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LOVE WELL

I Have Never Let My Kids Keep All the Halloween Candy and They Still Love Halloween

What this is

Though I have a lot of boundaries about the kinds of foods we choose to eat in our house, I have lots of fun memories of trick-or-treating as a kid and I wasn’t willing to give up those memories for my kids just because I hate how much crap there is in today’s candies (it’s not really about the sugar).

This post is a rundown of the tradition we run instead, a pumpkin tool I wish I’d known about sooner and what actually goes in our own bowl to hand out. There’s also a free customizable printable letter at the bottom if you want to start the tradition this year too!

The story

How it started in our house

The Switch Witch is a tradition we’ve been doing since my oldest was old enough to go trick-or-treating, probably when he was two or three. We eat pretty cleanly and we don’t eat a lot of candy and refined sugar, especially back when they were little. Now that they’re eight and ten we let it slide a little more when they’re out and about, but in those early years we didn’t eat refined sugar at all, and Halloween candy is full of so much JUNK that I wasn’t going to let them eat it, sugar aside. So the Switch Witch was how we could still go out, do the whole trick-or-treating thing, and come home without a month’s worth of candy in the house.

She sits on the counter for a few weeks and leaves on Halloween night

The Switch Witch I bought 10 years ago was a little stuffed doll that came with a book explaining the story behind the tradition of the Switch Witch. She’d show up at some point in October, we’d read the story, and then she’d sit on our counter for the rest of the month (a la Elf on the Shelf, minus the nightly moving and mischief). Then on Halloween she would take the candy and trade it for a present (usually a toy or something they really have been wanting.)

The presents

Let me back up on the candy for a second. As they got older and actually wanted some candy after all the hard work trick-or-treating, we’d let them keep a piece or two, or swap some of what they collected for the clean candy we keep in the house. Often our own trick-or-treat bowl hadn’t been emptied either, so they’d swap something they got for the cleaner candy we were handing out, and the rest went to the Switch Witch.

And as they got older and realized what was going on, the presents went from something like a $5 coloring book or a race car to real presents. They have opinions about what they want and they ask for things! Like the Elf on the Shelf, they’ll talk to the Switch Witch and ramble on about what gifts they want. I’m pretty sure my oldest doesn’t really believe anymore and knows it’s me, but he’d rather get the present, so we’re all just going to keep playing along. Both of my boys have spring birthdays, so this is a good way to get one present in between their birthdays and Christmas. April to December is a long way to wait when you’re eight, so they know the Switch Witch brings them one thing and they’re always thinking about what to ask her for.

Where the candy goes after she takes it

After Halloween I get the candy out of the house FAST. When we worked in a corporate office we’d just take it in and put it out for everyone. We’ve donated it to people who collect for the troops, and we’ve given it to dentists who collect Halloween candy (yes, that’s a real thing). I get it gone as quickly as I can, because if it’s still in the pantry they will find it.

The one we have is discontinued, so here’s what I’d do instead

As I mentioned, we’ve outgrown the actual story because they know it by heart, and the doll I have doesn’t always make it out more than a week ahead of Halloween at this point. That exact book and doll set I bought 10 years ago isn’t sold anymore, so I did a little search to see what’s out there.

These are the ones I found, and since I have not personally read any of them, I can’t tell you which is best but they all seem to have the same gist and tell the same type of story. Book 1 · Book 2 · Book 3 · Book 4

If you want the physical doll, this one is closest to what we actually have.

And if none of those appeal to you, I’m going to let you in on a secret: you don’t need the book (or doll) at all. You can just write your own letter explaining the whole thing, customize it to your own kid, and be done. This is what I’d probably do if I were starting over today. I wrote one you’re welcome to use as-is or change however you want, and it opens as a Google Doc so you can make your own copy and fill in your kid’s name, details, etc. Grab the letter here.

And if your family eats all the candy and everybody’s happy about it, that’s completely fine! I get it! Even if you eat clean and healthy the rest of the year and let your kids go wild on Halloween I completely can understand that and I’m not telling you to change a thing. This is for people who don’t want to give up the fun of Halloween but also don’t want their kids eating all of it. A few years ago I decided to just let my kids have at it with their candy instead of holding this boundary and after a fun-size Snickers and a mini pack of candy corn, my 5-year-old vomited all over. Neither he nor I want to experience that again so we stick with cleaner alternatives and pump up the idea of swapping it all to the Switch Witch. It’s been a great way for us to have our own tradition that they still look forward to every single year, and they’ve never once felt left out!

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The pumpkin carving kits are the wrong tool

Speaking of Halloween, the fastest tip I have is that the best tool for carving a pumpkin is a drywall saw. Mine was dug up from the bottom of an ancient tool box in the garage but if you need one it will run about $5. It’s small, and it’s sharp enough to get through the pumpkin with relative ease. A lot of the kits you buy on Amazon aren’t really strong enough, or if they are strong enough, they’re too sharp for kids.

Obviously with supervision, we let our kids do this when they were as young as four or five. But our kids have always been given the use of tools with supervision so you know your kid and can either do it all yourself, help them along, or supervise given their age and abilities. Slight warning - the drywall saw has teeth, so the pumpkin might need a little smoothing after if you care about perfectly smooth edges but I think it adds to the appeal to have a little texture.

When we went to school for a pumpkin carving event with the 1^st graders, we brought our drywall saw along, and it ended up being used to cut open the top of everyone’s pumpkin after all the other parents were cursing the “pumpkin carving knives” that came in their kits or even the kitchen knives that just couldn’t cut it (pun intended). The drywall saw saved the day.

What actually goes in our bowl

We hand out the same clean candy the kids trade for, partly so it makes it easier for me to have switchable candy on hand and partly because I know there must be other parents out there that appreciate a cleaner option for their kids now and then.

The brands I typically buy are UNREAL and YumEarth because both can be bought in bigger packages for Halloween. For chocolate, UNREAL is the closest thing to conventional candy I’ve found with alternatives for M&Ms, Snickers, Reese’s Cups, Almond Joys, etc. For sour and fruity it’s YumEarth all the way (alternatives for Sour Patch Kids, Gummy Bears, Starburst, Skittles, Jellybeans, etc). I usually check for sales (shop early like August/September for best pricing and availability!) at Whole Foods, Amazon, Thrive Market and Vitacost. This year Costco carries UNREAL so I’ve stocked up there. I will sometimes put out bags of popcorn or snacks too – kids LOVE it because it’s a snack for the road with some salt as a welcome break from the candy fuel. LesserEvil brand is clean and available at those same places named above (usually Thrive is best pricing).

All of these are better NOT perfect alternatives. They are still candy, but they have no dyes, no artificial flavors and slightly better ingredients than the traditional candies. There are other better-not-perfect brands out there too, so just read the labels. But most of the time candy is just that, candy, and we only have it occasionally so I’m not looking for perfection.

The teal pumpkin sits right next to it

One more aside before I wrap up. We also put out a teal pumpkin on the porch as part of the Teal Pumpkin Project, to signal that we have non-food items for kids with food allergies. We have been doing it for years and are always trying to spread the word because even though my kids can now have some candies, there were other years where our food allergies and sensitivities wouldn’t allow it and so I hope that the Teal Pumpkin lets other people know they are not alone. The joy on the faces of the kids that really need it can be priceless! The whole ask is three things: put out non-food treats, put the pumpkin somewhere people can see it, and tell other people about it.

Ours usually has glow sticks, stickers, and pencils with Halloween erasers on them. We don’t get a ton of trick-or-treaters, so it’s not a big expense, and honestly the glow sticks get taken by the kids who can eat anything they want fairly often! For me it was just an easy thing to do that might help other families out so maybe you’ll consider it too!

The short hit

Want your kids to do the whole Halloween thing without a month of candy sitting in your house?

The Switch Witch is the way to go. She shows up in October, sits on the counter, and on Halloween night she takes the candy and leaves a present. Here’s a letter to personalize to jump right in.

Want to have some clean candy for them to swap to or to pass out at your house? I recommend UNREAL and YumEarth for their bulk Halloween options.

Want to be the GOAT at pumpkin carving? Invest $5 in a drywall saw.

Hope you all have a great Halloween!

Before you go

We’ve been following this tradition since my oldest was a toddler and they still look forward to it every year.

What non-traditional traditions does your family have for Halloween? Drop it in the comments, because I’d love to see the ones I haven’t thought of!

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️

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LIVE WELL

We Left Traditional Health Insurance in January and Our Family of Four Has Saved At Least $12,000

What this is

I’ve already told the story about how I left my corporate job a few years ago. My husband left his corporate job last November (yay!) and so our corporate subsidized health insurance ended on December 31. After lots of research, we opted to not replace it with traditional insurance. What we joined instead is called CrowdHealth, which is a crowdfunding company. We pair it with a direct primary care practice we have belonged to for ten years, but that’s because we chose to join a DPC 10 years ago, not because we dropped insurance.

This post is what that change has actually cost us month by month since January, and everything I looked at and ruled out before we landed here. There’s an ER visit included. There’s also a list of people this is a genuinely bad idea for, so I know this won’t be for everyone.

I’m sharing it all below, including every number from our own bank statements. Not to convert you, but to remind people there are alternatives out there to a very broken healthcare system.

The story

First let me acknowledge something about this switch: It was scary! I’ve had health insurance since I was a kid. First on my mom’s plan through college, then on my own through a corporate job. I carried my own family on my plan and when I left my corporate job, my husband’s corporate insurance took over for the family. So this is the first time in my whole life that we have no traditional coverage. “The System” has always said this is BAD so before this year we just kept doing it because we were “supposed” to have this type of insurance.

But in the last couple of years, after doing my own research, I’ve intentionally gone against the system in a lot of areas of my life. I quit a corporate job. I started homeschooling my kids. I see an energy healer and a homeopath before heading to conventional doctors. Apparently this is just the next system where I’m finding my way against the mainstream because it feels like what’s right for my family. I think a lot of these systems that exist in our society are just straight up broken right now. Until there are new systems, I’ve just been navigating my way out of the old ones.

We were already paying out of pocket for almost everything

Let me back up. For ten years we’ve been part of a Direct Primary Care (DPC) practice and we paid for that ourselves, on top of the insurance premiums coming out of our paychecks. DPC are doctors where they don’t take insurance typically and you pay a monthly fee but you have unlimited access to the physicians and they take the time to get to know you because the 15 min appointments mandated by insurance don’t come into play. We joined a practice when my oldest was a baby because we wanted a family doctor that actually knew our family. They don’t take insurance but we stayed on our insurance plan in case there was an emergency and someone needed to go to the ER or for our yearly labs or if we needed to see a specialist. Additionally, I was seeing a naturopath and a chiropractor regularly, both of which insurance doesn’t typically cover.

We always felt like insurance was a huge expense we didn’t get much benefit from. The last full year of his plan, 2025, the total cost of our coverage was $17,516.16. I only know that because it printed on his W-2 in a random box lol. Our share of that was around $260 a paycheck, every two weeks, so his company did pay a large chunk of it, but we still paid close to $7,000 in premiums for our family of 4 for just medical.

And on top of that, the deductible before insurance actually kicked in any coverage was about $5,000 PER PERSON PER YEAR. We never reached it in all those years, so we were paying out of pocket for everything anyway, PLUS all those premiums on top.

We understood all along we were buying catastrophe insurance with those premiums and that deductible, but we just never realized there were other ways to do that.

What we looked at, and what happened to each one

When we knew we were going to lose our insurance, we started doing some research on options. COBRA would have been astronomical. It’s stopgap insurance and it isn’t really a long term solution.

So, my husband pulled the actual ACA NC Marketplace numbers on December 3. I dug up the email for this article to get the info right. For a family of 4, with no subsidy: Bronze was $1,681 a month with a $14,000 deductible, Silver was $2,163 with $11,000, and Gold was $2,312 with $3,600. With traditional insurance, since we have our own business now, we would have been able to pay for these pre-tax which does have some tax savings. My husband did the math and said after tax benefits, to compare apples to apples to anything else, we’d likely be paying $1,300 to $1,400 a month and still have at least an $11,000 deductible. If we weren’t starting our own business though, I’m not sure the tax benefits are there.

Those are OUR quotes, at our income, with no subsidy applied (we didn’t qualify). If your household income is lower, or you live in a different state, you could be quoted far less, so please go run your own before you compare yourself to us.

Since we truly got NOTHING out of the insurance we had for so many years I started to research other options. I’d heard people talking about “shares” so I started to dig into those. Some of the Christian Ministry shares require you to be of a certain religion and some don’t, and some have morality clauses (a lot of them won’t allow birth control or abortions). I know that’s a hot topic on both sides of the political aisle so if you’re considering those I’m just being transparent.

There are non-religion based shares out there too and after my initial research I was going to go with one of those because on paper it seemed like the best fit. I was ready to pull the trigger then my intuition told me to do a little more research on actual reviews from real people, not just what the brochures say. By doing that I found out some were taking upwards of six months (or more!) to refund people for what they’d already paid out of pocket, even when it was approved, and it was a long process with a lot of chasing and following up and following up again and submitting more paperwork. People described my nightmare and why insurance gets a bad rap too. The system is built to DENY and then fight to get coverage and then YOU have to drag the process forward yourself. No thank you.

The one I almost picked (before looking at real people reviews) offered more alternative health allowances though - actual money up front toward a naturopath or a chiropractor - and I wanted that. I still want it. But if you have to fight to get that money back, and you might not get it for six months or more, and they still get a say in whether you get it at all, was it really worth the extra small amount you might save?? For me the answer was no, and I gave up the thing I actually wanted (coverage of alternative care!) to get the thing I needed more (less hassle). I was already used to paying out of pocket for all my alternative care anyway.

Why we landed on crowdfunding instead of a share

The difference between a health share and crowdfunding tripped me up for a while, so I’ll save you the confusion.

A health share is a pool. Everybody pays a fixed monthly contribution into it and the organization pays eligible bills out of it once you’ve covered your share first. The one I almost picked was $658.50 a month, every single month, whether anybody in the pool needed anything that month or not.

CrowdHealth, a crowdfunding type company, has no pool. Each month we get shown specific bills and asked to fund them directly, so our number moves with what the crowd actually needs. You can see it in our own statements. Our funding request (what we had to pay towards other people’s bills) was $151.25 in January and $242.59 in August. A health share would have charged us $658.50 both times.

So that’s what we joined, in January, and a few weeks later I got to really find out how it works.

The ER visit that found nothing

In February I was near Charleston on vacation and something weird was happening with a nerve in my arm. I tried all my normal non-medical things and nothing was working, so after a quick google my husband told me it was time to go to the ER. How did it work with CrowdHealth? I opened it as a health event in the app that same day. Typically if it’s not an emergency you need to open the Health Event in the app BEFORE you receive care, so keep that in mind. But an emergency they always want you to get care first if you need it.

Anyway, back to my ER visit. Arriving at 5am, luckily the waiting room was empty and I was brought back right away. I was in the room maybe fifteen minutes. One doctor, an exam, nothing wrong with me at all. My family dropped me off and stopped for coffee on their way home and I called them to pick me up before they had even left the coffee shop.

I did not pay at the counter, which I assumed I’d have to do (this was my first non-insurance self pay experience lol.) I told them I was self-pay and they just noted it. Both the hospital and the doctor billed me a couple of weeks later, exactly the same as if they’d run it through insurance. Three bills total came in and they added up to $2,291.53. They had done nothing to help me! And yet the system charges an absurd amount.

I paid the hospital bill out of pocket on March 9 and CrowdHealth funded it on March 10. I paid the doctor on March 11 and they funded it on March 12. Both times the money was back in my account the next day!

My cost for the whole thing was $500, which is what you cover on any health event. It’s kind of like a deductible per event rather than per year.

Run that same visit through the old plan and we’d have paid all of it ourselves (probably more, because the rates billed to insurance are generally always higher than the self-pay rate I was given), because we were nowhere near that $5,000 deductible, and I’d still have been paying $260 a paycheck for the privilege.

They made me go ask for a discount first

There was one thing that surprised me when I requested the bills be funded. CrowdHealth came back and asked whether I’d requested a discount on the bill. I said no. They said okay, go ask for a self-pay discount first. So I replied to the bill emails, and they told me the rate I had WAS the already discounted self-pay rate. I said as much to CrowdHealth and they immediately approved it.

They want to know you’re trying to get the best price, because it isn’t their money, it’s other members’ money. But to keep the system working, they want everyone to be working to be as healthy as possible and to get the best pricing possible.

Planned and diagnostic care works a different way

There is a second path I want you to know about before you need it, because my ER visit is not how most care goes. If something is planned or diagnostic rather than an emergency, you tell CrowdHealth first and they help you find the best price, including negotiating with the provider on your behalf. My husband thought he needed a CT scan and reached out to CrowdHealth to figure out next steps. They gave him the least expensive option within a radius but it was close to an hour from our house. When he pushed back on that, they said he could pick somewhere closer to us and they would work to negotiate a rate on our behalf before he had the test (which I very much appreciated!). So they give you options of places they have already negotiated with, but if that doesn’t work for you for whatever reason, they are willing to do your negotiating to make sure you get the best deal possible. In the end he didn’t end up getting this particular test after working with our DPC doctor, but it was helpful for us to see how it would work in a non-emergency situation. One thing to keep in mind, if the test was less than $500, and it was a new “event”, we would have had to pay fully anyway. So the rule of thumb I go by is that an emergency means get care and submit your receipts afterwards, and everything else means call them before you go. It’s not that dissimilar to pre-approval for insurance, except they aren’t trying to deny you whatever tests you need, just negotiate the best pricing.

$300 per person bonus

CrowdHealth gives every member a $300 annual wellness credit. Not per household. Per person. For our family of four that’s $1,200 a year, and you can put it toward anything wellness related - annual physical, labs, a chiropractic wellness visit, or your direct primary care charges.

We pay $299 a month for direct primary care for all four of us, so our wellness credits covered four months of it. All four of ours are claimed and funded for this year. Typical turnaround time was about 10 days from when I submitted the paid receipt to when the money was in my account.

As I mentioned above, the alternative care allowance money was the one thing I gave up when I passed on the other share. This credit covers some portion of those alternative choices, and unlike that other share, I didn’t have to fight anybody for it through CrowdHealth.

What it has actually cost us, January through August

We pay a membership fee of $240 a month for the four of us. That is the base to be part of the crowd and doesn’t change month to month. On top of that, as members request funds, we get asked to chip in. The most they can ask is $420, which makes $660 our monthly ceiling. So the monthly ceiling is the same cost as the health share I was considering, but it can be (and often is) LESS than that.

Here are the real numbers, January through August.

• Membership fees: $1,940

• Crowdfunding requests: $1,530

• Emergency room bills: $2,290

• Total paid out: $5,760

• ER funding received back: $1,790

• Wellness credits received back: $1,200

• Total received back: $2,990

• Net: $2,770, or about $346 a month for a family of four

Direct primary care isn’t in that number, because we’d be paying for it out of pocket under any plan.

The cheapest ACA plan we were quoted, Bronze at $1,681 a month, would have cost us $13,448 over the same eight months, plus that whole ER bill because we’d never have hit a $14,000 deductible. That’s about $15,740, and it’s where the at least $12,000 savings in the headline comes from.

If you’re considering a plan like this, I think the most important number to know is the monthly ceiling to know your worst case. Over those eight months the absolute maximum they could have asked us for was $5,280, and we paid $3,463.56, which is about 66% of it. We have never once been asked for the full amount since we started.

It is a risk, and here is the gist of it

Crowdfunding as coverage is a risk, but based on my experience with insurance coverage there is a lot of risk there too because you never know what they will cover and what they won’t. In theory, when joining a crowdfunding membership, everyone is volunteering to pay everyone else’s bills. It’s a pool of people agreeing to pay each member’s bills, which is why they work so hard to make sure everyone’s being a good steward of other people’s money.

When CrowdHealth asks us to fund someone, we can say yes or no. If you say no, other members can see it, and if you decline more than once you get marked “red”, and then other people get to decide whether they feel like funding a red member. Most people set it to auto-fill “green” members, which is what we do, and I have never said no to one.

Again, this is not insurance. Nobody is legally obligated to pay my bill. If you have a complaint or don’t get paid, there is no state insurance regulator to step in for you. Nine months of clean funding is what I have, and I’m planning to stick with this system while we are all relatively healthy because it has absolutely been working for us. We are saving so much annually compared to the old system, we still have had coverage when we need it, and if something isn’t covered we look at it as though we are “self-insuring” with the money we have saved on premiums and deductibles.

The tax thing

If you’re self-employed this one may matter to you. ACA premiums (marketplace insurance) are 100% deductible as a self-employed health insurance deduction and CrowdHealth contributions are not, so some of what you save on the monthly number you hand back at tax time.

