New Year Nails

Nail and Cuticle oil

I hope you had a wonderful start to the new year. We are back from a trip home for New Year's Eve. We didn't stay too long. We had my parents visiting until the 28th and left for home on the 30th, so I feel like I've hardly had any down time over the holiday. The trip home was the sort that will become legend, and not exactly in a good way. We couldn't find anyone to feed our animals so we had to take them all with us, including our bird. The bird has a giant "flying" cage (meaning he can fly in it if he desires) and when we went to the pet store to get a travel cage they didn't have any. We ended up getting a hamster cage. He wasn't happy and had to be stuffed into it. He bit the mess out of my hand to show his displeasure. Then, balanced on our laps for the bumpy road trip, he got car sick and developed diarrhea. There's nothing like eating your lunch in the car over a hamster cage in which a bird has the runs. Fun times! Then, my sister came with her kids, my niece having just recovered from the croup or whatever she had. Naturally her brother came down with a 102 fever the day after they arrived. We still held our Wii Tournament and I actually won quite a bit of the dance off. I was really proud of myself because I danced all night and hardly ate or drank anything. The next morning, however, I woke up with a migraine so bad I could hardly see and vomiting, which prevented me from keeping any medicine down. I'm hoping it was just a migraine, anyway, because I still feel a bit iffy and today my brother-in-law tested positive for flu. So, the year hasn't started off very well for me. I'm trying to think positive, so I thought I'd share something that is working out well.

My nails were splitting and peeling.

I usually have really nice long fingernails, but recently they started breaking and peeling and splitting. Those of you who read this blog regularly have heard of my trouble keeping my Vitamin D levels up. I apparently inherited an inability to produce Vitamin D from sunlight, thanks to my Norwegian ancestry (the theory of some scientists is that people from the far north like my family, who hail from the Trondheim area, up near the Arctic Circle, don't have enough sun exposure to develop that ability). Anyway, if you don't have enough Vitamin D in your bloodstream your body holds on to fat because D is a fat-soluble vitamin. Then if you lose weight, which I did right before Christmas, you lower the vitamin in your bloodstream even further. You have to lose something like 30% of your body fat to release the vitamin D into your blood, but the lower the level is the harder to lose weight... it's a vicious cycle! Since I didn't lose anywhere near 30% of my body fat I guess my body is holding on to its vitamins and causing my nails to weaken. Either that or all the YouTube tricks I've tried for getting your nail wraps to stay on have damaged my nails. Whatever the reason, my nails were thin, ridged, and peeling, breaking off every time I used my hands, it seemed. I decided to see if I could make a nail oil using my Young Living oils.

I whipped 1/4 cup coconut oil with my electric mixer to make it smooth and fluffy. Then I mixed in 10 drops of Vitamin E oil from Walmart (I've read you can also use wheat germ oil but I already had the Vitamin E oil), 10 drops Young Living lime essential oil, and 5 drops each Young Living PanAway and Valor oil blends. I filled several small jars with the oil to give as gifts and saved one for myself. I've been applying it to my nails twice a day for about two weeks and voila! I can see a definite improvement. Hopefully my nails will be long and strong again soon. You can order Young Living products or sign up as a member here. Make sure to like my Naturally Amanda Facebook page for more recipes and ideas using Young Living products.

I haven't finished any dolls lately. I have several nearly done, and as soon as I finish all the laundry from our trip and pack up all the decorations I hope to get back into my studio. My mother in law is visiting this coming weekend though, so I don't know if I'll have time. I'm still washing sheets and towels from the last visitors! Hopefully soon everything will settle down and get back  to normal.

My nails after a couple weeks.