Getting to know me
Hi sweethearts,
Todays blog is all about getting to know me. The real, unfiltered me. I’ll tell you guys what my days look like, what my hobbies are, what I’m passionate about,….
A day in the life of Steph.
I’m so not a morning person so I wake up as late as possible haha. Depends on where I’m working, this is somewhere between 7:15 a.m. of 7:30 a.m. When I wake up, I prefer to stay in the bed for a couple of minutes to check my social media. I’m always curious about what I’ve missed during the night. Then I get dressed, fix my hair, wash my face and that’s it. This mostly takes about 10 minutes (yes, I am extremely lazy). Then I make myself breakfast and lunch, that I bring with me to work. I can’t have lunch early because of my stomach, so I eat it around 10:15 a.m. Then I make my schoolbag, quickly brush my teeth and that’s it. Getting ready in the morning usually takes about 30 minutes maximum.
After that I go to work with my electrical bike. I believe in our environment so I take the bike… Each day, my rides are from 15 to 40 kilometers. So for this small amount of kilometers, I would never take the car (okay, I admit it, I still don’t have a lincense but hey that’s okay!).
Then my work: I am a special needs caregiver in schools. I have 3 schools where I work. I support students and teachers. The studens I work with have mental disabilities, behavioral problems, autism, learning disoders etc. I studied for work like this because it’s my ultimate passion. Later, I’ll tell you why orthopedagogics really is my passion…
After work, I go home. Then I have some work preparations to do. Usually at weeknights when I finished working, I don’t do a lot. It’s just me and our couch… Nothing fancy. I really love hanging out next to our fireplace to watch tv. I love TV shows like Friends, the Big Bang theory, Mom,…. Romcom stuff. I also love to watch historical documentaries or movies about the world wars. History, another passion about me. My genre of movies is very much all things girly: with Mean Girls as my fave brainless-movie.
Sometimes I have Press-events that I’m invited to. I really love getting to know more about all things beauty. I’m a nerd, so I love learning!
This is me, "working" haha! #inclusion
In the weekends, my Saturday is all about ballet. I have 3 hours of practice, yay me! 1 Hour of training on pointes and 2 on my flats. I adore ballet. I’m a super awkard and clumsy girl, but somehow I feel elegant when dancing. I also love to do photoshoots on my pointes, maybe a side of me that you guys haven’t seen before.
Sundays are for relaxing, schoolwork or going to places.. Depends on how busy I am.
My hobbies.
I already told yo guys that I love ballet. Ballet is the only way for me to be working out and actually liking it. I really HATE fitness or working out. If I’m not in training, I love to do ballet workouts at home. Again, I’m lazy so I don’t do them often enough. My ballet workouts are all on youtube, with 2 of my favorite video’s, I’ll link them below. They are all about having long, beautiful muscles (like the Victoria’s Secret models). Okay, I really totally don’t look like one of them, but that’s not my goal. I just want to be fit, healthy and I want to like my body.
Then photography: Most of my shots are taken on vacation. I LOVE traveling so much. Going away from home, not thinking about work really helps me to get through the year. I just need it. I can’t help it. On vacations, I adore to take pictures of everything. I love watching my travel-pics afterwards. Great memories!
Plus; yeah the occasional Travel-braidfies are just a must.
I recently triend badminton fort he first time with my dad. I think that I’m actually going to do it on a weekly basis. My dad needs to stay fit and for me it’s a great excuse to be sporty, but NOT working out!
Can you tell that I love blue in pics?
And last but not least, all the blogging and braiding!!
I started braiding when I was a kid. I wanted to make my sisters look beautiful. When I discovered that there are more braids than a regular braid or a fishtail, the madness started. I wanted to learn ALL braids. I looked them up and started practicing. All the tinghs you find on my social media are thngs that I learned myself. I never took any class or whatsovever. I wanted to let the world look at my hairstyles so I started taking pictures of them for facebook. Everyone was getting tired of the braiding-pics so I started an instagram. There I could throw all my braids online. Those who were interested, they could just start following me. After instagram I had a youtube account. I must be honest, I didn't really like talking to myself so I deleted the account. I wanted to focus on photography. My braid and travel pics needed a place to stay...so I started a blog (a year ago at the end of november). I really love blogging. I can talk about anything I want AND I have a place online for my hairstyles. Plus a great thing about the blog is also the events. On my social media, I can't really talk too much about all the pressevents, since my page is only about hairstyles, not lifestyle. So all the info about the events are just for the blog.
My passions.
Now my passion, what drives me.
My job really is my passion. I love everything about orthopedagogics. With orthopedagogics I mean all sorts of special needs. When I’m working, I feel like completely myself. Then I am the best version of myself. I just don’t do the things I don’t like about myself when I’m working. These things are: gossiping, being a pessimist and not believing in myself.
I have studied for 3 degrees. The first one is a bachelor’s degree in orthopedagogics (special needs), then I studied to become teacher (because I wanted to learn more about how schools work) and then a special “bachelor after bachelor” ’s degree in special needs in schools. My job is called “support care giver in education” and a part of that is inclusive education. This means that I have a student with a mental disability, who goes to a regular school instead of a school for special needs. I help him at school. My other students are kids who just need extra care in regular schools.
I really do believe in inclusion. Our society should be open to ALL humans, no matter what. I believe that if we take enough efforts, that all humans can go to school or go to work. We just have to work on finding how we can manage it. If I’d have a special needs kid, I would want it to go to a regular school too. It might be hard and a lot of people don’t see the real reason why you should believe in it, but I think that it can be worth it all. No one should ever feel special. We should feel unique!
So after work or during vacations, I read a lot of articles or books about this matter. I am a nerd, I love learning and I need it. I need to stay learning because my mind needs to stay active I think!
Another thing that I care about a lot is mental health. I worked really hard on how to be happy, read all about it in the previous blog below!
"...fulfill your dreams. I can now say about my life that it's all good. I love everything I do. I love a lot of people and most of all, I'm learning to love myself. I'm not saying that I don't have flaws where I need to work on, but they aren't holding me back anymore.
I've accepted that I'm not perfect, and this only motivates me more to try to actually be a good person and to work on things that I don't like about myself..."
Working on my own happiness and being happy with myself is something that's very personal to me. I work on my happiness everyday. Really hard. It's not easy. I have to work on it treally hard. Sometimes, I need to block all the negativity out of my head, which is a real struggle for me since I'm a horrible pessimst!
And I'm ending this all with global warming and animal rights. Saving the best for last!
I'm obsessed with animals. I can't help it. If I could adopt an entire zoo, I would! I'm not going to convince you guys or anything. i'm just sharing my thoughts.
So, I have been vegetarian for about a decade now and recently, I wanted to go vegan more. I educated myself and watched a lot of documentaries about it. Our beautiful planet is just being ruined by us, humans and I think that we all can do something about it. Every little step that we take is good, even the smallest ones. I'm not going to ramble about it any longer, I just wanted to share it with you!
So, do you think that you know me a bit more now?
Thanks for reading this all!
X Steph