Who this might be a bad idea for

Before you jump in on this, a few words of caution (or rather things to check on).

You should check your state law first, before anything else. Some states still require ACA-compliant coverage and CrowdHealth cannot substitute. I found this out the hard way trying to set my dad up in New Jersey. Unfortunately it was a no go. CrowdHealth does list the affected states on their site.

65 is a hard cutoff age. Membership just ends, there’s no judgment call to be made. So if you’re close to that age, then this isn’t a good option, but Medicare kicks in then so you should have coverage from the government (at least as it stands right now…that’s another broken system that will probably collapse before I reach that age, lol.)

Tobacco use is a big one, because it is a lifetime disqualifier. Their wording is that if you have used tobacco products every day for a period of a year or more at any time in your life, you are not eligible to participate. Not currently, not in the last five years. Ever. So if you smoked daily in your twenties and quit thirty years ago, you cannot join at all (though I’m not sure exactly how they would determine this.)

Pre-existing conditions are excluded for your first two years, and capped after that. So if you’ve got things you’ve been dealing with for a long time, make sure you read the fine print as it might not be a good fit.

Neither cosmetic surgery nor fertility is included, and an ongoing prescription for a long-term medication isn’t something the crowd funds either. That one doesn’t keep you out, you just keep paying for it yourself. Read more closely for any other exclusions that might affect you before signing up.

If you’re at the doctor every week with multiple kids and your current plan genuinely covers unlimited visits, go check what coverage you have before you leave it. That was never my experience of insurance, but yours might be different and you should know what you’re leaving before you decide to switch.

Lastly, you do need to be able to pay a bill out of pocket and then wait for reimbursement. Our money came back the next day, or a week or two later for the wellness dollars, but I had to pay it myself first, and if a couple thousand dollars leaving your account for a week would break something, look at all your alternatives. When I had traditional insurance I would have had to pay that ER bill out of pocket anyway because it wouldn’t have met my deductible, so no difference to me, but everyone has different experiences.

How I’d evaluate any of these alternatives, not just this one

Before you decide on any plan (this one, or any other), I recommend you look at how many members there are. The members ARE the pool. If there aren’t many of them they can get flooded and be unable to pay, because paying is voluntary. More members means the cost spreads out and each individual ask is smaller. One of the health shares I was strongly considering ended up being much smaller than CrowdHealth and that swayed my decision as well.

You don’t actually need a DPC to use CrowdHealth

We have Direct Primary Care because we’ve had it for ten years and it’s a convenience thing for us. Unlimited visits, a portal, prescriptions called in, and they know me and my family instead of knowing who the next 15 minute appointment is.

If you already have a doctor you’re established with who takes self-pay patients, stay there. A sick visit or an injury would be a $500 health event, and your annual wellness exam gets up to $300 once a year for a physical or labs.

If I had known this existed back when my husband still had the corporate job, I probably would have switched sooner. I’ve thought the whole health insurance system has been broken for a long time and it just keeps getting worse, and sometimes dealing with the insurance paperwork is worse than dealing with the injury or the illness itself.

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The short hit

Want out of traditional health insurance without going completely uncovered?

CrowdHealth is what we use, and so far I highly recommend it.

My rec? If you’re currently healthy, join before you need anything, and save the difference in premiums from regular insurance in case you need to cover something out of pocket.

The picks

• CrowdHealth — joincrowdhealth.com, referral code L2WIWS. The fee is $60 per member per month. With the code your crowdfunding request is capped at $39 for the first three months, so $99 per member per month is the most you can be charged to start. For a family of four that is $396 a month, capped, for three months.

• Compare to your own ACA quote — healthcare.gov

Before you go

After going down my rabbit hole, CrowdHealth is the one we chose based on our family’s needs, age, and health.

What would it actually take for you to leave your health insurance plan? I’d love to hear where people are on this, especially if you’re self-employed and running these numbers right now. Post what your quote came back as if you’re willing, because I think a lot of us assume everyone else is paying less than we are.

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️

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EAT WELL

Heads up: the Costco product links below pay me nothing, I added them so you’re not hunting for anything. The only referral link in this post is my Instacart code. I only ever link things I actually use.

★ THE SHORTCUT

Want Costco without the warehouse and the two hours (or more??) it eats when you go? Shop it through Costco Same-Day, which is Costco’s own delivery, powered by Instacart (but it’s not actually Instacart). You get to it by going to Costco.com or opening the Costco app and choosing Shop Same-Day. BONUS: if you don’t have a membership, you can still get everything on this list, I’ll show you how down below.

The text that started this

Back in June I was at book club and Costco came up. Somebody had to go and she was dreading it, just sort of complaining about having to go. And I said, “Oh, I haven’t gone to Costco in years, I just do it online.”

She said, “Yeah, but isn’t it hard or like a million dollars?”

So I gave her the whole spiel. She said all right, I’m going to try it.

A couple days later, the text at the top of this post landed. Then this:

I had assumed this was common knowledge, but I was wrong apparently. I’ve been doing it for years so I figured it was one of those things everyone had already found. Apparently not. So, in an effort to spread the word to those that didn’t know, I bring you today’s post.

The one time I set foot in a Costco

I’ve been shopping at Costco for years, since I bought the membership online back in 2020 during COVID, and I only walked into a physical Costco for the first time earlier this year. People don’t believe me when I say that, but it’s true!

The one time I did visit, I wasn’t even going there intentionally. I was running another errand and there happened to be one right in the same parking lot of where I was going. There isn’t one super close to my house, so I figured I’d go check it out while I waited. I was also always a little curious whether there was something in the store I wasn’t getting access to by only shopping online. Even though I knew what it was going to be like inside, I was intrigued to see if all the Costco internet hype had any merit to it.

I grew up going to BJ’s, so I know the warehouse thing. Pallets stacked floor to ceiling, the giant carts, the crowds, the food samples (the way I eat doesn’t lend well to Costco samples lol). Before kids, I LOVED to browse - grocery store, Target, anywhere really, I’d go up and down every single aisle to see if anything piqued my interest. Post-kids I just don’t have time for that, so I’ve done pretty much all my shopping online for years, especially groceries.

So anyway, in this inaugural trip, I walked around for a while and I figured out two things. The first is that the cart is really heavy when it’s full (I know, shocking). The second is that I didn’t find a single product that was new to me that I actually wanted to buy. Everything I wanted was stuff I’d already been buying online.

And when I stood in the LOOONG checkout line the only thing I could think was “THIS is why I shop online.”

There was really no benefit to going in the store.

What an order actually looks like

I have a recurring task on my task management system every Friday to order groceries (mostly automated as part of my meal plan system), but right next to it, a recurring task to check whether we need anything from Costco. So I don’t actually order every week, but I check every week, and then I decide whether we’re low enough or whether we can wait. Usually it works out to an order every couple of weeks, and for stuff we go through fast I’ll just order more at once.

Fair warning: the first time you order DOES take longer than just a few minutes. I want to be honest about it because it’s exactly what made my friend stick to just what she needed instead of exploring. I went category by category, which is the same as walking up and down every aisle. I know not everyone shops like that. My Libra brain wanted to explore all the things and weigh all the options LOL. I searched keywords like organic and paleo to pull up snacks we’d actually buy. I filtered produce by “organic” because I knew that’s all I would buy from there. I searched some specific products I’d seen people posting about (so much Costco content out there!). So yes, it took a while, but still less than going to the actual store.

Having said that, the app does split into categories pretty well, so you can click through fast if you’re looking for something specific, or even if you’re not. Do I need drinks? Yes. More specifically, do I need water? Sports drinks? Soda? We don’t really drink soda, so I skip that whole section. I knew I wasn’t buying supplements there, so I skip those too. And it’s set up to be easy to just scroll and click while you’re watching TV or lying in bed.

Now, after using it for a while, it remembers everything I’ve ever bought. I sign in, click “Buy It Again”, and everything we’ve purchased before is right there to add back. Then I click “What’s New” (every single time I shop) because I’m always curious what they’re carrying now that I might want lol. It filters it for you so you don’t have to search every category. Anything new that piques my interest goes in the cart, and next time, it’s in “Buy It Again”.

With those two filters (Buy It Again and What’s New), our whole Costco order takes me under 15 minutes, usually sitting on the couch while the kids are playing.

So to recap if you’ve never done this:

• On your first order, go category by category once, focusing only on the categories you care about, the way you’d walk the aisles.

• If it helps to narrow things down, use keywords to pull up the things you’d actually buy (“organic”, “paleo”, “sugar-free”, etc).

• Every order after that, focus on “Buy It Again”, add what’s low, then check “What’s New” to see what you might be missing. Two buttons and you’re done.

My rec? Click “What’s New” every single time, even when you don’t need a thing. That’s the part of going to the store that was actually FUN, and Costco put it all in one category so you’re not hunting for it aisle by aisle.

Why I pay the markup and the tip anyway

I want to be straight with you about the money, because I don’t want you to be surprised. Same-Day prices are slightly higher than what you’d pay standing in the warehouse. Slightly. Costco says so right on their own page, that item pricing covers the service and delivery, which means the fees are built into the price rather than piled on at checkout. I haven’t done a line-by-line comparison (because I don’t go into the store) but from what I’ve seen, sometimes it’s just a few extra cents to maybe $1-2 here and there, depending on the item. Even with the markup, the pricing is still a HECK of a lot cheaper than the same items at the regular grocery store so I always feel like it’s still a good deal. AND if you went straight through Instacart instead, they mark up the prices even MORE and plus you pay the Instacart fee on top, so going in through Costco.com is the cheapest of the delivery options by a decent margin.

So yes, it costs more than pushing a cart around yourself, but here’s how I think about that.

I’m not carrying giant packs of paper towels. I’m not doing the cart-to-car, car-to-front-door shuffle. Costco doesn’t have bags, so if you go in person you’re packing everything into boxes you gathered yourself. Just that alone is worth the tip I pay my shopper.

And yes, I’m paying somebody to do the shopping for me. I think of it like I hired an assistant hourly and sent her to the store. There is a cost for hiring help. My time is worth something too. If I go to the store myself, what else could I be doing with the 2-3 hours it takes to get there, shop, pack it up, drive home and unload? What would that time cost me? I’m happy to pay somebody else to handle it!

You can also schedule the delivery ahead, which is really helpful when you’re planning for a holiday or a vacation or something. Often when we have family reunion trips as part of my trip prep I make a Costco order and schedule it for delivery at the vacation house for a few days later when we are actually there. I don’t want to waste my vacation time ordering groceries.

How we actually eat, so the list makes sense

I’ve been gluten-free for the better part of 15 years, and my kids have been gluten-free since they were born. My husband is not. As I’ve cleaned up my gut over the last 10 years I can occasionally eat gluten now, but I really limit it, and when I do it’s high-quality homemade sourdough-type gluten, or a really amazing dessert out if I’m treating myself. It’s not a regular thing and it’s not something we keep in the house at all. That’s why my cart looks the way it does.

We were dairy-free for a while, so I still don’t shop the cheese section much, but there are a few goat and sheep milk cheeses now that I do buy. I go grass-fed on beef and butter. I try to avoid refined sugar where I can. I aim for mostly organic, and I filter for it, because that’s how I prefer to feed my family.

None of that has to be your list. If organic isn’t where you want to spend, or you’re feeding people who’d riot over sheep’s milk cheese, there are lots of sections I’m not even browsing when I log in, and your version of this is going to have things in it that mine never will. That’s the actual point. Buy It Again builds itself around whatever YOU put in the cart, so the second order is fast no matter what you eat. Take the time once to do it right the first time, and the system starts working for you the very next time.

Before you click anything below

Every product below links straight to the Costco Same-Day listing. I do not get any commission from these links but added them for ease of shopping. If you’re logged in to your Costco account, it goes right to the item. If you’re not, you’ll land on a page that offers a login OR a “browse as guest” button, so click browse as guest and you’ll see it.

If you don’t have a Costco membership and you’ve been considering one, it also knocks $20 off an annual Instacart+ membership, $99 down to $79, if you use Instacart for any other stores.

And if you don’t have a Costco membership and you don’t want one, you can shop Costco through the Instacart app instead, with Costco selected as the store. You don’t need a membership at all. It’s the most expensive way to do it, but you can still get every single item below delivered to your door, so if something here looks worth trying, or you need just a one off shop for a special occassion, just search the product name in Instacart with Costco as the store. It’ll cost more, but for a lot of these products it’s still worth it compared to regular store prices. New to Instacart? My code KMATHER1B6C9 gets you $10 off.

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THE HAUL

Fresh produce

I pretty much only buy organic produce from Costco, and only things we’ll eat quickly. Costco quantities and produce are a bad combination if you’re not honest with yourself about what your family actually finishes, but my kids can scarf some berries.

• Organic green kiwi, 4 lbs – they last a long time

• Organic squash, 3.5 lbs - this is the zucchini and yellow squash mix

• Organic butternut squash, 2 lbs - already peeled and cubed

• Organic raspberries, 12 oz

• Organic strawberries, 2 lbs

• Organic blueberries, 18 oz

• Organic blackberries, 12 oz

• Golden pineapple - the one thing I buy conventional from Costco. Pineapple sits at the top of EWG’s Clean Fifteen, and Costco’s are usually big, delicious and cheap.

• Organic English cucumbers, 3-count

• Organic celery sticks, 2.5 lbs

• Organic baby spinach, 1 lb

• Organic green beans, 2 lbs

• Organic carrots, 6 lbs

• Organic jumbo mangos, 4-count

Frozen

• Jesse & Ben’s tallow sea salt house-cut fries, 32 oz - clean ingredients, made with tallow instead of seed oil, and they come out perfectly crispy in the air fryer. A great find on busy nights.

• Nature’s Touch organic 4 berry blend, 3 lbs – for smoothies

• Purely Frozen organic riced cauliflower, 4-count – 4 packs inside the big bag

• Kirkland organic blueberries, 3 lbs - the frozen ones, separate from the fresh

• Pick’d organic mango chunks, 5 lbs

Meat and seafood

• Teton Waters Ranch polish sausage, 2.25 lbs - the Teton Waters ones are grass-fed. If we’re going to eat processed meat, and my kids still love hot dogs and sausages, I’d rather it be 100% grass-fed.

• Teton Waters Ranch jalapeño cheddar bratwurst, 36 oz

• Kirkland grass-fed beef patties, 15-count - if I have time to make my own grass-fed burgers, I do. In a pinch we keep these in the freezer and throw them on the grill frozen.

• Jones Dairy Farm organic chicken sausage links, 2 lbs - not squeaky clean, but a clean enough protein for my kids who need something extra in the morning.

• Kirkland wild mahi-mahi, 3 lbs - I only buy wild-caught fish, and this one lives in the freezer and defrosts fast.

Deli

• Citterio 18-month prosciutto di Parma, 2-count - just pork and salt. Again, if I’m eating processed meat, I want it as clean as possible.

• Plainville organic oven roasted turkey, 3-count - we don’t do a ton of lunch meat, but when we do, the ingredients are just organic turkey and salt.

Dairy and cheese

Most of what’s here is sheep or goat, which is not an accident.

• Kirkland grass-fed butter, 4-count

• Trimona organic A2 whole milk Bulgarian yogurt, 2-count - I buy this for my husband. I like that it’s organic, full fat, and calls out that it’s A2.

• Kirkland organic Greek feta, 28.2 oz - organic feta is harder to find, and this is sheep’s milk.

• Kirkland pecorino romano - not organic, but sheep’s milk – for ALL the pasta!

• Kirkland Spanish manchego - again not organic, but sheep’s milk, and the price here is so much cheaper than a grocery store.

• Garcia Baquero Spanish cheese selection, 3-count - a mix of goat and sheep options, and it’s great for a charcuterie board in a pinch.

• Kerrygold Dubliner - grass-fed

• MALK organic unsweetened almond milk, 2-count - one of our favorites. Just organic almonds, water and salt, which is really hard to find in a clean organic almond milk. SO much cheaper than the store

Olives, pickles and dips

• Grillo’s pickles dill spears, 52 oz - clean ingredients.

• Lindsay Naturals black pitted olives, 6-count - cleaner than most olives you’re going to get.

• Gia Russa organic kalamata olives, 33.68 oz - these have a couple of additives even though they’re organic, but for the rare times we use them, organic makes up for it.

• Kirkland organic hummus cups, 20-count - clean ingredients.

Pantry

• Wild Planet albacore tuna, 6-count and Safe Catch ahi yellowfin tuna, 6-count - these are the only two brands of tuna I’ll buy, and both of them test for mercury. Safe Catch tests every single fish to a limit of 0.1 ppm on the ahi (the FDA’s action level is 1.0). Wild Planet runs an annual testing protocol and reports their albacore averaging around 0.17 ppm. Great protein to have on hand, my kids will eat it, and when I’m leaning more keto it’s a great lunch option.

• Chosen Foods organic avocado oil, 1 L - I know avocado oil has had a lot of controversy lately. The big UC Davis study that made the rounds tested products made WITH avocado oil, the chips and the mayo and the dressings, not the bottled oil itself, and 89% of those failed. Chosen tests every batch internally and does external testing quarterly. Combine that with organic, which is really hard to find in avocado oil at all, and this is one is a winner!

• Kirkland organic maple syrup, 33.8 oz and Kirkland raw unfiltered honey, 3 lbs - organic and raw. These two are my go-tos for cutting out refined sugar in our house and we always have both on hand.

• Kirkland organic ghee, 27 oz - it’s just clarified butter, but organic and grass-fed, and it’s shelf-stable.

• Kirkland organic peanut butter, 2-count and Nuttzo organic 7 nut and seed butter, 26 oz - organic nuts and salt, that’s it. The prices can’t be beat.

• Kirkland almond flour, 3 lbs - it’s not organic and I wish it were, but almond flour can be so expensive. When you’re gluten-free, and for a while we were grain-free, this is what a lot of our baked goods are made of. We keep it on hand even though it’s not organic, because it’s for a treat.

• One Degree organic sprouted rolled oats, 80 oz - this is the only brand of oats I’ll buy. Oats are one of the biggest crops for glyphosate and cross-contamination with gluten, and even organic oats can be contaminated. One Degree third-party tests theirs and carries BioChecked Non-Glyphosate Certification, and they’re certified gluten-free through GFCP to under 20 ppm. They’re also sprouted, which is easier on digestion.

• Himalayan pink salt, 30 oz 2-pack - one of the salts we use, for the added minerals.

• Roli Roti organic ginger turmeric chicken bone broth, 2-count - really clean ingredients, and it’s refrigerated rather than boxed. I’ll stick them in the freezer too. These are great if you’re sipping bone broth rather than cooking with it. I think the flavor is better.

Nuts, seeds and dried fruit

These are all single-ingredient and organic, and we keep all of them on hand for various things.

• Kirkland organic hemp hearts, 32 oz - I use a lot of hemp hearts to add protein to literally anything. Pancakes, smoothies, any kind of baked goods.

• Organic pitted Medjool dates, 24 oz - we use these for sweetening.

• Kirkland organic pecans, 1.7 lbs

• Sun-Maid organic raisins, 2-count

• Mayorga organic chia seeds, 3 lbs

• Kirkland organic whole cashews, unsalted and unroasted, 2.5 lbs

• Kirkland organic dried pineapple tidbits, 26 oz

• Sunny Fruit organic dried figs, 40 oz

• Go Raw sprouted organic pumpkin seeds with sea salt, 22 oz

• Kirkland dry roasted macadamia nuts, 1.5 lbs

Snacks

These are all treats we keep for the kids for when we’re out of the house and I need cleaner packaged snacks. Better not perfect.

• Nature’s Garden organic trail mix snack packs, 24-count - they’re organic. I don’t love that there’s some sunflower oil in the dried cranberries, but it’s a protein and fat snack my kids will eat.

• Simple Mills honey cinnamon sweet thins, 14 oz, Simple Mills chocolate brownie sweet thins, 14 oz and Simple Mills almond flour sea salt crackers, 2-count - this is a brand you can find everywhere, these are just bigger packages, because they’re kind of expensive and small at regular stores. They’re not squeaky clean and they’re not organic, but they’re gluten-free and a nice treat. The brownie ones come in and out of stock.

• Country Archer grass-fed beef stick minis, 28-count - grass-fed beef, clean ingredients, smaller size is great for kiddos.

• Sweet Nothings organic squeezable smoothies, 16-count - sort of like push pops but with clean organic fruit only.

• Tropical Fields organic coconut rolls, 11 oz - clean, short ingredients list.

• That’s It organic fruit crunchables, 21-count - just organic fruit, dried.

