study I’ve met my husband Tom. As a great Dutch football player once said, every disadvantage has its advantage.
My Education
After high school I graduated as a beautician and tried to open my own beauty salon. Unfortunately this wasn’t a success and I went back to school. I applied for a course of social work and could immediately start working. I went to school one day a week and the rest of the week I worked in a housing facility for mentally disabled people. At the end of this three year course I wasn’t happy working this profession so I started to orient myself for yet another profession. After a few orientation tests and conversations with my family I applied for the university course Applied Science. This is a course focused on chemistry and microbiology. During my high school I didn’t follow any physics, mathematics or chemistry classes so the last half year of my social studies I followed a mathematics course at my new school and a chemistry course at home to catch up before starting. These were eventually sufficient enough to complete this four year study. So now I am qualified as a beautician, social worker and a chemical engineer. After I graduated as a chemical engineer I applied for a job as a Safety Data Sheet specialist and I am still working with great pleasure at this firm. During my chemical study and in my working field I work with the legislation and regulation behind a lot of chemicals and their safety information.
Why Start a Blog?
So back to my blog about healthy, natural and independent living. In my youth I was never interested in living healthy. Yes in my puberty I wanted to lose weight (even when I wasn’t overweight at that time), but that was not for my health only to fit in a smaller clothing size.
So since a few years I’ve become more and more interested in a healthy lifestyle. I was getting more aware of the difference between easy and healthy food. The easy foods which appear or are marketed to be healthy, often aren’t actually that healthy at all it appears. So gradually the diet soda’s, 0% fat yoghurts and margarine disappeared from my diet and made place for water, normal fatty yogurt and real butter. And then I got pregnant! This made me even more aware of the healthy choices I had to make. My whole day became about making sure I tried to be as healthy as I could for my baby. After all, everything I ate would also get to my baby, I had to make sure I gave my baby the best start I could.
During my pregnancy I had the luck that I didn’t crave any food. Sometimes a women craves, for instance, chocolate or pickles. My appetite even decreased, especially in the first trimester, this made the choice between healthy food or sweets and snacks a lot easier. After Oskar was born I nursed him, so healthy choices were again not only for myself but also for him and therefor a lot easier to make. But the more I looked into the different kinds of healthy food the more I realized I did not know a lot of it and still have so much to discover!
Being Independent
The older I get, the more aware I become of the life I’m living. I think this is a natural process that a lot of people go through when reaching adulthood and/or starting a family. But I notice I’m not really happy with the matter of ease that has slipped into our lives. Of course it is really easy to be able to buy food 24/7 and order almost everything online and receive it the next day at your home. But it isn’t actually all that nice in my opinion. Maybe I’m old fashioned but I sometimes long to the times before the smartphone and the internet.
You had to be more independent. You couldn’t just order your food, clothing or anything else to arrive within 24 hours at your doorstep, local little shops were still around, people cooked, more often, from scratch and connected in real life instead of lurking online at the lives of people around them.
This can, of course, be a really over-romanticized image I have from, let’s say, 30 or 40 years ago, but I think it will be worthwhile to be a little more old fashioned. I think it is very satisfying and useful to be able to craft or cook from scratch yourself. A lot more satisfying than ordering everything online. I don’t just want to solely consume but also produce my own products.
Currently I have no skills whatsoever in crafts, cooking from scratch or planting a garden. So I want to invite you to go on a journey with me. I want to learn how to live life from scratch, be more independent and of course be healthier! And preferably I want to learn these things together with you, because learning together is a lot more fun.
So what can you expect from me. I’m going to write every week about a subject. This could be about healthy food from scratch, crafts or gardening (or maybe even about something else entirely). Sometimes you will have to excuse my English, it is not my first language but I’ll try to write the best English I can. I want to encourage you to go on this journey with me together, so if you are interested in this, subscribe to my newsletter and get notified when I post another blog.
I think this will be enough for now. If you have any questions or tips and tricks please leave a comment or contact me via the contact form. Goodbye for now and I hopefully see you soon at my next blog post.
