I am working long days, long hours, stretching the time and myself at this moment, and I am ready for a vacation of being busy of doing nothing at all (sorry, I don’t even like that song, but now it started playing in my head). Ironically what I am working on is our summer issue of coastal family vacations, and maybe that’s why I admit – I am ready for it! Bring me the beach, let me sit on the dock of the bay (ha, the song in my head just turned into a better one), have a cold drink in my hand and get on a boat and feel breeze on my face and smell the salt of the sea. I just want that coastal family vacation, and I want it now!
I am not the only one today who is dreaming of beaches, read Reeta’s post on her site House of Anais of her beach love and see some of her favorite beaches. In the upcoming magazine, Reeta also shares some of her favorite California beaches, and we interviewed her daughter Anaïs, whom Reeta’s blog is named after. In addition to Anaïs, we are featuring 9 other traveling kids, and what they think of moving and traveling to new places. My children and I had several great discussions as we did the interviews together. My family is also going to be in the magazine, my son in the cover, and you will get to know a little bit more about my husband too. It’s a family issue, so I felt it was important that my family is part of it. That’s right, my family helped me in several ways in the making of this issue, and so did Skimbaco’s Instagram “family.”
Instagram has been a great buffer for me to get ideas for topics for the online magazine, and it’s Instagram where I get honest feedback what a possible cover image for our magazine could look like (for the last issue I didn’t choose the original picture, after listening the feedback from my Instagram friends). It was also on Instagram where someone said to me that our magazine doesn’t look like it’s for real people, the pictures are too nice, and only the rich can enjoy life the way we do. In reality, we don’t use stock photos in the magazine, in fact, some of the photos are taken with a smart phone! The photos and content is always created by our own team, and in each issue we have two guest writers. Some of the guest writers are famous lifestyle or travel experts, but some are our friends. In each magazine we also feature two Instagram-friends and publish their Instagram photos. If any magazine is real, we are.
I also got another comment on a recent Instagram photo. It was “Katja, you live like in a magazine.” I answered, “yes, I do, and it’s called Skimbaco Lifestyle.” And I am just like anyone else, my life is taking kids to school, showing up at work (while it is my home office, it still is work and I have to show up and work), and I wash laundry, make dinner, and go through things everyone else does in life. However, I seize the day. I enjoy my coffee moment, try to make my family laugh with my stupid jokes, make dinner time an adventure and sometimes live somewhat too minimalistic life so we can save money for extraordinary travels (or moving to a new place). Not living life to the fullest and experiencing extraordinary is not an option. And that’s what Skimbaco Lifestyle really is about, and I know I am not the only who lives this way.
Last week I wrote about Instagramming with integrity, and today I would like to encourage you to “seize the day” and find the beauty in it. It is easy to look at the #IGtravelThursday photo stream, and feel “I wish I was there right now,” and feel stuck in the place, stuck in time, and just wishing for the getaway. However, most my Instagram-friends post beautiful pictures not just from their travels, but from their own backyards and neighborhoods as well. Your everyday life is exotic to someone else, and it can be the most beautiful thing to you.
Our dream this summer was to go to Greece, but since this spring has been quite busy for us, and simply we didn’t have the time to put on travel research and didn’t easily find the flight-hotel-activities combo we were looking for, we dropped the entire plan, and are heading to my family’s summer house in the Turku archipelago in Finland instead. It’s not going to be the luxury coastal trip we dreamed of, but I think it will actually be better: there is no wifi at the summer house, and we will get to see family. There is a private beach, maybe a row boat and a fishing rod. Midnight sun, Nordic nightless night and eating dinners outside. We can visit the cousins, see the aunts and uncles, have three-hour-discussions face to face while nobody is checking their phones. This summer I will seize the day, and go back to my childhood scenes, back to same places, I just wanted to leave when I was growing up, and I already now know that I will “seas the day” on the coast.
How are you seizing the day? Share it with us and use #skimbaco for life’s best moments and #igtravelthursday for your travel photos.
On related news, we won’t be publishing posts during a summer vacation, but Instagram Travel Thursday will still be hosted in many other blogs. Bloggers, join our Facebook group so you can get the linky code even when I am on vacation.