• That’s It mini fruit bars, 24-count - not organic, but just fruit.

• Solely organic fruit jerky, 16-count - just organic fruit.

• UNREAL dark chocolate variety pack, 15.4 oz - cleaner, not perfect. They’re copycat versions of Snickers, Reese’s cups and peanut M&Ms. We keep these for treats and it’s what I hand out at Halloween. Whatever doesn’t get taken, my kids can actually eat, or they use it to swap out clean candy for some of the other junk in their bucket.

• Boulder Canyon beef tallow sea salt potato chips, 22 oz - just potatoes and tallow. Not organic, but fried in tallow instead of seed oils, which is a winner for us to have sometimes.

• LesserEvil organic cheddar space balls, 17 oz - these are definitely not very clean, but they’re cleaner than regular cheese balls, so this is a very infrequent treat for my kids. It is junk food, but it’s cleaner junk food.

• Chifles organic plantain chips, 20 oz - great if you want something crunchy and organic, and they go really well instead of tortilla chips. I also use them for a Christmas crack, which I’ll write up closer to the holidays.

• Seven Sundays cereal snackies, 20-count - not organic, not perfectly clean, but a good snack for my kids when on the go.

Drinks

• Spindrift sparkling water, 30-count - the only sparkling water I buy. I try to avoid anything with natural flavors (which is almost ALL other sparkling waters). Spindrift uses real fruit.

• Kirkland organic raw kombucha, 8-count - my husband likes kombucha sometimes, and this organic raw one is a great cheaper alternative in the Kirkland brand.

• Kirkland organic coconut water, 9-count – Some brands of coconut water I like and some brands I don’t, but I do like this one. Just organic coconut water, no other additives. We keep it in the fridge in case somebody’s sick.

The stuff that isn’t food

I’m leaving these in because people are always surprised by what else turns up in a Costco order. This is the category where I’m least disciplined, and I’m fine with it.

• Blueland dishwasher detergent tablets, 110-count - Blueland is a cleaner brand and they’re plastic-free.

• Unitex 100% cotton terry towels, 52-count - 100% cotton, great for cleaning, and it’s nice to just have rags around. Cheap and you get a lot of them.

• Con-Tact shelf liner, 2-pack - this is what I use to line my pantry shelves.

• MIU silicone freezer trays with lids, 5-pack - a dupe for Souper Cubes. Great for freezing things and you can pop them out into a bag.

• USPS Forever stamps, 100-count - little-known fact, Costco sells Forever stamps, usually at a very slight discount. But more importantly they get delivered to my house, so this is where I buy stamps now.

• Apache Mills entry mat, 30 x 47 inch - I also occasionally buy floor mats, a new pan, random mini appliances that show up in my feed. Same-Day doesn’t carry the full span of the store in these categories, so anything small enough to fit in a cart you’ll find, but you’re not buying a mattress this way.

What I don’t buy at Costco

Supplements. We don’t buy them there. Quality really matters and I won’t find the kinds I take.

Most household and cleaning stuff. We’re fragrance-free here and I don’t want anything with fragrance. In the store I can’t even walk down those aisles. The Blueland tabs above are the exception, because they finally have a cleaner brand available. I always check the “What’s New” section hoping to find more clean options.

The organic chicken, and the grass-fed ground beef. I used to buy both in bulk and I thought it was a great price. The chicken just comes out so stringy, such a weird texture, that I stopped buying it. I know people who buy it and haven’t noticed an issue, so this might just be me. The grass-fed ground beef is fine, but I found that the farmers market grass-fed ground beef I can get isn’t really any more expensive, and local is almost always better. Most of our meat now comes from Open Pasture, which does chicken, beef and pork and ships nationwide but is local here in Charlotte.

Anything in the bakery. There’s really nothing gluten-free in there, so I don’t even look, but even if I weren’t GF I know the ingredients used likely are not very clean.

Before you go

What’s your best Costco find? Post the actual product in the comments, not just the category, so the rest of us can go add it to our carts. I’m always looking for something new to ME that maybe isn’t new to the store.

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️

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EAT WELL

★ THE SHORTCUT

Housekeeping first: this one is for my Charlotte people. These are three small local bakeries I want more of you to know about, and nothing here is affiliate, I make exactly $0 on this one, just want to spread the love. If you’re not in Charlotte, keep reading anyway, because two of these ship and I’ll tell you how I found all three so you can go find yours. This “method” works for non-gluten-free bakeries too, but those are MUCH easier to find!

The short hit

Want a gluten-free bakery in Charlotte that’s actually GOOD? These three are the ones I order from regularly. All three are dedicated gluten-free kitchens (meaning no gluten in the building at all, not “we can accommodate that”), and all three bake with real and mostly organic ingredients, which at this point matters to me more than the gluten-free part does. My husband does NOT eat gluten-free but he happily devours everything from here because you legit can’t tell. None of them is a shop you can wander into on a Tuesday afternoon though. You need to pre-order (mostly). Here’s how I’d actually decide which to try:

• Bread or a special event cake

  • Eleven Eleven Bakery

  • Plan ahead, they need up to seven business days.

• Bagels, muffins, cinnamon rolls, or anything you need SOON

  • Indulge Yourself Bakery

  • Cynthia’s turnaround is days, not weeks.

• A splurge box of gourmet pastries, or you want to actually walk into a place

  • The Accidental Baker

  • Walk-ins welcome weekend mornings.

Only ordering from one to start? Make it Indulge Yourself. Best prices of the three, fastest turnaround, and Cynthia will say yes to just about anything you ask her.

My rec? Order from Indulge first, then get on Eleven Eleven’s calendar for whatever your next birthday or holiday is, because her cakes are incredible. If you want to try a few different things before committing, walk into a pop-up at The Accidental Baker.

The picks and details

• Indulge Yourself Bakery, pickup in Dilworth. My top pick and the one I order from most now. Cynthia converted her garage into a commercial grade kitchen and has a roll up garage door that converts it into a storefront. It’s adorable. Organic flours, grass-fed butter, organic pasture-raised eggs – high quality REAL ingredients I would use if I were baking myself. Her prices feel like a regular bakery rather than a place with a huge gluten-free markup. She has no minimum order size and she’ll flex on timing when she can. I’ve ordered for next day turnaround without issue. Her breads are all dairy free and vegan. My picks: the bagels, the muffins (pumpkin and blueberry are wonderful!), the cinnamon rolls (made fresh and iced, not take-and-bake).

• Eleven Eleven Bakery, delivery or pickup in Matthews. Sussa (the owner) is who I go to for artisan bread and celebration cakes. Everything is organic and non-GMO, they use maple sugar for some of the sweetening. They do custom cakes too. They deliver in Charlotte, they’re often at the farmers markets, and a handful of local shops carry their bread now as well. Everything is made to order which means it can take up to seven business days (though often faster), so plan ahead. My picks: the artisan bread, the strawberry cake, the lemon cupcakes.

• The Accidental Baker, delivery or pickup in Oakhurst. The splurge. You can request delivery, or pre-order and pick up, or walk in weekend mornings until he sells out (people line up before he opens so you’ve got to go early!). Organic ingredients, grass-fed butter, a $75 online minimum, and order windows that can run up to a few weeks out when he’s full. My picks: the bagels, the cornetti (like croissants), the cheese danish, any specialty pastries he’s offering that week.

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The story

My kids have been gluten-free since the day they were born, which means I have tried basically every gluten-free option in this city. Every bakery, every grocery store brand, every “oh we have a gluten-free option” at a restaurant. Not because I’m thorough, but because when it’s the only way your family eats, you just end up trying all of it eventually.

A lot has changed in the gluten-free world in the past 10 years. Finding gluten-free is usually easy now. A decade ago there was almost nothing on the shelf. Now there’s a whole aisle of it, which sounds like great news and sometimes is. But so much of it leans on chemicals and gums and fillers to fake the texture of real bread. Gluten-free does not automatically mean better for you. A lot of the time it just means different junk.

So what I’m actually shopping for now isn’t just gluten-free. It’s ingredients. Real butter, real eggs, organic flour, and a person who cares what goes in the bowl. THAT is why I like all three of these, and it’s the reason I’ll drive across town for any of them. If one of them were gluten-free but full of junk (there are indeed lots of these options out there), it wouldn’t be on this list.

Let me back up on the safety part though, because it changes what I’m able to tell you.

I’m gluten-free with a sensitivity. I’m not celiac, and I don’t react to cross-contamination, so I can eat somewhere that also bakes with wheat and be totally fine. My brother-in-law can’t. He has celiac, and when he’s celebrating with us, “oh we can accommodate that” is not good enough, because the flour is in the AIR. It’s on the surfaces, it’s in the mixers, it’s floating around the whole kitchen. All three of these are dedicated gluten-free kitchens with no gluten in the building at all, which is what makes them safe for him and not just convenient for me.

I also think having a dedicated gluten-free place is a contributing factor to why the products are better. When gluten-free is the entire business and not a side option, somebody has actually had to work at it. Compare that to somewhere like Sunflour, which has five locations here and bakes its gluten-free from scratch every morning. They say right on their own website that their kitchens handle gluten and they want you to have the full picture before you order, which is more honest than most places bother to be, and I give them real credit for that. I’ve had their cakes and cupcakes a couple times though, and I just don’t love them. I’ve had them taste chalky, I’ve had them be a bit dry. It’s just not something I’m going to make a special trip for. Plus, I could never hand it to my brother-in-law.

For a long stretch we were dairy-free on top of gluten-free, and that was HARD. It was not just that the taste was subpar (it was in most cases) but it also meant I had a hard time even finding options at all. So for years, I just had to make everything myself. And while I loved baking in my pre-kids life, I do not have the capacity to really do it very often anymore. (Though my 8 year old has taken a liking to it and has become our new in-house pastry chef so maybe all of these bakeries will be losing my business soon lol). But it was never about the baking for me, it was about controlling what ingredients went into the finished product. These days, like I said, I’m too busy for baking most days, and having someone else do it to my standard, with real transparency in ingredients, has genuinely made me giddy at times.

How I found all three

Whenever I’ve referred to these people in the past I get asked this, but the answer is boring: I asked.

I posted in local mom groups and Charlotte groups on Facebook, “does anyone know a good gluten-free bakery,” and people answered. And I started trying different options on the list. Most cities also have a local gluten-free or celiac group on Facebook, and searching in there is where the REAL intel lives, because those are people who have already tried everything and have opinions about it. When I travel outside of Charlotte I usually do a search in Yelp for “gluten free bakery” and see what comes up and give it a whirl. I’ve got a go-to place now where I visit my family in South Jersey (where I pick up all the things for the holidays!), and one near our beach house close to Charleston when we are celebrating there. Though often when we are driving to the beach I’ll place an order here in Charlotte and bring the goods with me!

That’s the method. That’s it. Lol. It’s nothing life changing, but it works wherever you are. It may take trying a few before you find one that suits your needs and tastes, but once you’ve got it narrowed down, it feels good to support local!

Eleven Eleven, the first one I found

Sussa’s signature item is an artisan bread loaf. It is closest to a sourdough but it’s not actually sourdough. It was actually one of the first gluten-free breads I’d ever had that tasted like actual bread. It was also the first one I could eat untoasted (IYKYK). Though I do toast it anyway after day one, but that’s preference now, not because it HAS to be toasted like other GF bread. It makes a real sandwich, which sounds like a low bar but if you eat GF it absolutely is not.

Everything she makes is organic or non-GMO and they use maple sugar for some of the sweetening. It’s also all dairy, soy and corn free. The flours are almond, coconut and arrowroot though, so fair warning, this is not the one for a nut allergy.

The cakes and cupcakes are beautiful and they’ll do custom designs too. My absolute favorite thing they make is the strawberry cake. I order it every single year for my birthday. So, so good. The lemon and chocolate cupcakes are great too, honestly all of them are. You can truly taste the quality of the ingredients.

The kitchen is in Matthews but it’s not a walk in storefront. So it’s delivery, pickup at a prescheduled pickup time in Matthews, or grab bread one of their retail partners or farmers market. Mecklenburg County Market carries their bread, and so does Bradford Market in Huntersville, Southern Olive in Fort Mill, Charlotte Vitamins and Berrybrook Farm. If you’re brand new to them, the Beginner’s Kit (from $35) is the easiest way in to taste a few different options in one go. I did want to note that I’ve noticed their prices going up over the last six to twelve months on the cakes, and my honest guess is they were underpriced before for what you’re getting.

The Accidental Baker, the one I stood in line for

Matt, the owner, left a corporate job to start this little bakery gig – hence the name. His wife is gluten-free, so he started trying to perfect gluten-free baking for her, and the hobby turned into a business. He started with a pop-up at the Metropolitan, certain days only, more of a “stand” than a bakery with all the baking happening offsite. That’s where I found him, and yes, we (well my husband, lol) stood in line for it. We had heard word about REAL gluten free bagels and we couldn’t miss out on trying when they were popping up near me! It was worth the wait for sure as GF bagels usually taste like cardboard and these did not lol. Now, he’s got a commercial space in Oakhurst. He won a 2025 Charlotte Magazine BOB Editors’ Choice award and was runner-up for Best Bagel and Best Custom Cake, which I’m mentioning because he deserves it.

What hooked us first were the bagels and the cornetti (similar to croissants). The cheese danish is a favorite around here too because I truly hadn’t had one in 10+ years since I went gluten-free. The Take-And-Bake cinnamon rolls were his original product and they’re still great - being take-and-bake means they are always warm and fresh! He also does a gluten-free sourdough and sourdough English muffins now as well.

Quality is very, very good, with the same organic or grass-fed ingredients as the others. However, it does run more expensive in my opinion. There’s also a $75 minimum on online orders, and while it’s easy to hit once you see the prices lol, that can feel prohibitive if you don’t need a lot at once. If you wait in line for the walk-in hours on the weekends there is no minimum (but you are absolutely spending your time instead.) So this one is a splurge for me, not a weekly thing, but worth it once in a while.

Side notes: A few of his pastries, the cornetti and the danishes among them, are made with gluten-free wheat starch. He labels it on every menu. It’s processed below the gluten-free threshold and most celiacs are fine with it, but if you avoid anything wheat-derived at all, here’s your heads up. Also, I’ve heard he’s rebranding to Panetteria Senza, though there’s no word on when. Mentioning it in case it’s already happened by the time you read this!

Indulge Yourself, the one I call first now

Cynthia is my most recent find and she has become the one I call first. I found her because the Accidental Baker’s window was weeks out and I needed (lol) gluten-free bagels sooner than that, so I googled “gluten-free bagels Charlotte” and there she was, in Dilworth, much closer to my house than either of the others.

Same quality bar as the other two with organic flours, grass-fed butter, organic pasture-raised eggs, purified water. All of her breads are dairy free and vegan, and cupcakes can be made dairy free for a few dollars more, which would have mattered ENORMOUSLY to me during our dairy-free stretch.

The turnaround time is a different universe from the others though. There’s no advertised rush option and I don’t want anyone showing up expecting one, but I have had things ready the next day. Next day! I’d been used to waiting three weeks somewhere else so I did not expect that as even a possibility. I try to give her more notice than that now, for her sake, and she still says yes to more than she has to.

I do have a story about hamburger buns to share which gives you some insight into Cynthia the owner. They weren’t on her menu at all but I asked if she potentially offered them (I didn’t want to meet the minimum order at Accidental Baker lol). She said she’d be happy to try making them, and proceeded to text me a couple hours later saying she tried it and had some samples for me to try. We drove right over and tried them with dinner and they were perfect. I told her as much and she told me she had tried again and made them bigger and I said ‘no, no, the exact way you made them for me the first time’. And now she makes them for me regularly to my specifications lol. They still aren’t listed on her menu but you can get them (and lots of other things!) just by asking.

She customized my order with the cinnamon rolls too. She sells them by the half dozen, I once needed eight, and I asked if she’d just make them a little smaller using her original ‘batch size’ so I could get eight instead of six for the same price. She did! And then told me she liked them so much better so was going to start offering it as 8 instead of 6. That’s the pattern with her, whether it’s something off menu or a shorter turnaround than she’d like: if she can make it work, she will. And that right there is one of my main arguments for buying from a person instead of off a shelf, even if it’s slightly more expensive.

I’ve had the sandwich bread, the baguettes, the burger buns, the bagels, the muffins (incredible), the focaccia, the pumpkin cheesecake, the cookie cake, the chocolate cake, the chocolate chip cookies, the chocolate crinkle cookies, and probably something I’m forgetting lol. Her cinnamon rolls are made fresh and iced, not take-and-bake, and they hold up for several days, which almost nothing gluten-free does. She is happy to give storage, reheating or freezing instructions if you ask as well for any of her items.

What’s really put her at the top for me though is the pricing. Muffins are $3 each and bagels come in under $3 when you buy the dozen, which is how I usually order. A dozen cupcakes is only $30. Her baguettes are full size too, where other places sell you a demi for the same $5 (which is half a loaf for the same money, so not really the same price at all). The one thing I’ve found that lands at the same price as others is the GF focaccia, and that’s a specialty item most regular bakeries don’t even make. Add in no real minimum and a turnaround measured in days instead of weeks, and you make your way to the very top of my recommendation list.

Not in Charlotte?

Ships to you:

Eleven Eleven ships some of their products nationwide, so the artisan bread can come to you even though the delivery van can’t.

GF Sweeties in South Jersey is my favorite gluten-free bakery when visiting my family there, and they ship nationwide through Etsy. Sachiko started it after her daughter had to go gluten-free at twelve and she couldn’t find a single recipe she liked. The kitchen is dedicated gluten-free and peanut free. The thing I love is that her treats are less sweet than a standard bakery, which she says comes from a Japanese influence, and I genuinely prefer the taste. They’ve got a real storefront now in Collingswood too, not far from Philadelphia.

If you’re anywhere near Charleston, Mabel Mae’s is where we go. Everything is gluten-free AND vegan, which is a hard combination to pull off, and they’ve got two locations plus the Mt. Pleasant farmers market. They don’t ship, so this one’s for when you’re down there, but worth checking out.

I do want to caution you for anything shipped - it often costs more, and there’s a reason. Expedited shipping and protective packaging are what keep gluten-free baked goods from arriving stale, and all of that gets built into the price. So if you don’t want to deal with that, keep reading.

Or just find yours:

Go find the small gluten-free (or not!) baker where you live. The one person working out of a commercial kitchen or a licensed home kitchen who has made this their livelihood. In my experience, people running a GF bakery rather than a regular one, seem to have an extra layer of “passion” within them. Plus the baked goods are almost always better than what ships to you or what you can find in a grocery store (and usually cheaper too) because you’re not paying for a box engineered to keep bread alive in transit.

Post in your local mom group or your city’s Facebook group and ask. Search the local gluten-free and celiac groups, even if it’s just a preference for you. Filter for Gluten Free on Yelp. Check out the Find Me Gluten Free app. Ask around at the farmers market. A little bit of effort may unearth a hidden gem you may have never found otherwise since most of these places don’t have brick and mortar storefronts you can drive by.

One practical note for all of these bakeries – they don’t use preservatives, so plan to slice and freeze most of what you buy the same day or next day after it arrives. It keeps a few days on the counter and months in the freezer.

Before you go

Do you have a small local baker you’d drive across town for, gluten-free or not? I’d love to hear what small local businesses you’re supporting! Post your city and what gems you’ve found so others may find them too.

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️

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On Tuesday I told the story of how this “healthy home” came to be: 15+ years of researching my way through mystery symptoms, one category at a time, food to products to fabrics to the house itself, running alongside 15 years of building new construction rental houses. The two finally converged when we found a piece of land at the beach and got the chance to build the good decisions into the structure instead of patching them on top. That post is here, and it’s free. This is Part 2 where I share every brand and all the details. We’ll start first with the unique thing we did in three of the rooms.

The three rooms

There was something unusual we did, and the builder told me it was the first time he’d ever heard of it. Midway through the build I was actively debating whether the on-site EMF testing was worth it, or whether we should just do the basic protections and call it a day. Zack from The Purified Home, the consultant we hired, is based in California, but he happened to be in South Carolina for a family trip and was willing to drive a few hours to test our house without us paying his travel expenses, so because of that we decided to go for it.

So, during construction, before the house even had power, he walked it with an EMF meter, room by room. He was testing four things: electric fields, magnetic fields, dirty electricity, and radio frequency. We were hopeful that everything out by the ocean would come back “clean,” but there were a few hiccups.

The city water tower a couple of miles away carries cell antennas, and the bedrooms facing it read many times higher than the rooms on the other side of the house. It was the same house on the same day, thirty feet apart, but now we had the data.

Without testing, you’d never pick those rooms out as different. There’s no sound, no light, nothing you can feel. It’s just a number on a meter in a room that looks exactly like the one next to it.

Here’s what we did about it - I’m giving you the whole recipe - because when I first went looking for this information it was scattered across consultant sites and one YouTube video and that made it feel overwhelming.

To fix the issue we didn’t have to do something to the whole house, and we didn’t even have to do something to the whole rooms. The report called for EMF shielding paint on the specific walls facing the tower, and that’s what we did. We focused on the bunk room, the mini master, and the master bedroom, and only on the walls that actually face the tower.

The paint we used was Safe and Sound RF-ECO 5G Shielding Paint from Safe Living Technologies. It’s technically a primer, with carbon and graphene in it, and it goes on black, then you topcoat it with the finish paint and color of your choice. But there’s something I didn’t know upfront and that is that the paint alone does nothing. It only works when it’s grounded. So after the first coat, a run of conductive foil tape went directly on top of the painted surface (usually behind the baseboard, or about an inch above it so it’s hidden), up to a small metal grounding plate screwed to the wall, and the plate got wired into a grounded outlet. Zack’s instructions called for one grounding plate per painted wall, so our five painted walls took five plates. Then came a second coat of the shielding paint, and then our normal finish color on top. You may need a coat of white primer first if you’re going light, since the shielding coat does dry black.

You’ll need the paint, plus a grounding cable, grounding tape, and a grounding plate kit for each room. The paint and tape are also on Amazon at the same price.

When you stand in those rooms today, you cannot tell that there is anything different about them. The walls look like every other wall in the house.

If you want the exact application steps our consultant wrote out for the painter and electrician, they’re below with the rest of the spec.

What’s below

Below the paywall are the actual specs including the brands we used, the numbers, the maintenance schedule, and a downloadable checklist you can hand to a builder or a sub or work through on your own.

The sections follow the same order as Tuesday’s post, so you can read them side by side. Tuesday has the why for each category, and this has the exact what.

If you’re building or renovating, save yourself a lot of research and read this first.

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In my mid-twenties, my body started doing things nobody could explain.

Nausea that came out of nowhere, with full-body sweats and dizziness. Sometimes it lasted a few minutes, sometimes an hour. At first people told me it was stress. It happened at work, at dinners, at home, and once on vacation while I was walking on the beach with my friends, which is about the least stressful setting a person can be in. Then came the pins and needles, running down my arms and legs, on and off for weeks at a time.

That got me a whole bunch of tests and doctors. An MRI. Scans to rule out MS. Every test anybody could think of, all clean, and at the end of it a prescription for anxiety medication and a theory that I was probably having panic attacks.

I knew that wasn’t it. I just couldn’t prove it or give a better option.

Looking back now, with years of research I did myself because nobody was doing it for me, I don’t think there was one cause. I think there was a slow drip into a bucket and eventually the bucket overflowed. I’d had the Gardasil vaccine in my twenties, older than it’s recommended and strongly encouraged by my OBGYN for some strange reason, and then I had an adverse reaction to it. I was working a high-stress job that was probably pushing on a system already teetering. My diet was full of junk, I drank too much, and I had never exercised a day in my life. And a few years before any of the symptoms started, I had lived in a rental with a leak that ran from the third floor all the way down through the first, with water leaking out of a chandelier and a thermostat two floors away, and it was “fixed” with a coat of ceiling paint. I lived there for years after that incident.

Maybe any one of those alone would have been fine. My body could have handled it. All of them together apparently it couldn’t.

(The full health story deserves its own post, which I’ll plan to work on soon. It will be long. LOL)

What matters for today is what all of it turned me into: someone who researches. Someone who doesn’t believe the first answer if there isn’t info to back it up. Nobody could tell me what was wrong, so I started changing things myself, one at a time, and paying attention.

One thing at a time

Food came first. When I was trying to figure out all these gut issues I was also hearing about something called Whole30. These days everyone probably has heard of it, but back then it felt kind of extreme. But I knew I needed to eliminate some foods and see if any of them were the culprit behind what I was feeling. While I was doing my first Whole30 (which is basically just eating whole foods and eliminating potentially inflammatory foods like sugar, gluten and dairy), I became an ingredient reader. I started learning how many foods I was eating that had lots of unpronounceable ingredients. After I finished the Whole30 the ingredient label reading stuck with me. I can’t “unknow” what I learned, so I actively started avoiding many processed ingredients when I could.

Then a few years later some of the same people I was following for food ideas started talking about environment too. Not just what goes in your body but what goes on it, and what’s around it. Beautycounter was just getting started at the time, and knowing that they banned so many potentially toxic ingredients from their products without me having to read those labels too was appealing. I joined as a consultant for the discount because I was on a mission to replace all my personal care products to clean up what my family was touching each day.

Personal care was harder than food. I’d read a serum label, not recognize a single word, and have no idea whether that word was fine or terrible. So I leaned on EWG, and on companies like Beautycounter that do real third-party testing, so I could trust a company instead of re-researching every bottle in my bathroom.

From there it kept going. Clothing fabrics. Cleaning products. And eventually the house itself: what the building materials are made of, how water and air move through a house, how the house you live in can quietly be the root cause of health stuff you’d never connect to it. When we were doing a bathroom renovation I took a healthy bathrooms class from Christine of Holistic Homes, which sounds niche, and it is, but this was the kind of deep dive I tend to seek out when I’m learning about something.

Again, I can’t unknow what I know.

Meanwhile, we were building houses

There was another thread running parallel to this wellness journey for the last 15 years. My husband and I have been building rental houses as our side business. Building them, then renting them, then building more.

When you build an investment property, everything is a cost-benefit calculation. Tenants don’t keep a house the way you would if you lived in it, so you’re constantly weighing what’s worth the money against wear and tear you can’t control. I got a lot of reps in picking finishes and materials with somebody else’s use of the house in mind. I’ve built or majorly renovated more than 15 houses over the years – lots of practice!

So by the time the opportunity to build our dream beach house came around, I had 15 years of health research experience and 15 years of experience building houses on budgets that had to make sense. It was inevitable that eventually I’d want to combine them. And that’s what happened at Stay Salty IOP. It’s built for me and my family, but we run it as a vacation rental for now (and yes, you can finally stay in it. Hit reply, comment or DM me and I’ll tell you how!)

The beach house

We looked for land at one of our favorite beaches, Isle of Palms, SC, for about five years before we found anything that would work for us. This has been a long time goal to have an oceanfront rental property that we could use with our family too, but buying something just to buy it was not what we were looking for so we had to be patient.

When we finally did find the perfect spot and decide to build, I knew this one was going to be different from our other builds. It was still an investment property, still a rental, but a short-term rental, which means more people through it and more wear and tear than our long-term properties. The cost-benefit math didn’t go away, but I knew our family would spend a lot of time there so there was a new factor at play that we didn’t have in our other investment builds. This house is probably our retirement house, or at least a place we will spend large chunks of life in when the time is right.

And that fact changed what I was willing to do.

At home in Charlotte, I have been working to improve the health of our home for years as I’ve been learning over time. But it’s been patchwork. A wi-fi timer here, a water filter there, addressing things one gadget at a time on top of a house that already existed. Given the chance to build from scratch, I wanted the health decisions in the actual structure. Some of these things CAN be retrofitted later, but a lot of it really can’t, and I’ll flag which is which as we go.

I also knew I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I’d been reading about this stuff for a decade, but there’s a real gap between following healthy-home accounts and knowing which filtration system belongs in front of which HVAC unit in a coastal climate. So in our budget we made sure to include room for a healthy home consultant. We hired Zack from The Purified Home, out of California, and he helped guide us through the process.

(If you’re looking for this kind of help, a few I can vouch for or would consider: The Purified Home is who we used. Christine of Holistic Homes, whose bathroom class I took, does similar work across the whole house. And The Well Build covers the whole process and is who I’d also interview if I were starting today. I know a lot more people are getting involved in this space so I’m sure there are more options I’m not aware of!)

I’m definitely glad we had Zack on our team because while I’ve made 100s of design decisions over the years, I never got too in the weeds on the mechanicals and things behind the walls. One thing I regret though - we brought the consultant in at the framing stage, and we should have started with the healthy home consultant in the architectural planning stage, before we ever hired a builder. When your requirements are in the plans from the start, they just get priced like everything else. When they show up later, each one is a change order and a conversation about how “that’s not how they normally do it”. I also ended up talking to the plumber, the electrician, and the tile installers myself, one at a time, to make sure the protocols Zack and I had agreed on actually happened. Those conversations should have been part of the contract. He also could have been part of some decisions that I didn’t even realize could have a healthy component, so next time I build a healthy home I will absolutely hire the consultant as early as possible.

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How to decide what’s worth it

I’m not going to hand you a ranking on the healthy components, because I don’t think there is one.

What I’d actually tell a friend: look at the categories (air quality, water quality, EMFs, VOCs, etc.), look at what each one costs to address where you live, and weigh that against your own sensitivities and your budget. Different people react to different things. I’m more sensitive to microbial stuff than to chemicals, so VOCs matter to me but they’re not where my money went first. Your list might be the reverse, and that’s not you doing it wrong.

One more thing to consider is whether or not you can add it in later. The inside-the-walls choices (insulation, wiring, etc) are essentially now-or-never, so on a new build those decisions come first in my view and you likely can’t do much about it if you’re working in an existing house you’re not taking to the studs. A water filter or an air filtration system can be added later, as long as you leave the space for it. So leave the space if you’re not sure!

Your environment factors into the order of the list too, and so does who’s available to do the work in your market. Honest example: insulation probably belongs near the top for most builds, as it should. At the beach however, my options and my environment pushed me to a choice (spray foam) that healthy-home people argue about, and I’ll get to why. The point is that the “right” answer shifted because of where the house is, who could install what, what my personal sensitivities are, and cost. That’s true of almost every category.

So here’s what we did, category by category, and the reasoning. Take what’s useful, skip what isn’t yours.

Air

The house runs medical-grade whole-house air filtration, one unit per HVAC system, mounted in front of the HVAC unit itself. That means you need physical clearance for it, so it’s easiest to plan at design time. It can be retrofitted if the space exists.

I wouldn’t have chosen this on my own. I knew standalone purifiers. I didn’t know what actually works inside a whole-home system.

Our consultant also talked us out of something I thought we were supposed to ask for (which honestly helped with building trust with him!) HVAC companies love to offer an ‘upgrade’ to add a UV light in the system to kill bacteria. His take: the air moves past that lamp too fast to do much at all. It’s a very common upcharge that we chose to skip.

The house has an ERV, which exchanges air rather than just exhausting it, which is important when building an airtight structure. Also the range hood is sized to match the makeup air the house can supply. It sounds like a boring mechanical detail, but it is a big factor as to whether a sealed house works, because an oversized hood in a tight house creates pressure problems.

Given the environment at the beach, we also added dehumidifiers, one per HVAC unit. We also included one in the attic, which is an often forgotten space since it doesn’t have its own HVAC unit but the humidity in the attic can cause issues at the coast. All of our dehumidifiers are set to 50%, right in the middle of the 45 to 55 band recommended. There are problems on both sides of that range, so the middle is the goal, and not “as dry as possible.”

Water

I’ll tell you what made me take water seriously, because it wasn’t a study. It was sludge.

I used a countertop distiller at our Charlotte house for years. Distill, add the minerals back, done. I brought that same distiller to a different house at this same beach, ran it the same way, and found a thick layer of sludge in the bottom of the distiller after the cycle ran. My Charlotte water had never done that. I was absolutely shocked and disgusted. I haven’t drank unfiltered tap water in Isle of Palms since then lol.

So when we built, we tested first. Zack sent a sample of our water to a lab, and we chose the filter based on what was actually in it. That’s the piece of advice I’d give anybody at any budget: test your water, then buy the filter that removes what your test found. Otherwise you’re buying a filter for someone else’s water.

What’s in the house: whole-house filtration covering everything, showers and sinks included, filtered past drinkable. Ours sits outside, which works here since we don’t really freeze. If yours has to live inside, put it near a drain, because it needs flushing a couple times a year for maintenance.

We also added a whole-house water structuring unit. Structured water is woo to a lot of people, and I’m not going to argue anybody into it. It’s a layer I added on top of real filtration, not instead of it. Some would say it’s not necessary but for me, if I’m building my dream home, it was something important to me. Drinking “dead” water doesn’t really help our bodies, and the structurer adds “life” back to it. New to structured water? Natural Action, the brand we used, has a simple beginners guide that explains it better than I can. Which unit you'd need depends on the size of your house, and there honestly aren't many options to choose between, so it's not an overwhelming rabbit hole. For once.

The next layer for the water is an inline Clearly Filtered unit on the refrigerator water and the stand alone ice maker. The water coming out of the tap is perfectly fine to drink but I know ice makers and refrigerator water lines are notorious for build up so I wanted the water as filtered as possible there. Since I’m “extra” with all of this, I do plan to add an under-sink reverse osmosis setup in the pantry faucet with minerals added back once we are spending large chunks of time there ourselves.

(On RO vs distilled vs spring water: I think rotating between them is good, and whatever strips contaminants out (RO and distillation), be sure to add minerals (or even sea salt) back. There are several scandals circulating right now about expensive spring water being bottled and sold that is actually no better than tap water, so I don’t think you can win at anything these days – rotate and do your best!)

Electrical

People tease me about this category because it can feel extra if you’re not familiar with dirty electricity and EMFs. It also happens to live inside the walls, so most of it was now-or-never so we went for it.

The house is wired in metal-clad wiring throughout. Standard residential wiring is Romex; metal-clad is usually used in commercial properties. We had to find an electrician willing to do it and pay extra since it’s not his normal work. It cuts way down on dirty electricity and EMFs, and once drywall goes up, that decision is closed forever.

Every bedroom has a kill switch on the bed wall. The guidance I follow is nothing electrical within three feet of your head while sleeping, which means outlets behind the nightstands would be out. But this is a rental and guests want to charge phones by their beds, so instead of removing outlets we added a switch that cuts power to the whole wall behind the bed. Guests who don’t care never notice. My family and I sleep with the wall turned off.

There’s a kill switch for the router too, so the Wi-Fi can be turned off overnight. Every bedroom is hardwired with ethernet availability, and the ethernet still works with the Wi-Fi down. Additionally the wi-fi router lives away from the bedrooms in a front hall closet, never behind a bedwall. At our Charlotte house we do the cheap after market version: a plug-in timer on the router. We set a time for it to be turned off each night and back on in the morning. Easy to use but also annoying on those nights my husband’s trying to work late!

We opted for no dimmer switches anywhere. Dimmers are a known source of dirty electricity and skipping them is free. If there are certain spaces where you think having a brighter and dimmer option are important, consider bulbs that have different settings. We use circadian light bulbs at home in Charlotte and I LOVE them but they can be expensive so we started with the areas we keep lit up most often at night and will gradually swap out the rest over time.

There’s one more electrical story, about three specific rooms in this house and a can of black paint, and I’m telling it at the top of Friday’s post where everyone can read it, because it’s probably considered the strangest thing we did and it deserves more than a paragraph.

Insulation

As I mentioned earlier, we ended up using spray foam insulation, which is controversial in healthy-home circles. I really didn’t want it and we went back and forth on it many times. The coastal environment decided it for us though; the house needed to be sealed, and tightly given how humid the oceanfront air is, and it’s on pilings, so we needed to insulate underneath the house as well. Somewhere inland, I’d look hard at rock wool or another natural option, because I don’t love the VOCs with spray foam and the risk of failure is not zero so you really have to make sure you have an installer that is very experienced. Unfortunately the cleanest ingredient wasn’t the right answer for this house. Protecting the house from the environment was the most important factor and for most people the VOCs on exterior walls will not have a huge impact.

A tight house is only a good idea if you’re also bringing in fresh air on purpose. That’s the ERV again which I mentioned above. These decisions travel in pairs. Older built houses were intentionally built to breathe so the systems needed were different. There are two schools of thought on it but whichever you choose make sure that the other decisions you make pair up with the breathability of the house.

Bathrooms

We chose to tile not only every bathroom floor but every bathroom wall as well. Water can go everywhere in a rental bathroom and drywall is a bad bet if you’re avoiding moisture damage. We used large format tiles in the showers when possible to minimize grout lines, the easiest access point for moisture to get behind the tiles. For waterproofing, we went with a Schluter membrane waterproofing system on shower walls, floor, over the curb, and several feet out into the room. The standard would just be in the shower. In a small bathroom I’d waterproof the entire floor.

A lot of my bathroom thinking came from Christine’s class, and the full bathroom playbook, waterproofing coats, leak testing, etc will be in Friday’s post.

Leak protection

My favorite unglamorous money in the house: prevention. I put Leak detectors under every sink that alert when there is a pipe leaking. Rubber mats under every sink, with the detector sitting in the mat so it catches a slow drip. We also put leak detectors and metal drip pans under the ice maker, dishwashers and washing machines. These detectors have a small sensor and then a wire connected to the battery box so you don’t have to move out the appliance to change the batteries. Additionally we also put a whole-house leak detector on the main line that shuts the water off automatically when there is a leak. I recommend the whole-house shutoff to everybody. Water damage stories usually start as a small leak nobody found for a while and I think it’s a worthy investment.

Gas versus induction cooktop

This debate ate an unreasonable amount of my research time. I was leaning induction, because I’ve read that gas in the house can be an air quality concern. Then I read about induction and read about a real EMF concern. After months of reducing EMF everywhere else, that gave me pause.

In the end we went gas. It’s a rental, guests know how to cook on gas, and the learning curve for induction can be steep for someone only staying a week. Plus the air filtration and ventilation in this house are legit so I’m confident in the air quality. If we lived here full time, I’d potentially revisit it.

Flooring, Trim, Cabinets

We always choose site-finished white oak throughout instead of carpet in our rentals. Carpet holds onto everything and makes dust and is not easily cleanable or replaceable. Site finishing, rather than prefinished planks, is what let me control what actually went on the floors, and the low-VOC finish we chose couldn’t be smelled two days later. (If you’re extremely VOC sensitive, prefinished cures in a factory instead of your house, and that might be the better direction for you.)

We used solid wood trim for windows, doors, baseboards, etc. Avoid MDF where your budget lets you but especially in bathrooms and wet areas. It soaks up moisture like a sponge and the glue holding it together is like a chemistry set.

We have custom made cabinets throughout the house and they were made of plywood and solid wood, not MDF. I made sure to ask the shop directly what the boxes were made of before signing.

Furniture and bedding

Since it is a rental and we need to buy 9 mattresses at the same time, we chose organic mattresses from Happsy, Naturepedic’s bed-in-a-box line. One thickness, one model, which is why they cost less, but they’re extremely comfortable.

We opted for solid wood furniture wherever possible, no upholstered beds to trap dust and moisture, and natural fiber wool and cotton rugs instead of synthetic.

On the beds we offer Quince organic bamboo sheets, organic cotton duvet covers, 100% cotton blankets, and mattress protectors that are waterproof with an organic cotton surface.

The sofas are also Quince, and full honesty, they’re likely still poly-filled. They do have solid wood frames though, and are sustainable, but it was a budget call to go this route. Sofas in a rental get destroyed every couple of years so we needed to not break the bank. I am a big fan of Quince, as you all know by now, so this felt like a good compromise. Next time I’d look at Medley, which is likely a cleaner option.

Remember, if you’re working in your own existing house, most likely you’re not replacing the furniture in every room all at once. Just be aware of what’s out there and do what you can when you can. You don’t have to do everything all at once. I didn’t do everything perfectly in this house even with the intention of a healthy home! The list would be never ending so just do the best you can with the knowledge you have and don’t sweat it too much. This advice is true for ALL of this, not just the furniture.

What all of it actually bought me

People ask if I can feel a difference when I’m there, and I want to answer that carefully, because I recognize that the house is at the beach, and the beach flatters everything.

Here’s my honest answer: At home I fall asleep fine and then wake up in the middle of the night and have a hard time getting back to sleep. There, I sleep through until morning. My husband likes to leave the drapes open so the sunrise over the ocean wakes us up, and at home, any bit of light would keep me awake. There, it doesn’t. I can’t hand you a lab result separating the house from the vacation. I can tell you which one of those places I sleep through the night in.

But the change I’d actually point to is quieter than sleep. Anyone who’s been down enough health rabbit holes knows the background hum: am I doing enough, am I missing something, do we need to filter this water, should we have brought the air purifier. I built this house from scratch, so I know exactly what’s in it and what isn’t. And the hum just stops. I fill a glass of water straight from the tap. Ice from the ice maker, tea from the hot water dispenser, no step in between, no decision to make. I look at a thermostat in one of the most humid places I know and it says 50%, every time. My kids breathe clean air in every room without a single machine humming in a corner. It allows my body to truly REST.

My favorite moment every time we stay there is the initial few steps in the house. Outside is salt air with a distinct smell – the beach! But inside I smell nothing. No fragrance, no bleach, no cover-up scent. Just clean fresh air. If you’ve ever walked into a rental and smelled the air freshener doing battle with something underneath it, you know exactly what I mean. Because of that, I think smelling “nothing” is amazing.

The kids’ favorite moment is heading to their bunk room. It’s got custom solid-wood bunks with bookshelves and reading lights, which they treat as their private fort. They spend more time inside than you’d expect from kids staying at the beach. And the last thing that happens at night, in every bedroom, is somebody flips the switch labeled BED WALL and the wall behind the bed goes quiet. In our room it’s on my husband’s side of the bed so he hops out to get it when we’re ready to power down. Even if it weren’t on his side, I’d probably still make him get up.

We haven’t been renting it for that long but I’ve had guests notice too, which I definitely didn’t expect. We’ve had people write unprompted to ask about the mattresses. A repeat guest told us she could just feel a difference in the air and the water. One guest who describes herself as very EMF sensitive told us she felt great here.

Most mornings when we’re there, I’m out on the porch off our bedroom before the sun clears the horizon, in my pajamas, no glasses, no contacts, because a sunrise isn’t about seeing anything in particular. The water at that hour is still, almost like glass. When we started building, the idea of retiring here felt like a very long way off. Sitting out there looking at the sun peek out over the ocean, it feels like a plan.

If you’re not building anything

I get that probably most of you are NOT currently building a house, but most of this can still be applied to your current house too if you’re interested in cleaning up the environment to best support your family.

Test your water, then filter it. A countertop RO, a countertop distiller with minerals added back, or an under-sink filter at one faucet. Shower and bathtub filters are a one-off you can install yourself. Clean water is probably the top thing I’d recommend. Water is life.

Air. If whole-house isn’t an option, standalone units work. AirDoctor and Jaspr are the two I recommend, and I compared them in last week’s post which you can find here.

Buy a hygrometer (or a few) to know what humidity is actually like in your house. It’s cheap and it tells you whether you actually have a humidity problem or whether you’ve been guessing. You’re looking for 45% to 55%.

Then add a dehumidifier if you live somewhere humid. Even a single room unit, set to that same 45 to 55, can do wonders. We have several in our Charlotte house and usually only need them in the warmer months. The hygrometer let’s you know when its time to turn them on or off for the season.

Put a timer on your router so the Wi-Fi shuts off overnight, or use an outlet with a button you keep by the nightstand. Move the router out of the bedroom while you’re at it.

Swap out your dimmer switches. A cheap electrician visit or a manageable DIY. You know you don’t use them that often anyway.

Go look at where your bathroom fans and your dryer actually vent. They’re supposed to terminate outside. A surprising number terminate in the attic, which is hot, humid, and unconditioned, which makes it the worst possible place to send a steady supply of warm wet air. If they are not venting outside, it’s worth having an HVAC tech check it out. If you have an ERV you may not even have exhaust fans so worth a check.

Leak detectors and drip pans: these under the appliances and these under the sinks, plus a whole-house shutoff on the main line if you can swing it.

Solid wood over MDF and particle board when the budget allows. This goes for trim as well as furniture.

And when new furniture comes in, give it some air. Let pieces off-gas in the garage if you can, or open the windows and doors for a while, or just don’t stay in the house right after the furniture lands. That last one is what we did, and I know it isn’t available to everyone. I also ran the Jaspr on high in the main rooms for the first few weeks after the new furniture arrived. If you’re seriously VOC sensitive, make an actual plan here. If you’re just trying to do better: we’re bombarded all the time, you will most likely be fine even with the new furniture, so get some fresh air or a filter running and move on with your life.

★ THE SHORTCUT

• You can’t do everything. Weigh air, water, EMFs, and VOCs against your budget, your environment, and your own sensitivities.

• Decide your healthy-home requirements before you hire a builder.

• Test your water before you buy a filter.

• Buy a hygrometer before you buy a dehumidifier, then hold 45 to 55%.

• Skip the HVAC UV light.

• Avoid MDF. Solid wood and plywood are the way to go if you can.

• Check where your bathroom fans and dryer actually vent.

• Leak detectors, drip pans, and a whole-house shutoff are the cheapest insurance in the house.

Before you go

Friday: the build spec. Friday I’ll list out all the brands and details, what I told each sub before they started, and a downloadable checklist you can hand a builder. The top of that post, free for everyone, is the story of the three rooms and the black paint. The spec below it is for paid subscribers.

And tell me: which of these categories is the one you’d tackle first in the house you’re in right now? Have you been curious about how to make your home healthier? Would you consider renting a vacation house based on it being a healthy home? I’d love to get your thoughts on if this is a topic you’re familiar with or if this was all new for you!

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️

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LIVE WELL

AirDoctor vs. Jaspr: What I’d Actually Buy for Each Room

★ The Shortcut

The short hit

Want cleaner air without a whole-home install? The brand I run all over my house is AirDoctor, and it’s where I’d tell you to start. Jaspr is the splurge on a standalone unit if you want the prettiest, sturdiest machine, with a real-time screen and a lifetime warranty. Here’s how I’d actually spend it:

• Bedrooms and normal rooms: a medium AirDoctor. I have the 3000/3500; I’d buy the 4000 new. One in every room where you sleep or sit a lot.

• Open living/kitchen: size up. The AirDoctor 5500 for an open space, which cleans it at a full four changes an hour. Or spend slightly more on the Jaspr if you want the look and the build.

• Office or anywhere you spend hours: add one there too.

• Only buying one to start? Make it the bedroom. You spend a third of your life there doing most of your body’s repair work.

My rec? Wait for the AirDoctor sale (sometimes up to ~$300 off) and buy direct from their site where it’s cheaper than Amazon when it’s on sale. And run a HEPA vacuum over the filters once in a while to stretch their life.

The picks

• AirDoctor — what I run, and my everyday pick. I have the 3000/3500; I’d get the 4000 new for the look, or the 5500 for a large open space. I also highly recommend adding the full year of replacement filters onto Amazon Autosubscribe so you don’t have to think about it!

• Jaspr — the splurge: steel build, commercial air-scrubber pedigree, real-time air-quality screen, lifetime warranty. Sold direct only.

• A HEPA vacuum for the filter-life trick — I use this Shark, but any HEPA vacuum works. We recently got this HEPA backpack vacuum too which would work great!

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The story

One night while my son was cooking something in the oven, the whole downstairs went a little smoky. I grabbed the air filter out of our bedroom, carried it downstairs, and the second I plugged it in it shot up to high power and glowed red. We could watch it work. Once the air cleared, it dropped right back to normal and went quiet. I knew it was important to filter the air we breathe for things we can’t see, but that was the night I could actually see it happening.

Let me back up.

When I started cleaning up the personal care products in our house, I went down a lot of rabbit holes. What you put on your body matters as much as what you put in it. And in one of those deep dives, I learned the thing we’re most exposed to all day isn’t any product at all. It’s the air we’re breathing (and the water we drink, but I’ll save that for later.)

So I went down the path to learn about what I could do for air filtration. There are whole-home systems, but our house was already built, and that felt scary and expensive to touch. No whole-home system. No renovation. As a first step I needed something easy I could just plug in. I did the research deep dive. Austin Air Systems came up a lot in the wellness blogs I followed at the time (10+ years ago), but back then it was so expensive and not exactly something you want sitting out in a room as they were big and bulky. AirDoctor as a brand started popping up in places I was looking too. But honestly? Every wellness influencer around was pushing AirDoctor, so I was skeptical. I waited and waited in analysis paralysis and then they ran one of their sales, where you can usually get $300 off if you wait for it, and I caved. I bought two of their medium sized ones, the 3000 version at the time, one for our room, one for the nursery. We only had one kid then.

I didn’t really believe it but I could feel the difference in our bedroom. The air was fresher. We slept better. So I kept adding them, another baby, another filter, then one for the living room and kitchen based on the story I opened with.

As I mentioned above, I actually know they work because you can SEE the red light come on when they are working harder. When we cook, even when there’s no smoke, just the smell, they cycle up. A couple summers ago we got wildfire smoke/haze all the way here in Charlotte from Canada, and every time we opened a door the filters would climb to red even though it looked clear outside. One night every filter in every bedroom went red/loud overnight. Since it was every room at once it didn’t feel like a glitch, so I assumed it was something going on with our HVAC. We had someone come out to check, and sure enough we had an exterior exhaust issue and we fixed it. Now every single time the HVAC gets serviced, I notice the bedroom filters go red the day the techs leave, because they’ve stirred up all the dust that was sitting in the system. The filters catch it. That’s my proof they’re doing their job.

Here’s AirDoctor’s actual pitch, and what won me over past the influencer noise. They call regular HEPA a 1943 standard, and their UltraHEPA is independently tested to capture 99.99% of particles down to 0.003 microns, which they say is 100 times smaller than the ordinary HEPA cutoff. The second filter is a carbon/VOC filter aimed at the gases and odors most purifiers ignore, the off-gassing, the cooking smells, the cleaning-product fumes. They’ve even had it third-party tested to pull live viruses like SARS-CoV-2 and H1N1 out of a sealed chamber. So it isn’t only catching dust, it’s going after the stuff you can’t see or smell.

We’ve had ours for years at this point, even though they still get a lot of hype on the internet. You do have to change the filters, and there are two in each: a HEPA and a carbon. You swap the carbon one twice a year and the HEPA once a year. There’s an indicator light that tells you when it’s time to change one or another, so you’re not guessing. Yes the filters can get expensive, but then I remember THIS IS THE AIR WE BREATHE EVERY DAY and it’s important so it’s worth it to me to keep up with the cost of the filters. Here’s a tip someone passed me that I’ll pass to you: run your normal HEPA vacuum over the filters every so often (we do it once a month) and it stretches their life past the six-month or one-year mark. The light still tells you when they’re finally done and need a swap though.

My favorite feature? The “Dim” button. One push and every light goes dark, the panel, the LEDs, that glowing blue dot in your bedroom, gone. You can leave the panel on in the daytime if you want to watch the numbers, but we run ours on Dim, 24/7, in every room. I hate when an electronic in my room (which are minimal!) disrupts my sleep with the tiny LED light.

When we built our healthy home at the beach from the ground up, I knew I had the opportunity to add air filtration right into the build process (that’s its own post coming soon). Me being me, I was a little over the top about it all, and right after we moved in I knew I wanted a separate filter just for the VOCs, because brand-new furniture and other new products off-gas for a while. I’d been eyeing Jaspr for a while, it came out after I had already purchased all of our AirDoctors. It is a commercial-grade air scrubber and catches tiny particles like VOCs too, so I wanted to explore it more. It costs more than the AirDoctor (but still less than the OG Austin Air System), but it’s genuinely beautiful, and you only change out one filter every six months, sometimes less depending on use. During the California wildfires I watched a lot of people call it the next level up in air filtration, so I was intrigued. I ended up getting one for the beach, on top of the medical-grade system already in the HVAC system, as one more layer we could pull out whenever we were there.

What makes Jaspr different is where it came from: disaster restoration, the big commercial air scrubbers crews run after mold and wildfire damage. Jaspr basically shrank that machine into something quiet and pretty enough to live in your kitchen. It pairs a true HEPA with about a pound of activated carbon, and it shows your air quality in real time on a little screen, so you’re never guessing whether it’s working (you watch the number jump when you cook, same idea as the AirDoctor’s light but more detailed). It also skips UV light on purpose. Jaspr’s argument is that air moves through the filter too fast for a UV light to kill anything. They lean hardest on mold and smoke. If that’s something you’re concerned about, I’d look deeper at Jaspr.

I didn’t leave it out for rentals in our vacation property. It was for our first few trips during the off-gassing part with all the new furniture and materials in the house. After those initial months, I ended up bringing it home to Charlotte because with the full whole-house system at the beach we didn’t really need it there, and I wanted to run it against the AirDoctors side by side.

Here’s my honest verdict now that I’ve run both for years. People kept telling me the Jaspr was the next level up from AirDoctor, and I believed it going in. Side by side, I think the air comes out just as clean from the AirDoctor, and on paper AirDoctor’s filter is rated to catch even finer particles. Where the Jaspr earns its higher price is the build and the design: steel instead of plastic, a screen that shows your air quality in real time, and a lifetime warranty. If I were furnishing from scratch and wanted the prettiest, sturdiest machine for the main room, I’d still splurge on a Jaspr. Everywhere else, AirDoctor is what I run and what I’d tell you to buy first. On a budget: AirDoctor. Splurge: Jaspr.

One note on which AirDoctor, since there are a few. I have the 3000 model (now sold as the 3500), the older boxy ones, and they’ve been workhorses for years. If I were buying new today I’d get the 4000. It’s basically the same performance, but it’s the newest model and the design finally looks the part, much closer to the Jaspr (though not all steel), which was honestly the one thing the old ones were missing. And for a really big open space, they make a 5500 that clears over 1,000 square feet at that full four-changes-an-hour, right in the Jaspr’s territory (though Jaspr says it can cover even larger open areas.)

The Jaspr lives in our kitchen and living room now, because that open space needed more than the medium AirDoctor we’d had in there (a bigger AirDoctor like the 4000 or 5500 would cover it just as well, I just already had the Jaspr and love how it looks in that room). It blends right in. They’re all pretty quiet on the low settings, though some people crank the speed up in their bedrooms at night and use it as a white noise machine. I leave mine on auto, and when the air’s clean, you barely hear it.

If you want an air filter and are considering a cheaper one off Amazon or from a store, there’s one thing worth understanding first. You’ll find units of every size, down to the size of a water bottle, all making big claims about particle size and how much they capture. But the number that actually matters is how many times a machine can turn over all the air in the room, its airflow. Here’s the real comparison: AirDoctor rates my 3000/3500 to clean a 630-square-foot room four times an hour, the 4000 does 694 sq ft, and the big 5500 does over 1,000 sq ft, all at that same four-changes-an-hour the Harvard/CDC guidance recommends. The Jaspr holds that 4-changes pace up to around 800 square feet, then eases off, which is how it still covers 1,600 square feet at about 2 changes an hour. A sized-up AirDoctor like the 5500 keeps the full 4 changes across a bigger room. On particle size, AirDoctor’s UltraHEPA claims down to 0.003 microns and Jaspr runs a true HEPA to 0.3 microns. Square footage alone will fool you anyway, because high ceilings or a chopped-up floor plan take longer to clear than one open box. Bottom line, both brands blow the little Amazon units away.

Before you go

Do you already run an air filter, or is this the year you finally get one? Hit reply and tell me. I read every single one.

Talk soon,
Kristen ❤️

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LOVE WELL

The first year both of my boys were in school together, we had to be out the door by 7:30. We were used to early mornings (trading floor life will do that), but not with two kids to feed, dress, and load up. And even though I spent years out the door early, I am not, in fact, a morning person. We did the standard night-before stuff, but I didn’t want a fresh to-do list at 10pm when I’m already dead tired.

We did decently well until the last few minutes. “GO GET YOUR SHOES AND SOCKS,” and everyone thunders back upstairs and comes down with one sock, or the wrong sweatshirt, or a toy. “Where’s that paper we need?” and I’m digging through backpacks and the piles in their room. So I stopped trying to fix the whole morning and just went after that last mile, the few minutes right before the door. Almost everything I did lives in the mudroom (and if you don’t have a mudroom, then whatever area you have RIGHT by the door.)

(Full honesty: we homeschool now, so this isn’t my current circus. But I lived it for years, and these are the things that actually worked, not theory. We do still leave the house often so while it’s not always at 7am that we have these problems, I think it is a universal issue of people with kids under a certain age.)

Start here: keep the socks WITH the shoes

If you do one thing this week, do this. Our socks do not live upstairs at all. The whole lot of them live in a bin right where we keep our everyday shoes, by the back door. No more running upstairs for socks at the last second where inevitably that slime or soccer ball or whatever else your kid is into lulls them into distraction. Socks and shoes, same spot.

You don’t need a mudroom for this. If your shoes live in the front hall closet, grab any bin or basket, dump the socks in, done. Everybody has some kind of bin sitting around, so this one is free. I did it for myself too, I’ve got a bin in “my” locker with my socks so when I have a few minutes for a quick walk around the block I don’t have to waste precious seconds grabbing socks to get out the door. It took about five minutes to set up and we felt it the very next morning.

One more thing that made socks a non-issue, at least for my two boys: we got rid of almost every sock except one color. Black, all the same size and style. Now everything matches everything, so nobody’s hunting for a pair, you just grab. Bonus for mom: it’s a gift to your laundry – no need to match socks. This one only works if your kids wear the same thing, but if they do, it’s magic.

That one tip changed my life and it’s yours, free, whether you ever pay me a dime. Go set it up this weekend and report back.

Below the line is the rest of the story of my back door revamp. If you relate to any of this you may want to keep reading: The kid who goes upstairs after breakfast to get dressed and comes back twenty minutes later still in PJs and holding a Lego creation. The teeth that “definitely” got brushed, except they definitely didn’t. The stack of school papers that the teacher sent home Monday but end up crunched in to a ball at the bottom of the backpack Friday, with a permission slip buried somewhere in it.

At the end, you’ll get The Setup: the order to build it in and a map of what lives where. It’s the part I’d hand you if you wanted to knock the whole thing out in one weekend instead of reading about it.

If you’re not in a place to pay for this, that’s completely fine. Stay free, the socks fix is yours, and there’s a free issue every week regardless. But if you need help taming the chaos, the paid path will get you more insight into the systems I really use every day.

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Eat Well

The Back-to-School Lunch Reset: Three Stainless Steel Swaps I Have Never Regretted Buying

The short hit

If you’re about to start packing lunches again, these are the three things I’d buy. All stainless, all bought once, and years later I’m still using every one of them. Two of them can be used on the go (or at home). One lives in the fridge and I did not expect to care about it as much as I do.

If you’re only doing one, start at the top.

The picks

• PlanetBox stainless lunch box. My top pick, and the one still going strong years in. Compartments in different sizes, tiny stainless containers with silicone lids that nest inside and actually seal, TRULY dishwasher-safe, optional swapable magnets on the cover so the “theme” grows with the kid. Yes it’s expensive up front but it lasts forever which means it’s cheaper than everything I would otherwise have replaced over the years. It’s the Rover model — $55 new, and I caught mine on a back-to-school sale for $43. Two moves before you buy: check for a back-to-school sale, and check your local moms’ group for used ones (mine ran about $20). Shop the PlanetBox.

• The stainless steel snackle box, the version with the flat ice pack. Same-size compartments in one carrying case, sized for a family spread rather than one person’s lunch. The ice pack sits flat underneath the containers and the lid still closes, which is the entire reason I bought this version after using two others previously. It’s $44 — worth it for stainless, though they also make a $24 plastic version if you’re not quite at the “no more plastic” stage yet. Shop the snackle box.

• Stainless fridge containers with clear lids. Sold as cheese containers. I use them for opened deli meat, bacon, and cheese I grate myself. Slim, stackable, all one size, and you can see what’s in them without picking them up. Shop the fridge containers

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The story

The lunchbox I hesitated on

I had heard about PlanetBox and I had heard it was expensive. Buying one for a preschooler felt a little insane.

My oldest was heading into preschool and camps and suddenly lunches needed packing. Around that same time, I was learning how much materials matter, what a container does to the food sitting in it. I’d already swapped everything in our kitchen from plastic to glass, so the lunch box question was going to come up eventually since I knew I didn’t love to use plastic.

Everyone I asked about the PlanetBox said the exact same thing: yes, it’s expensive, and it will last for years.

I thought about what I grew up with. Cheap character lunch boxes that either broke or that you outgrew emotionally by the following school year if not sooner. The clasps would break, or you’d just be done with the character a month after you “had to have it”. When I was starting my lunchbox search, bento-style plastic ones were popping up everywhere. I didn’t love the plastic but wasn’t sending hot food so I thought maybe I could overlook it, but they ended up being worse in a quieter way…not truly dishwasher-safe! The lids warp or sometimes even melt. Hand-washing a multi-compartment lunch box every night was NOT going to be on my bingo card.

So I caved and bought two PlanetBoxes in 2019, because I had a second son coming up right behind the first, and told myself it would pay for itself across the years. 7 years later I’m here to report it absolutely did!

One of thing things that actually sold me was the little stainless containers with silicone lids that nest inside the compartments and seal tight. That was the key to sending yogurt in a lunch box without the whole thing becoming a crime scene.

There are interchangeable magnets for the cover so it can “grow with the kid” as their interests change, which my kids could not have cared less about, but I know some kids might care more. What I used the lid for was a dry-erase marker. Love, Mom, have a great day. I could jot a note with the marker if I was feeling like my kid needed a pick me up. Or more often I would jot down whose lunch it inside, back when I was packing multiple at once (more on that later). The dry erase can be wiped off with a paper towel and any remaining comes right off in the dishwasher.

Once both kids were in school, making lunches became one of those daily to-dos I dreaded. It just felt like it took so much time and effort and made a big mess when I was cutting up fruits or veg or cheese or whatever. My efficiency brain decided I needed to batch prep and do more than one day at a time. With two kids, two or three lunches at a time meant I needed six PlanetBoxes but I barely hesitated knowing how well they worked. Buying six new would have been steep, so I bought several used from a local moms’ group and they showed up in perfect condition. That works in reverse too. When my kids age out, I can resell them because I know they will be in great shape. Not a sentence I think I could ever say about another lunch box, especially after 7+ years of use.

Something I didn’t see coming? We homeschool now and nobody in this house is packing a lunch, at least not daily. And yet, I still use all of them!

We use them for picnics. We use them at the beach, where the seal keeps out sand and the kids can open and close them without me. We use them as snack trays when we’re on a road trip like individual charcuterie boards. They stack flat for travel, so we packed food in them for a Disney trip. They fit in the backpack cooler I wrote about earlier this summer, which is exactly why I bought that particular cooler. And I usually pack one for myself now if we’re on the go, because it holds enough food for an adult. And when we are with cousins or friends, they get one too.

The snackle box, third time lucky

“Snackle boxes” (tackle boxes, for snacks) were having a moment a couple of years ago and I bought in immediately, because it’s exactly how my kids eat. A little of this, a little of that. Snack-plate style.

These do a different job than the PlanetBox: the compartments are all the same size and it’s built for a shared spread, not one person’s lunch.

Version one: The first I tried was plastic and off Amazon. I searched and searched for a non-plastic option and it didn’t exist. Plastic was the only option at the time and I made peace with it, because this thing holds cold and room-temp food and never anything hot. Plastic plus heat is where I draw the line. Nine or twelve little containers inside a bigger lidded tray you carry as one unit. It also doubles as a travel charcuterie board, which sounds ridiculous right up until you’re at a beach house arranging carrots and ranch and nuts and honey in their own cups around a board. We loved to pack it for a trip on a boat or even just to keep it in the fridge for afternoon snacktime.

Version two: about a year ago, I finally found an upgraded version where the inner containers are stainless steel and a bit bigger than the original version I had. This realy helped when I was packing for more people. One slight problem was that each inner container had its own separate lid. With small kids, individual lids disappear somehow and because I didn’t realize this was the way the world works, I didn’t do a great job keeping track of the lids. So after a year we had quite a few with missing lids and I needed to find some replacements.

Version three: is what I have now and what I’d tell you to buy. When I was looking for the replacement lids or containers I stumbled upon what I had been dreaming of. Stainless containers inside a larger carrying case, just like the last version, but the detail I had genuinely been hunting for finally existed. This one has a flat ice pack that fits exactly underneath the containers and still lets the lid sit flush. Every other setup I’d tried, you add an ice pack and the lid won’t close or the containers won’t stay flat. When you’re just having snacks at home out of the fridge the ice part doesn’t really matter, but when you’re taking snacks out on a boat or to the beach in August the ice is the key! I looked for this exact combination for a long time and was thrilled when I finally found it. I will be guarding the smaller lids with my life this time around lol.

The fridge containers, which I did not expect to care about

These are marketed as cheese containers but the first thing I put in one was deli turkey.

If you buy sliced deli meat you know what happens. The bag gets slimy, it never reseals right, and the meat doesn’t stay fresh once it’s open. Same with the Canadian bacon we get at Costco, where the package is wet and drippy the second you open it and has to go somewhere else immediately.

I used Pyrex lidded containers for this for years. Pyrex is great but it’s wrong for this job: it doesn’t fit into the shallow cheese and meat drawer, it’s heavy, and if you’re looking down at it in the drawer you can’t see what’s inside because the lids are solid. These containers are slim, all one size with interchangeable lids, and they fit in the drawer because they are shallow. The lids are clear plastic (but the plastic doesn’t touch the food) so I can see what’s in there at a glance instead of picking up an opaque Pyrex lid or squinting at it from the side.

These aren’t my leftovers containers, I have others for that. This set does one job: slim, stackable, same-size storage that makes the fridge look organized and keeps a freshly opened package fresher than the package does.

And the other thing that lives in them is any cheese I grate myself. I started grating blocks of cheese after I learned that pre-shredded bagged cheese usually has anti-caking agents in it that isn’t disclosed on the label. Grating a block takes about thirty extra seconds, plus it tastes 100x better and melts better too. I grate the whole block ahead, load these up, stack them in the cheese drawer. My own pre-shredded cheese.

Before you go

Do you have a lunch or fridge container you’d buy again without thinking twice? Hit reply and tell me. I’m always looking for ways to get more organized.

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️

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The story

Every so often I text a friend a Quince link with zero context. Just the link and “trust me.” If you know me in real life, you already know my Quince love is real, so odds are you’ve gotten one of those texts.

My obsession started with their clothes several years ago when I first saw the brand pop up with organic options at low prices by cutting out the middleman. Now it’s pretty much my entire wardrobe. What surprises some people is how much more they carry now besides clothing, and slowly I’ve branched out into almost all of it. I could list a hundred things I’ve bought over the years (sadly). Mostly clothes, sure, but also bed sheets, luggage, purses, wallets, furniture (yes, actual beds and couches), pillows, blankets, kids’ clothes and bathing suits, jewelry, shoes. Even area rugs.

At first, I kept going back because of the fabric. Their clothing lines runs heavy on organic and sustainable materials at really good prices. If you’re just getting started on lower tox living, clothing is probably nowhere near the top of your list, and that’s fine, it wasn’t at the top of mine either. But it’s an area I’m focused on now. Cotton, linen, wool, silk, no polyester. Quince has a lot of it.

Not only do they have the fabrics I want, but the quality is hard to beat and there is true transparency on the pricing. At these prices you’d expect cheap quality. It isn’t. They cut out the middleman and sell direct to you, and they’re upfront about how the pricing actually works. So that cashmere sweater that looks too good to be true? It’s just a really nice cashmere sweater for a really good price.

One thing I love when I’m browsing the site: under each product, they compare it to a couple competitors and show you the price difference. Quince workout clothes will list Lululemon and Athleta with their prices and features in a table right along side the Quince item so you can compare. They do it for everything, even furniture. Go look up the comparable item yourself, the quality is the same. Sometimes I think Quince quality is better.

If you’ve never heard of Quince, where have you been? lol. But seriously, it is worth checking out if you’ve not heard of it. It is the first place I look now when I need something. Tablecloth for a party? Check. Organic baby gift for a friend? Check. Shoes for a wedding? Check. Towels for the guest room? Check. Cutoff shorts for the summer? Yep. I could give you a million recommendations. Instead I’ll leave you my last few buys plus my ShopMy, where I try to keep it updated with the items I think others might love that I can affirm are excellent. Ask me anything specific too, if I haven’t already tried it there’s a chance it’s already in my cart and I can let you know soon what I think 😊

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★ The Shortcut

The short hit

Have you seen a Quince price and assumed the quality must be cheap? It isn’t. They sell direct and skip the middleman, so the too-good-to-be-true cashmere is just a genuinely nice sweater at a good price. Start with the natural fabrics: cotton, linen, cashmere, silk - skip any polyester. New customers get $20 off your first $100.

Links: Quince ($20 off your first $100) · My tested Quince picks (ShopMy)

The last few items I bought:

Clothes for me

• 100% Organic Cotton Gauze Smocked Sleeveless Maxi Dress — $60

• 100% Organic Cotton Gauze Long Sleeve Shirt — $44.90

• Bella Stretch Vintage Shorts — $40

• Organic Cotton Racerback Bralette (2-Pack) — $29.90

• Organic Stretch Ripstop Shorts — $34.90

Not clothes

• Italian Pebbled Leather Sling Bag — $74

• Bamboo Sheet Set — $134

• Kids’ Bamboo Long Sleeve & Pant Pajama Set — $22.90

• Brennan L Sectional (Performance Chenille Linen Blend) — $2,700

• Carry-On & Medium Check-In Suitcase Set — $229.90

Before you go

What’s the one Quince thing you want me to vet for you? I love talking about Quince!!

Talk soon,
Kristen ❤️

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Heads up: some links below are affiliate or referral links. I only ever link things I actually use.

LOVE WELL

Beach Reads and Bubbly: how I found my book club

How it started

One of the best things that happened to me at least six years ago now: I started following Katie of Beach Reads and Bubbly on Instagram (she’s on substack too!) At the time she was a gal in the Chicago area with no kids that loved to yap about books. Now she has three kids and still likes to yap about books. She is an avid reader like me and posts about books she reads with a really positive, fun energy. It’s a happy place on the internet.

Even though she’s blown up since I first started following her, she still gives the best book recommendations. From the very beginning I knew we had very similar taste because what she loved I had already read and loved or when I read what she recommended I would usually align with her final rating (usually but not always). She’s who got me into reading romance, among other genres. She coined the term B.R.A.D. which stands for “beach read after dark” and can be categorized as a spicy romance that’s short on plot but long on spice. It’s actually what you want when you don’t want something deep, or angsty, or thought provoking – it’s the equivalent of scrolling on your phone to numb out, just much more fun. She reads romance, thrillers, mystery, gen fiction, historical fiction, romantasy, etc, and I read all of those plus some non-fiction too. While Katie reads a little of this and a little of that, the core of what she wants are books that make you feel good and who can argue with that.

I started following her right around when I started back in my reading era. In 2020, at the start of COVID some friends and I were chatting about how we now had time to read some of us decided to read a book at the same time. It rekindled my old love of reading and I decided to try to read 20 books that year. Remember this was a time when we literally had no where we could go and nothing to do (and I had two toddlers at home) so while this felt aggressive, it also felt possible, even though I hadn’t been reading AT ALL for years. I ended up reading 21 books and I was so proud of myself! I had used to love reading but only ever read lying on a beach during vacation so it would be a few books a year (which was still more than most people I knew!) but then I had kids and all reading went out the window for 5+ years. For 2021 I was feeling good and decided to try to up it to 26 books, one every 2 weeks. I ended up reading 41! Nearly doubled from the year before. So in 2022 I decide to go all in and up it to 52 books as my goal, one per week. The result? 105 books! My mind was blown. I’d been reading nearly double my expectations every year. There was no way I could read more than 105 books so I set my 2023 goal at 104 books or two books per week. Drumroll please – I ended up reading 142 books in 2023. I know. It was too much. I was spending every free minute reading which was great and also an addiction so I intentionally cut back to limit myself to 90 in 2024 and way back to 75 in 2025 and 2026. I feel like that is a tolerable pace. I often feel like I’m not reading much at all these days but I’m still on track for 75 books a year which is obviously not insignificant. I also sometimes compare myself to my book club friend who has at times read 450 books in a single year!!!! Yes it is very hard to comprehend but I know it as true. If you’re into romance books – check out her IG where she can actually recall minute details from the 400+ books she reads per year: SuperSpecificRomance
(Also want to give some photo credits to another book club friend with a Bookstagram! Check out CLT.Reads and follow along on her reading adventures)

Then she made it local

Anyway, speaking of book club. In 2023, Katie from Beach Reads & Bubbly created local groups (through what’s now Bumble BFF) where people following her on IG could post their city and start a book club locally. I don’t think she expected it to take off the way it did. There are hundreds of these clubs now. She doesn’t actually run them or have anything to do with them – she just brought like minded readers together.

I’d wanted to join a book club since 2020 when I hit my reading stride, but the introvert thing is real (plus, COVID). I tried to get into friends’ existing clubs and they were full (once a cozy book club forms, it’s hard to expand). By 2023, my kids were 5 and 7 and I was ready to get out in the world more.

The first Charlotte meetup was in June. I missed it, and then I panicked a little that the group would form without me and I’d be the odd one out. So I made myself go to the second one in July. About 25 women met at a local brewery and I met so many lovely people! A subset of us got fixated on one book in particular (A Court of Thorns and Roses — someone was still reading it and we ALL wanted to know what she’d think…IYKYK), we swapped numbers, and that little group is now one of my closest friend groups. We travel together, do regular dinners, celebrate birthdays. Three years in, it’s one of the most important parts of my life.

We still go to the bigger Beach Reads and Bubbly Charlotte book club too. Charlotte’s split into a few location-based options now, and ours in South End is still the biggest, 15 to 35 people a month at a wine bar. It’s amazing the turnout we get! Usually two book options a month, one romance and one not, so people can pick (a lot of the time I read both). Every month new people show up after seeing Katie talk about her clubs online, and they get welcomed right in.

About the “bubbly”

As I said, Katie doesn’t run any of the local clubs. Each city votes and decides for itself. Some meet in homes, some in public, some do one book a meeting, some lean literary, some lean romance. In Charlotte we meet at a wine bar, and you can have a drink if you want, not required. The drink-with-your-book-review thing is more Katie’s brand. In Charlotte, you do what you want to do.

What makes a beach read (and how I actually read)

One thing I love about book club is everyone reads the same book but comes in with totally different opinions. Sometimes people love a book while others hate it, and sometimes for the exact same reason. Reading is so subjective. Books I’ve adored, some of my book club friends couldn’t finish, and the other way around. Though for the most part I think the reason the group has clicked is that our general taste in books is similar (we all love a B.R.A.D. too).

Sometimes you just want something brainless and fun, not deep, a.k.a the B.R.A.D. But most of the time, even for romance, I want character development or plot, something to actually keep me engaged. And I like to switch genres, never three thrillers or three romances in a row. Literary fiction, historical fiction, mysteries. The variety is what keeps me reading.

I read almost exclusively on my Kindle now. I gave up physical books, which was hard at first, but a real book feels heavy to me now, hard to lug around. I do audiobooks on walks or in the car, which is the only time it works for me, because my brain has to fully concentrate to listen. So I tend to listen to nonfiction and self-help type books. I process those better by ear anyway and I only listen in small doses.

If you’re on the fence about walking in

If you decide to join a local BR&B book club, you will not meet nicer people. Everyone at these meetups has been pre-vetted, in a way, because they all follow Katie, someone who’s a genuine positive light on the internet and prides herself on staying on the good side of it. The people who show up are connected to that and it makes a difference immediately.

So put yourself out there! I walked in not knowing a soul and walked out with some of my best friends. Everyone was new at some point, and there are always new faces. Having something to look forward to every month, a reason to get off my phone, a book waiting for me: it’s honestly made me a better version of myself over the last few years. If there isn’t a local one near you – be the first! I promise it will be worth it.

The short hit

Want to find your own book club? Follow Katie at Beach Reads and Bubbly on Instagram, see if you jive with her book recs, then look for your city’s local group (they run through Bumble BFF). If there’s one near you, just go and give it a try. You don’t have to know anyone, and everyone there was new once.

What I’ve loved lately (recent 5-star reads)

• My Friends by Fredrik Backman — literary fiction. Everything he writes is heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. A little slow to get into sometimes, but I’m never disappointed at the end. I did this one on audio (recommend it), and it was very well done.

• Dire Bound by Sable Sorensen — romantasy. Loved it. Sort of a Fourth Wing and Hunger Games type of vibe. The sequel Fury Bound just came out and it’s next on my list.

• Dolly All the Time by Annabel Monaghan — one of my favorites of the summer. She’s an auto-read author for me now. She writes women in their 30s and 40s (so hard to find in this genre), real characters that make you feel something, one book a year (I wish it were more!)

• Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino — something a little more out there. A girl who believes she’s an alien sent to earth to gather information. Funny, and also quietly a spiritual-awakening kind of book if you listen to the underlying message.

• Twenty Years Later by Charlie Donlea — The last thriller/mystery I truly couldn’t put down. About a cold case from 9/11…sort of.

• Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy — literary fiction, I opened the year with it. Epic, a little mystery/thriller under it, but more literary. Short but it definitely stays with you.

• Windy City series by Liz Tomforde — sports-team romance, light on plot, easy, and you don’t have to read them in order. I just read book 4, Play Along, and liked it better than book 1.

My August stack (my actual TBR)

I read fast, so this is a best guess, but here’s what’s stacked up:

• Fury Bound by Sable Sorensen — the Dire Bound sequel.

• The Last Letter by Rebecca Yarros — a tear-jerker romance with excellent reviews. It’s an older one that’s been on my list forever and I’m finally getting to it. Same author as Fourth Wing but very different vibes in her contemporary works.

• Into the Blue by Emma Brodie — a decades-spanning love story I keep seeing everywhere.

• Look Closer by David Ellis — a few years old but I’ve heard good things; a thriller.

• In Her Own League by Liz Tomforde — the Windy City spin-off.

Before you go

What’s the last book you couldn’t put down? Hit reply and tell me. I’m always adding to my TBR (to be read) and love to read books that come highly recommended by someone I know!

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️

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It has been a little more than a month since I launched Busy Living Well and I wanted to take a moment to say Thank You for being one of my first paid subscribers. Of everyone who reads Busy Living Well (which is now over 350 people!!), you decided this was worth real money and actually supporting me, and I don’t take that lightly.

I’ve heard from a f…

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LIVE WELL

The clean manicure that dries without a light and lasts like gel

The story

A friend of mine, newer to the wellness world, asked me recently if I’d totally given up nail polish. Fair question, since she knew I don’t like to intentionally put toxins on my body. There aren’t many clean options out there, especially at a salon, and if you’ve tried the cleaner brands they typically last about as long as a regular manicure (aka 3 hours) before chipping – nothing like a gel mani that goes at least a week or more. Most people I know (the non-wellness crowd) have worn gel for over a decade, and I was in the same boat for a long time. They don’t even know there’s another option. I told her what I tell everyone who asks: you must try Dazzle Dry.

A little backstory:

I’ve had long nails my whole life. As a little girl, my punishment for hurting my sister (aka scratching) was getting my nails cut off. I’d cry and cry about it, because even then I loved having them long and painted. So the need for pretty nails ran deep. lol

When working my corporate job, I had a standing salon appointment every other week. It wasn’t that I loved getting a manicure. I actually hated it – it felt like such a waste of my precious time. I just felt like I always had to have polish on to look “polished” (pun intended.) And with gel, I couldn’t easily stop, because it really weakened my own nails. Every appointment also meant sitting there for thirty minutes just to soak the old polish off. So my thinking was, well, I’m already sitting here, might as well get them repainted too since that’s only a few more minutes. For years it was every two weeks: go in, soak it off, repaint.

Toward the end, after I partnered with Beautycounter and learned so much more about toxins, I started realizing how bad gel polish really was. Once I understood how many chemicals are in it, I was done. I didn’t want that in my body, especially pregnant. I got it off one last time and never went back. It was a bit of a “once I learn something I can’t unlearn it” moment, so I quit cold turkey (luckily at a time when I didn’t have a bunch of events coming up 😂).

After that, I was scared to wear any polish at all, and for a long time I just didn’t. Eventually, for a vacation or a wedding or somewhere I wanted to look nice, I’d reach for regular polish, the standard OPI or Essie, which are actually full of toxins too. And it always chipped in less than a day. It also took forever to dry, so I’d be stuck sitting there, unable to shower or get dressed or get in bed. That ultra fast dry was the one real thing gel had going for it (that, and not chipping). With babies and toddlers I never had time to sit and wait, so unless I planned it out before a trip, it chipped within a day or two. I basically gave up.

I kept looking for a clean gel. There just wasn’t one.

I don’t remember how I came across Dazzle Dry but it was during one of my deep dives down the polish rabbit hole. It was described as a kit. I assumed “kit” meant the whole gel setup with all the steps and a UV light, but no, it said no light. I was intrigued. The ingredients were much cleaner than typical polish, so I bought myself a mini kit for Christmas one year. (Mom tip: if you want something for yourself in the few months before Christmas, buy it, wrap it up, add a tag from Santa, and boom you got exactly what you wanted under the tree!)

Ok, so the Dazzle Dry process itself: two coats of base, two coats of color, one coat of top. No light, no UV, no dry time. You do the coats right in a row, and by the time you finish your tenth finger, the first one is completely dry and ready for the next coat. It dried as hard as gel, with nothing extra on top. I loved the fast dry, so I figured I’d at least get to paint my nails more often. I did not expect it to last any longer than regular polish though.

Spoiler alert: I was wrong! It lasts a minimum of a week. I’ve stretched it closer to 10 days on my fingers and definitely 2+ weeks on my toes. And at the two-week mark it’s just like my gel manicure used to be – you only need to redo it because of the clear nail growth at the cuticle, not because it’s chipping at the tips. That’s when I thought, okay, this is the winner for the times I actually want my nails painted.

I’ll be honest about my 80/20. I still don’t paint them every day like I used to. Even though the ingredients are much cleaner than gel, and cleaner than your Essies and OPIs, it’s not the squeakiest-clean option out there. There are a few cleaner regular polishes now, but they don’t give me the quick dry and the long wear that makes nail polish worth it for me. So Dazzle Dry is my cleaner-enough option, the one I reach for when I want color, not an everyday thing.

Removal might be my favorite part though. It comes off with regular nail polish remover, as fast as regular polish, and it does not damage your nails the way gel does! So I can wear it for a weekend or an event and take it off a few days later without it being a whole ordeal. With gel, if I got my nails done for a two-day thing, I felt like I had to leave it on as long as humanly possible, because taking it off meant more damage and such a time-suck that I dreaded doing it more than every two weeks.

Fair warning: a couple of my friends love gel so much they do it themselves at home (hi book club gals!). They’re not on the same toxin-elimination journey I am lol. Some say they’ve tried Dazzle Dry or other non-gel options and it just didn’t last as long as their beloved gel, so I think it might be a person-to-person thing. For me it lasts just as long, often longer, because it’s thinner. Gel always felt so thick that even in thin coats I could peel it off in sheets by the end. I don’t get any of that with Dazzle Dry.

One more thing people keep telling me (I believe it, I just haven’t tested it myself): you need the Dazzle Dry base and top coat, but in between you can use any color polish you want! It’s really the base and top that make it dry and last the way it does. So if you want a wider color range, or an even cleaner brand color layer, you can slot another clean polish in the middle. That said, Dazzle Dry already has a ton of colors.

The short hit

Want to paint your nails without gel, without a UV light, and without as many toxins? Dazzle Dry is the one. Two coats of base, two of color, one of top, no light. It’s dry by your last finger, lasts a week or two, and comes off with regular remover without wrecking your nails. The whole thing, fingers and toes, takes me about 20 minutes. I actually timed it (without rushing) for these photos and it was 14min for fingers AND toes and I let it dry 4min extra min to total 18min before I started making lunch. SO FAST. The salon was an hour minimum, more if they had to soak off the old polish first, and that was JUST for my fingers.

My picks

Buy direct from Dazzle Dry (they run sales often) or on Amazon. Pricing is the same, so it really comes down to whether Dazzle Dry has a sale going that week but I also like to shop direct when I can.

• Starter kit (mini), $39 — the easiest way in, and my top pick to start.

• Full-size starter kit, $80 — pick your own color, all full-size bottles.

• Mini flight, $48 — five colors, no base or top coat.

• My color: Hearts Caress, a medium dusty rose. I also grabbed the “Best of Pinks” mini flight.

Why I go mini: most colors come in full-size or mini, and since I don’t paint often, the minis are perfect. One bottle has lasted me at least ten manicures. You’re supposed to toss old polish every so often anyway (it doesn’t actually last forever, even though we all kept the same bottles for years growing up). With the minis, I’d rather run out than have to throw it out.

Either way it’s less than I used to pay for one salon manicure, and a kit lasts for many. (Quick tip: free shipping kicks in at $50+, so pairing the $39 mini kit with a full size color or a mini color or the mini flight gets you there.)

Before you go

Are you still using gel polish, or did you find a clean polish you actually love? Hit reply and tell me. I would love to explore more clean brands with real recommendations!

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️

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LOVE WELL

Three things that make the cut on every trip

A backpack cooler, a little spice stack, and a homeopathy kit smaller than my hand.

These three come with us when we travel. Not just in summer. I bring them on basically any trip, all year. But summer is when everyone’s actually going somewhere, so it felt like the time to finally write it up.

Two of them (the cooler and the homeopathy kit) tag along on just about any outing, right down to a pool day. The spice stack is more specific: it rides along on the trips where I know I’ll be cooking. None of the three are that exciting or revolutionary. All of them save me constantly. So, one at a time for the details.

The backpack cooler that actually fits our lunch boxes

This one comes with us most places, and it’s just the right size for a day out. The reason I love this particular one: the base is big enough that our PlanetBox lunch boxes (the metal, stainless ones that are built to last, so you’re not tossing plastic and rebuying every year) lay flat on the bottom. Buying a cooler bag that fits a lunch container sounds like nothing until you actually go looking for it. It is really hard to find a cooler that isn’t enormous that will hold those flat. Ours go on the bottom, stacked, and there’s still room up top for drinks or whatever else we need. Whether it’s just the four of us or my nieces are along too, everybody’s lunch fits.

The pockets are the other reason it earns its spot. The outside side pockets are actually big enough for today’s giant water bottles (one side will even hold a bottle of wine, with a strap on top so nothing tips). I keep the top pocket loaded with napkins and disposable utensils and the front pocket stuffed with paper plates, so when we’re out and grabbing food I never have to think about it. There’s a dry compartment for a wallet and phone, elastic bands on the front for a trash bag or whatever else, and a wipeable, leakproof liner inside. We use frozen ice packs instead of straight ice for less mess/water when they melt but either would work.

I tried a bunch of coolers before this one. The others were either too small to fit the lunch boxes flat, too flimsy once you loaded them up, or their bottle pockets couldn’t fit a normal water bottle (which sort of defeats the purpose). And the ones big enough to hold everything were too heavy and bulky to actually want to wear. This one is on the bigger side (35 liters), but once it’s on your back, with the padded straps and the chest clip, it honestly doesn’t feel like it.

We generally use it as the backpack for the day that just happens to be a cooler too, which is exactly why it travels so well. We’ve used it as a carry-on on for long flights (pack the food, use frozen ice packs, refreeze when we land for the return trip), and as the grab bag on road trips so everything stays in one place. And the shoulder strap is quietly overachieving: there’s a stainless steel bottle opener built right into it, a stretchy loop for your sunglasses, and a little card slot too.

Ours is a Maelstrom (a brand you’ve almost certainly never heard of, same). One note: if you don’t have PlanetBox lunch boxes and don’t need a cooler that fits them flat, this Tourit backpack cooler is another one I loved— so much so that after we lost ours once, I bought it again. It’s only slightly too small for the lunch boxes, and if we aren’t packing those then this is the one I grab.

The little spice stack I never travel without

Quick and important distinction: I’m not hauling spices to a friend’s pool. This one only comes on the trips where I’ll actually be cooking — a week in an Airbnb, a camping trip, anywhere I’m making our meals (even just breakfast) instead of eating out.

I stole the idea from my neighbor Andi years ago. She had a medically complex kiddo and had to make all of their food from scratch, even on a week in Europe, which meant cooking every single meal. She posted this little stack of tiny containers that all clip together, each one filled with a spice or a blend from home. It clicked for me immediately, because I cook most of our food from scratch too, and I have blends and brands I actually like.

The thing about cooking on a trip: you don’t need full new bottles of anything (they take up room and it’s a waste of money), but you do need variety, because spices are how you make food taste good. And finding organic spices while you’re traveling is hard. At an Airbnb you never know how old anything in the cabinet is, or if there’s even salt. Camping, you’ve got nothing but what you brought.

So I made my own kit to take with me. Mine is a little airtight stack of six containers, a couple uses of each, and everything stays fresh. I throw it in my bag and I’ve got spices for the whole week. Mine usually has pink Himalayan salt (the salt at rentals is always the cheapest one they could find), organic pepper, organic garlic granules (I put garlic in everything), and my go to blends: Italian, Taco, and Steak, all from Primal Palate (Thrive Market carries them too!). Italian is my most-reached-for. One little section can carry a whole meal. Every friend who’s seen it says the same thing: oh, that’s such a good idea. Because they’ve all hit the exact problems I just described.

If you want more room, or you’re feeding a bigger crew, this cheaper version comes as a set of four 5-container stacks - great for a longer trip, or if you want to pack them up for different purposes (basics vs blends? Bfast vs dinner?)

My homeopathy kit (the one I actually won’t leave without)

This is the number one thing I pack, every time, whether it’s a day trip or a month, whether it’s just me or the whole crew. I know homeopathy isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine. I’ve just seen it work in my own family too many times to leave it home.

The reason it travels so well is the size. A full kit can hold 30 to 50 remedies and still be smaller than the palm of my hand, so it goes anywhere. I’ve reached for it on trips for bug bites and bee stings, for someone feeling carsick, for a reaction after too long in the pool, and for my own nerves before a flight. With that many remedies in one little case, there’s almost always something that helps in the moment. Even a small travel kit usually has enough overlap to cover you.

If you’re brand new to this, a 30c kit is a great place to start. There’s also a kit made specifically for travel, which is the one I’d grab if you just want the on-the-go version. I personally keep a bigger 200c kit everywhere I go, but I’ve been using homeopathy for a while so I’m comfortable with it.

A couple of honest buying notes, because this is where people get burned. I don’t trust one-off single remedies on Amazon. I’ve literally peeled back a label and found a different remedy underneath. Buy a sealed full kit (like the ones I’ve linked), or get the bigger kits straight from a reputable source. The places I trust: Homeopathy Works / Washington Homeopathic, Ollois, Boiron, and Professional Supplement Center as a retailer. A sealed kit in a box is always safer than a loose bottle.

For those that are skeptical of homeopathy, I get it. I was too. But here’s a story about how I became a believer years ago: my son was maybe two or three, up all night, throwing up, crying, frantic, couldn’t settle, wouldn’t let anyone put him down. Hours of it. I gave him a remedy in desperation and nothing changed, so of course you think, see, it doesn’t work. Then I sat down and did a little more research (with homeopathy you match the whole picture, not one symptom), found a better fit, and gave it to him. Within 15 seconds, and I am not exaggerating, he calmed down, fell asleep, and slept the rest of the night. Woke up totally himself. That fast. After that I was all in, because I had proof with my own eyes that it worked.

(I know homeopathy seems too woo for some people so I’m not saying you have to put these kits in your summer bag, but I do! If you’re curious about it, I’m planning to Dive Deeper into my homeopathy journey and how you can get started in some future posts. Keep an eye out if that’s of interest to you.)

The shortcut

The short hit. If you just want the picks: a cooler that holds real food, a stack of your own spices for anywhere you’ll be cooking, and a tiny homeopathy kit. This is exactly what I’d grab.

1. The backpack cooler (my top pick of the three). Fits our metal lunch boxes flat, big bottle pockets, dry compartment, wears like a normal backpack. Ours is a Maelstrom. No PlanetBox to fit? The Tourit is the other one I loved.

2. The travel spice stack, for trips where you’re cooking (Airbnb or camping). My six-container stack, or the bigger four-stack set for longer trips. Fill it with your own blends, mine are Italian, Taco, and Steak from Primal Palate.

3. The homeopathy kit. New to it? Start with a sealed 30c kit. Want the travel version? Here it is. Skip loose single remedies on Amazon; buy sealed kits or go direct to a source you trust (Homeopathy Works, Ollois, Boiron, Professional Supplement Center).

Before you go

What’s the one thing that always ends up in your bag when you travel? Hit reply and tell me. I’m always looking to add to mine.

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️

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FLOW WELL

The shortcut

It’s a three-year monthly calendar. A half-size notebook where the lay-flat spread is a full month, one page per month, three years of them in one book. I keep two: one for life, one for meals, and I run them side by side.

Why three years instead of the calendars you already own? Because I’m always planning further out than they reach. The dentist you book a year ahead. The summer trip you’re mapping in November. A three-year book gives all of that somewhere to live instead of rattling around in your head.

Easiest place to find them is on Amazon (search “three-year monthly calendar planner”). There are plain professional ones and beautiful hardback ones. There are tiny ones and there are big ones. These are the actual ones I’m using right now: Plain One and Pretty One

Extra hack: I use an erasable pen when writing in these – because obviously things can change over time. And pencil is just a mess. Extra fine point refillable erasable pens is where it’s at for calendar planning! Try these (my fave) – they also come in COLORS for those that like a pretty planner.

Why paper, when I’m all about the tech these days

White space on the page means the day is open. And the second I can see that at a glance, I feel calmer and know that there’s room for whatever I’m working on next. No tapping into every single day on my phone to figure out where I have room. I just look down and see it.

When I’m planning rather than reacting, a digital calendar can be overwhelming. I can really only see one day at a time on my phone, and even on a big screen the text gets cut off. When I need to plan something further out, say a dentist appointment for one of my kids, I want the whole week in front of me so I can find the day with space. My kids are sensitive to doing more than one thing in a day, so if there’s soccer that night, that’s not the day. Paper does the one thing my phone can’t. It shows me the shape of the month all at once.

And I’m not anti-tech (I promise). I use my Google Calendar in parallel. I have a hundred tricks and apps for running my day-to-day (more on that later – I’m looking at you Todoist!) But I share a Google calendar with my husband, so my digital view is my stuff plus his plus a few other calendars all layered on top of each other. I like keeping my real stuff clean in the paper book. Once a month I do a true-up between the two. When something new comes up while I’m sitting in my office, I add things to both at once. Away from my desk, I put it in the digital calendar and catch the paper at the next true-up (with a reminder to actually do the true-up, because otherwise I might forget lol). Paper stays for the big stuff. Trips, appointments, plans. And the digital one gets loaded with all the smaller stuff.

How it started

For years I printed out a blank calendar page every single month and filled it in by hand, even with Google Calendar right there. I just need to see the whole month on one page. How it’s spaced out, weekdays versus weekends, how many times a week I’m actually getting to yoga. One day at a time on a screen doesn’t give me that. So one day I thought: I do this every month, why don’t I just buy a book. So I bought a basic calendar book.

Then I hit the wall every planner hits. School-year calendars end in June. Regular calendar years end in December. By early winter I’m already planning summer, sometimes further, and those months don’t exist yet in some books. So the appointment stays in your head, or you leave yourself a note to write it down once you finally have a calendar that reaches that far. Then I found out three-year calendars are a thing. (They make five-year ones too, but three made me feel a little less like a psycho.) Three years of dated monthly pages, one slim book, because it’s only a page a month. My Type B friends (I’m looking at you Adrienne) could not comprehend, but for my Type A brain it was a sigh of relief.

Then I bought a second one, for dinner

I realized I was doing the same thing for my monthly meal plan – printing out a blank calendar and filling it in monthly. Seeing it all at once lets me balance things out, so we’re not eating chicken three days in a row, and I can write “tacos” on every Tuesday and be done. Fewer boxes to fill in, less overwhelming.

I kept the old printed out calendars so I could look back at past meal plans so as not to reinvent the wheel every month. What did we eat last month? What did everyone actually like? And then copy the winners forward. Summer eating is nothing like winter eating, so pulling up what we ate last June beats guessing from last month. And now the two notebooks sit side by side. Soccer on Tuesday means an easy early dinner. Date night already on the calendar for Friday means pizza for the sitter. The meals just key off the life I’ve already got planned.

The part I didn’t see coming

As I said, I’m the stereotypical Type A. I like knowing what’s coming as far out as I can, and honestly, I like having things to look forward to. So the calendar ended up doing more than just keeping me organized. I’d look a few months ahead, see empty pages, and think: room. Room for a trip, room to go see someone. And when a month is already covered in writing, I know I’m done saying yes. So the white space kind of tells me when there’s room to reach for something, and when to protect what’s left. It only works for me because I can SEE it on the page.

If you want to try it

This is for the paper person. If you’re happily all-digital, more power to you, I’m not going to switch you (though the meal one might get you anyway if the meal planning apps aren’t working for your family’s needs). But if you’re already a girl that loves paper and you’re frustrated because you can’t get everything out of your head and onto the page, because the page keeps running OUT, that was me. I wanted it out of my brain and into a format I could “see” across time. I kept having to hold things or leave myself reminders about the dentist appointment six months out. This fixed it. Like I said above, things can change so I use an erasable pen so nothing is locked in. That was another key to making this system work for me.

The easiest way to start is just to put in what you already know. Birthdays, standing appointments, the trips you’ve booked. Then pull up your school’s calendar and dump the whole year in at once. That’s the fastest way to fill the pages, and to feel how much you’ve been carrying around that you didn’t even know you were still holding. And SEE where there might be space between sporting events or appointments for you to just BREATHE (or take a trip).

Before you go

Paper girlie or fully digital? Type A or Type B? And what’s the one thing stuck in your head right now that needs to get onto a page? I’m testing out some digital meal planning things lately that MAY get me to give up my dinner notebook, but I’m not there yet. I’ll keep you all posted when I’m ready to give it up.

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️

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EAT WELL

The story

A decade of these

Every summer we take a big family beach trip to our house in Isle of Palms, SC. I don’t really drink anymore, but I can’t pass these up while we’re there. Mostly because I don’t have to make them myself - years ago we officially deemed my brother-in-law the mixologist. Now he just makes big batches of these all week, and nobody argues. (He also makes a perfect (decaf for me) espresso martini – maybe I can get that recipe sometime too 🤔)

It started back when I was strictly paleo and collecting all of Danielle Walker’s cookbooks. I’d recently made tequila my liquor of choice, so I went looking for a margarita I could make at home. I found one of hers that looked easy, tried it, and it’s been our go-to for more than ten years now. Everyone I’ve served it to falls in love with it, mostly because it’s so simple and the ingredients are so clean but it tastes so fresh.

The first spicy rim was an accident. One of the first years we made these, we’d just been to HomeGoods stocking the beach house and I grabbed a jalapeno salt grinder, basically salt and dried jalapenos. I thought it would be perfect to use it on the rim. After a few rounds we got lazy and ground it right over the top of the drink instead. When at the beach we’re trying to keep things as simple as possible, right?!

The Tajín came not long after. I had a spicy margarita at a charity event with a Tajín rim, my husband and I loved it, but then never saw Tajín anywhere else (not true these days – I think most spicy margs out there come with a Tajín rim!) Later that year I was doing Christmas shopping on Amazon and a box of mini Tajín bottles popped up randomly. I thought they’d be a perfect Christmas stocking stuffer for him! Since the box was so big, we ended up taking a bunch to the beach, which turned out perfect because the humidity there turns a full bottle into a clumpy mess. The minis you use up in a day or two, and the rest stay sealed and ready for the next trip. We kept it stocked there for whenever we were visiting - it really does take the drink to another level.

Eventually the clean-ingredient part of my brain caught up. I knew Tajín probably had some caking agents or something in there that wasn’t up to my standard. But YOLO! It’s a few times a summer, so we drank it and didn’t overthink it. Recently I found the upgrade I wanted: Simply Organic makes a chili lime seasoning that’s basically an organic Tajín, so we’ve switched. To me it tastes the same! Or at least it feels the same, hits the same spots on your tongue, works the same in the drink. No mini bottles, unfortunately. But I use it enough now that I’m going organic from here out. In my most recent search, Redmond Real Salt has an organic one too – I may try that next.

The kids got in on it too

My kids weren’t drinking margaritas, obviously. But they’d tasted the Tajín and loved it too, and I kept catching them stealing the mini bottles and “drinking” them in secret. So we set out to find them a real use for it. The winner: slice up a watermelon, squeeze a wedge of lime over it, and sprinkle on some Tajín / chili lime seasoning. It sounds crazy, but the sweet-salty-spicy thing is honestly perfection, and now they ask for it every time we have a watermelon in the house.

The short hit

The best margarita

It seems too simple, but I swear it’s the best. Best part is it scales up to however big of a batch you need.

• 2 parts tequila

• 1 part lime juice

• 1 part honey syrup

Add all to a shaker with ice, shake shake shake, strain over a fresh glass of ice. Not a traditional marg ingredient, but add an optional splash of club soda (lime Spindrift is preferred) if you want to be sipping all day.

.

The honey syrup sounds scary but is easy. It’s 50/50 honey to hot water, mixed until the honey dissolves. Make it ahead and keep it in a jar in the fridge, which is what we do, especially on a beach week when we’re making batch after batch. You ideally want it cold when you’re mixing the drink. Fresh-squeezed lime tastes best, but if you’re making it in bulk, or drink after drink, bottled organic lime juice that’s not from concentrate works too. Not as good as fresh, but after the first one, you can’t really tell at all.

The recipe credit belongs to Danielle Walker, and I’ll link it here.

To take it up a notch, you rim the glass with chili lime seasoning (Tajín or similar) by rubbing a little lime around the rim so it’s sticky, then pressing the glass into the spices. I recently found this that makes this easy! Or my lazy girl method, just shake some on top. 😂

(Mocktail side note: I wrote this post and then told my husband he had to have a margarita so I could take a photo for my Substack. We had a busy week and he just wasn’t feeling it, so yesterday I decided I’d just make one (at 9am) and not drink it. Then I figured you couldn’t see the difference between tequila and water in the photo, so I used 2 parts Lime Spindrift instead of the tequila to get the shot. It was delicious!!! Especially with the chili lime rim. So we’ve now got a go-to mocktail version worth sipping on all summer. And yes, the photo is actually the mocktail. 😉)

Before you go

I’m always hunting for new ways to use the chili lime seasoning. Hit reply and tell me yours. I will absolutely try it!

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️

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LIVE WELL

The clean cleaner that actually cleans

The story

For many years, I didn’t think about my cleaning products at all – I just bought whatever my mom used to buy when I was a kid. Windex, 409, Clorox, Scrubbing Bubbles, etc. When I started working with Beautycounter back in 2018, I started to learn how many chemicals are in the products we use every day. It wasn’t just about the ones that go on your skin like deodorant, lotion or shampoo, but what about the things you touch constantly? Realizing everything you touch goes into your body too, I knew that cleaning supplies and laundry detergent would be the obvious next things to swap.

The problem was I didn’t know what to actually buy. So many brands out there today are greenwashing. They use all the right words, convincing you it’s “clean” and don’t back it up with the right ingredients. The tool I leaned on was the EWG (Environmental Working Group) database, where you can search a cleaning product and see its score. More than once I’d find something I was sure was clean, look it up, and unfortunately it wasn’t. Mrs. Meyer’s is one a lot of people grab because they think it’s “clean” based on the label, but if you look it up in the database, it’s actually rated a D.

So at first we just used Dr. Bronner’s Castile soap. Unfortunately, for cleaning, it just didn’t do it for me. It felt like I was smearing soap around my counters instead of actually cleaning. It felt nothing like a real countertop cleaner, like the 409 I used to reach for. Then I heard about Branch Basics, saw how clean the ingredients were, and tried it. I’ve been using it almost exclusively for years now.

It was a little intimidating at first because it’s a concentrate you mix yourself. It seemed complicated. I was wrong. It takes about three seconds now. You get multiple bottles out of each concentrate, so it lasts a long time, and I use it on basically everything: bathrooms, kitchen, glass, mirrors. The bottles even tell you exactly how much concentrate to add for each job. We also use the concentrate for foaming hand soap, just a splash into a foaming pump with water. When on the go I keep a travel-size bottle in my bag – I’ve used it as hand soap when the airport bathroom fragrance is overwhelming, as laundry detergent in an Airbnb, or even for a quick hotel room sink wash. There are so many uses!

The thing people really want to know: does it actually clean when something is genuinely gross? My experience? Yes. Honestly, for day to day I mostly use a wet Norwex cloth (if you don’t have one, find someone who sells them, it’s worth it!). But when my 8 year old has been baking with honey and I’ve got a big mess to clean up, Branch Basics works perfectly. Since you can adjust how much soap goes in each bottle, you can make it as strong or as mild as you’d like. When we get the house deep cleaned, we ask the cleaners to use our Branch Basics only, and the house is sparkling after. The one honest caveat: if you’ve got heavy buildup in your shower, this might not strip all of it. I’m still figuring that one out myself lol. For everyday cleaning, including big kitchen messes and dirty kids, it pulls its weight as well as anything I’ve ever used. Big bonus points from me for the fact that there are no toxic “fragrances”!! (ALWAYS avoid Fragrances – it’s by far the worst possible ingredient to find on a label.)

When you buy from the Branch Basics website, they have an awesome subscription program so you don’t have to think about reordering (I love a subscription for products I use regularly). But you can buy one-off as well. They also sell bottles in both plastic and glass with lines so you know how much concentrate to use (but you can also use your own bottles if you break theirs!) If you are in a time crunch though and need it NOW, they recently started carrying Branch Basics at Target, which is awesome! The Target concentrate bottles are smaller than the ones you buy direct, and I assumed they’d be more expensive, but me being me, I did the math per ounce. It’s not more expensive! So I recommend the direct site if you want the $10 off your first order (and to have the subscription option, so there’s no thought when it’s time to reorder) and grab it from Target if you want the ease of picking it up ASAP!

I’ve got a couple other concentrate brands I’m starting to test and I’ll report back. But if you want one simple swap toward a lower toxin burden for you and your family, this is the one I’d start with.

The short hit

If you want one easy swap to lower the toxin load in your house, start under the kitchen sink or wherever you keep your cleaning products. Branch Basics is a multi-purpose concentrate you mix with water, and it’s one of the only cleaners I’ve bought for years. One bottle of concentrate makes multiple bottles of cleaner, so it lasts a lot longer than the other stuff you’re used to buying. Buy it one of two ways: direct from BranchBasics.com (for $10 off your first order), or if you need it ASAP, at Target!

Before you go

What’s the one product under your sink you keep meaning to swap? Hit reply and let me know and I’ll tell you if you can use Branch Basics for it instead!

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️

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I’ve been quietly building something, and I want your help pointing me in the right direction of where to dive deeper.

For years the systems that keep my own house running have lived in my head and in my spreadsheets (the meal plan, the holiday timeline, the whole operation), and a few of you have been telling me for ages to just make them shareable already. So I plan to, but I’d so much rather build what you actually want than to guess and hope it lands.

Two quick polls and one open question and I’ll go back to building. It should take you only a minute or two but would mean so much to me!

First, the big one. Here are five systems I could build out this year, the exact systems I run in my own house. If you could only start with one, which would it be?

The poll only lets you tap one, so tap your top pick. Then PLEASE reply and tell me any others you’d actually grab, even if that’s all five. That helps me more than almost anything.

Okay, one more quick tap. This one just helps me figure out HOW to hand these to you:

And the part I most want to hear: what’s missing? What would you pay for that isn’t on that list up there? Reply and tell me, even one line. I will take all of the replies seriously and share what I can!

As I am trying to help lighten the mental load for as many women as a I can with this little Substack and these systems are what have lifted it for me over the years. I’m excited to share more and want to start with the biggest need first!

Please reply!

Talk soon, Kristen ❤️

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If you’re new here, read: Part 1 - The Trading Floor and Part 2 - The Breadcrumbs

The two things in my way

So there I was, silent tears running down my face in my own guest room for the first time in thirty years, seeing an energy healer on my laptop between work calls. And somewhere in the year and a half that followed, the fog kept lifting bit by bit until I could finally see the thing I’d been avoiding. I wanted out.

But wanting out and actually leaving are two very different animals, and two things stood squarely in my way. My identity. And the money.

The identity piece went deep. If I wasn’t the corporate badass juggling everything, then who was I? I was so tangled up in being the capable one that walking away felt like erasing myself. Not to mention that ingrained part of me that kept telling me walking away was failing at something. And there was a specific shame I could not shake: the thought of having childcare but no corporate job (since I already had the 10 week experience of being home alone with them and what that did to my mental health). I was embarrassed by it. Who keeps the nanny and quits the job? (Plenty of people, it turns out, but at the time I was certain I’d be judged for it.) Katie and I worked in session on the identity piece for a year and a half, maybe closer to two. Not “talked about it.” Worked on it, until the story I was carrying about who I had to be actually loosened its grip. The mind is really really good at telling stories and then holding on to them for dear life.

Then the money. After climbing the ladder for close to 15 years at an investment bank, I made good money. Many would say really good money. The thought of giving it up because I “didn’t love going to work” felt insane, and borderline irresponsible, especially to me. My parents divorced when I was really little and I came out of it with a bone-deep need to be able to take care of myself no matter what. The thought of handing over the reins and relying fully on my husband’s income terrified me. Even though he made enough to support our family easily, it was more about how it would make me feel than the real actual money.

The thing that finally shifted it was something my husband pointed out that I’d somehow never counted. All those rental properties I was managing, making every single decision on, pouring my nights and weekends into, they brought in real income. And because I did all the work, he’d always thought of that income as mine. I had genuinely never framed it that way. Once I did, a lightbulb just went off. I already had another job. I already brought in income. I could leave the bank, run the real estate full time, keep our childcare, and have a hundred times more flexibility in my life.

COVID, of all things, made it obvious. Our real estate business took off during that period. I had multiple properties under construction, and because we were all home anyway, both laptops sat side by side on my desk. When the market closed and my trading day wrapped up, I’d close the work laptop, open the personal one, and pour my evenings and weekends into the properties. At some point it stopped being a side thing. It was a job. I’d just been doing it after hours, on top of another job, plus being a mom and a wife and a whole human being. When I looked up and really took a moment to take my office in, seeing it physically set up for TWO jobs gave me the permission to go back to just one (just happened to be the OTHER one rather than the original).

Even then, it took me lots of real inside work with Katie to actually get ready and take the leap. To become the version of me who could walk out the door. And then, right after I hit the tipping point and put it out there, the universe did something I still can’t fully explain.

In February 2021 I went to my boss and told him I was ready to step away, that I was burnt out and wanted more time with my family. He told me I was a rock star employee and that he wanted to support me, and he offered me a six-month leave of absence. A test drive. Try it, and if I hated it, come back; if I loved it, quit from the leave. It was genuinely generous, and I went home fully planning to take it.

Then I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and just knew. The leave would just be kicking the can down the road. That seat wasn’t mine anymore, my heart wasn’t in it, and if I didn’t rip the bandaid off, the decision would hang over the whole “time off” and I’d never actually land in my new life. The next day I thanked him and told him I was sure. We set up a three to four month transition, and I’d be out by late June.

What happened next is what solidified for me the idea that the universe always has my back, what’s for you can’t land until you make space for it, and we are ALL powerful manifestors.

The sign I couldn’t explain

That May, while I was working out my last stretch, another bank came to my husband with a job offer. He didn’t even want it, he liked his job. I said, what’s the harm in interviewing, we’re still working from home for COVID (yes, still, in summer 2021), go gather information, nobody will even know. So he interviewed. They offered. He said no thanks. They asked what job he would want, and he basically designed his own dream role. They said sure. He ended up leaving the trading floor before I did, even though I was the one who decided to leave first! (Annoying! LOL)

The sign from the universe that I was on the right path? The new job included a pay raise for my husband, and what they offered him was almost exactly the amount of income I was walking away from. Our household income didn’t change. One of the biggest blockers I’d spent over a year clawing my way over - the money - was just taken care of like that. And neither of us had engineered it. I just trusted that we could make it work if I left and we would figure out how to live a slightly different, less expensive lifestyle, and before I was even gone we had a way to “make up” my income without any extra effort. If you’ve ever wondered whether I believe in manifestation, that’s the moment I stopped wondering. And I now tell that story to everyone I meet that is afraid to move forward – you never know how you will be taken care of until you put it out there that you’re ready to let go!

The leaving itself was anticlimactic. After fifteen years, I never got to walk the floor and say goodbye, because we were still in lockdown all that time later. I sent messages to the people I would miss, closed one laptop, and kept working on the other. My husband had an industry required 90 day transition period between firms (still paid!), so that summer we were both not working, both still getting paid (I had negotiated a severance package), with two little kids, three and five. We looked at each other and thought, this will never happen again where we all 4 are home and have this kind of flexibility?? So we decided to go to Hawaii for a month with the kids. (The irony that TODAY we’re both working from home for ourselves and the kids are homeschooled and we have the same flexibility we had that summer, is not lost on me. 😂)

That was five years ago. My life today looks nothing like anything trading-floor me could have pictured. I travel the world on spiritual retreats. I homeschool my boys (elementary age is my jam!) with a wild amount of flexibility. I do 1:1 biomagnetism sessions and energy work, the exact kind of work that pulled me out of my own hole. I still love a spreadsheet, some things don’t change, but the grind of fifty and sixty hour weeks in a windowless seat is just gone.

And Katie. I owe so much of this to her that words feel too small for it. Over the years we went from healer and client to actual real, close friends. Right after I left my job, she created a little weekend retreat for women who needed community, and a group of us went, not just to receive from her, but to build something together. That group stuck for several years. We would meet twice a year for a weekend, with smaller check-ins in between, and it quietly became the support system I didn’t know I’d been starving for.

Last year, hosting another one of these weekends, Katie and I looked at each other and said the same thing at once. We’re really good at this. We know how to build a space where women actually feel held. What if we opened it up, beyond just our circle? Katie has already been leading worldwide retreats with her husband for years, and I have been hosting and creating these intimate spaces for others for most of my life (remember - I’m used to taking care of everyone else?? These days I know how to do it while taking care of myself too.)

The invitation

So we are doing it! Rooted.Rested.Rising was born this year. We hosted a beautiful one-day women’s retreat here in Charlotte this past June and the women walked out lighter and more connected than when they came in. We’ve got a Biomagnetism Sound Healing combination workshop coming up in August locally in Charlotte (We had one in June as well). And we’re just now opening registration for the most important one yet.

It’s called The Way Home. October 8-11, 2026, on the Isle of Palms in South Carolina, just outside of Charleston.

We built it for a specific woman, and I think you might know her. She’s me, seven years ago. She’s running the whole show for her spouse, her kids, her parents, her job, everyone. She has it all together on the outside and no idea who she is underneath anymore, because she hasn’t had a real minute to herself in years. She’s genuinely forgotten what it feels like to be taken care of.

The Way Home is four days where none of that is her problem. No logistics. Dietary restrictions aren’t a hassle, they’re just handled, by a private chef. There are quiet solo walks on the beach, and there are games and crafts, and there’s also ceremony, sacred time, channeled energy healings, and a room full of women who know exactly what it’s like to carry all of it. It is, truly, the way home. Back to the version of you that existed before you put everyone else first.

I know how hard it is to put yourself first, to actually spend the money on something like this. And to ask for the time/support from those around you to take over the spinning plates. I lived inside that fear for a very long time, remember. But I promise you, if you go, you come back with momentum, filled all the way up, better able to take care of everyone you love without running on empty. Every retreat I have ever been to did that for me. The more I poured into my own cup, the more I had to give when I got back home.

If any of this is landing a little too close to home, that might be your breadcrumb. You can find everything about it here: The Way Home. And you can find Katie and her work at Zen Within Academy.

Come home to yourself. We’ll hold the space for you.

Before you go

Thank you for reading this vulnerable post. My hope is to connect with women that can see themselves in any part of my story. If you think that might be you, I’d love for you to reply and tell me which part resonated most with you. Looking forward to connecting with other women taking the leap into finding their true selves and quieting all the noise telling you what you “should” be.

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️

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If you haven’t yet, go back and read Part 1. At the end, you left me quietly coming apart at a windowless desk, running on no sleep, sure that something was wrong with me. Let me back up to the fall of 2019, because this is where it all started to unravel. And then, weirdly, start to heal.

We had to let our nanny go. I won’t get into the details, but it was a child-safety thing, the kind that makes your stomach drop and your decision instant. We gave her a month’s notice and we worked with an agency to find a replacement. We hired one after a couple weeks and lots of interviews. Our kids were one and a half and three and a half, right in the thick of stranger danger and slow to warm up to anyone new. So I took two weeks of PTO to be home and help the new nanny settle in and learn all our little routines.

Within the first three days, my husband and I looked at each other and just knew it wasn’t going to work, so we let her go fast. And then we were back to square one, except now my two weeks were evaporating while we interviewed frantically, called in different agencies, reached out to everyone we knew for recommendations, and did all the things you do when you’re desperate to find the right person who can also start immediately. My two weeks ran out. So I had to do something I’d never thought I’d do: I took a leave of absence.

I was home with my babies for ten weeks.

I know how that sounds. Ten weeks home with your kids, what a gift. And I love them more than anything. But that baby-toddler stage is genuinely one of the hardest things I have ever done, harder for me than any trading floor, and every single day I felt more of myself slipping away. Looking back, I think I was somewhere in postpartum depression or anxiety, I just didn’t have the words for it then. I was also grieving the sudden loss of the original nanny. I felt like I was drowning. I was desperate to get back to work to feel a little more like myself, and I also didn’t even love my work. Both things, at the same time.

At the very end of 2019 we finally found her, the nanny who would go on to be the perfect fit for our family for the next few years. I went back to work and for a minute it felt good to be back in my groove. But something in me had shifted. My nervous system was still stuck in that white-knuckle, fight-or-flight place from the whole ordeal, and it would not let go.

So I did another thing I’d never really done. I started seeing a therapist. I’d been exactly once before, in a crisis, about ten years earlier, and opening up to a stranger did not come naturally to me (understatement of the century at the time). Around the same time I started seeing a homeopath too, who I still see today. I was throwing everything at the wall, trying to find my way back to myself.

And then came the wellness expo.

The thing about the expo is that I almost didn’t go. My old massage therapist had a booth and knew I was struggling, and she told me to swing by on a Saturday, that there’d be all kinds of vendors. Going somewhere by myself, for myself, on a weekend, was so far outside my normal that it’s almost funny now. But I got dressed and I went, even though I had an undercurrent of anxiety running through me.

I walked in and it was a lot. Vendors everywhere, mediums, psychics, massage therapists, sound healers, all these things I knew absolutely nothing about. I texted my friend, “I’m here, where’s your booth?” She wrote back that her daughter had come down with the flu and she wasn’t there. Uh-oh.

Old me would have turned right around and driven home. The whole reason I’d come wasn’t even there. But something in me said, well, you’re already here, and this is a big deal, you showed up somewhere completely alone. Might as well look around.

There was a room running rotating sessions, and I checked the schedule, and five minutes from right then there was a “Group Sound Healing Session” with someone called Zen Within Academy. I didn’t know what sound healing was. I didn’t know what any of it was. But it was what was happening next, so I walked in.

Katie and her husband Josh were at the front of the room. She led a guided meditation and then they used their instruments for what she called frequency healing while the rest of us just sat there quietly and took it in. I’d tried meditation in the past and never really got anywhere with it, so I didn’t have high hopes, but maybe the guided version was exactly what I needed because I was able to drop right in. I was shocked and felt drawn to the woman up front. She looked about my age. She mentioned she’d spent many years at another major bank before doing this work, and something in me sat up. Here was a woman from my exact corporate world who had crossed over into whatever this was. I could not stop noticing her energy.

At the end I did something completely out of character. I walked up to her, thanked her, told her I’d never experienced anything like it and that I was only there by total fluke. I took her business card. And something told me to book a one-on-one session, even though her website was vague and I could not have told you what the session even was. I just thought, I’m following these breadcrumbs, and the breadcrumbs led me here.

That was six and a half years ago. I’ve seen her at least once a month ever since. (She’s also become one of my dearest friends, but that part comes later.)

Funny timing: right after I booked, I got sick. Twelve days flat in bed, a kind of sick I’d never known. This was March 2020, so, yeah, I guess it wasn’t the flu. By the time I surfaced, the world had shut down, and my scheduled in-person appointment became a virtual one. Me, at home, in lockdown, husband working down the hall, new nanny with the kids downstairs, about to have a session I could not have described to you if you paid me.

I had no idea what “12th dimensional healing” was. I went in anyway, feeling weirdly called to it.

We talked a little about what was going on, the whole nanny spiral, how my body was still stuck in survival mode even though the actual emergency was long over. And then she did something I’d never done: inner-child work. She spoke to a younger version of me. At the end there was this guided activation where she did all the talking and I just listened.

And while she was talking, tears started rolling down my face. Silently. I wasn’t trying to cry. I wasn’t even sad, exactly. They just came.

Today these kinds of tears happen to me fairly regularly, but back then? I hadn’t really cried in about thirty years. Not at sad movies, not when someone was hurt, not at anything. I’d gone numb somewhere back in childhood and just stayed there. And now here I was, sitting in my own house in front of a Zoom screen with tears sliding down my cheeks and no idea why.

I said to her, “I don’t know what that was. I don’t know what’s happening. But I guess I’m supposed to come back.” Because clearly something had moved in my body that I did not consciously do. That was the moment I was hooked.

The thing I’ve come to love about this work, more than the talk therapy I’d tried, is that I don’t have to show up already knowing what’s wrong. I don’t have to dig for the topic. It just surfaces. I’ll think we’re going to talk about some argument with my husband, and then something small from the drive over comes out instead, and that turns out to be the real thing. For once in my life, I don’t have to have it all figured out.

What I didn’t know yet, sitting there with those thirty-years-late tears, was that these monthly sessions would end up doing something all my spreadsheets never could. They were going to give me permission to blow up the entire life I’d spent fifteen years building.

But first I had to get past two things standing in the doorway blocking my exit: my identity, and the money.

I’ll save that part of the story for Part 3 (which you can now find here).

Before you go

Have you ever followed a breadcrumb that made no logical sense at the time, and it turned out to matter? Hit reply and tell me. Those are my favorite stories to read.

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️

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