Little girls are apparently way more interested in goats than antiques.
I LOVE it when you go to a flea market/swap meet/antique store with zero expectations and then accidentally stumble upon a treasure that just so happens to require exactly the (small) amount of cash that you have sitting in your wallet.
Right?!
A couple of weeks ago Elise (she of the epic Double Mermaid Party) and I took our girls on a day trip to a little pop-up antique shop way up along the crest of the Santa Cruz mountains. The place is run by a family of extremely successful antiques dealers who apparently host a super-affordable sale of spectacular finds once or twice a year – and serve guests sandwiches and tea on their spectacular property overlooking the valley while encouraging them to also relax on the beautiful tree swing and coo over the on-site pygmy goat family in between browsing sessions. (I have to assume that this is a tactic to ensure that everyone leaves with a massive case of FOMO.) (I also have to assume – because nothing being sold at the event was even close to as expensive as you’d expect – that the family does this largely because it’s fun and an easy way to empty out inventory, but whatever: I’m all over it.)
My scores (for a total of $55): those antique apothecary bottles I was going on about awhile back, an antique croquet set for Kendrick’s birthday (which you saw if you follow me on Snapchat)…and the bedside table of my (and my daughter’s) dreams.
This bedside table is midcentury.
It is useful (a magazine rack to hold all those 16-square-inch two-year-old books! Hooray).
Most importantly, of course: it is pink.
My daughter’s room has always vexed me. Because it doubles as a guest bedroom it has to have a futon in it (as much as I would like to, I am not investing in one of these contraptions anytime soon), and the dimensions of the room make the furniture arrangement sort of awkward no matter what I do. I’m discovering that the best tactic is to make sure that everything in her room is actually necessary – and, above all, functional, especially because she’s starting to reach an age where she has her own stuff (as opposed to stuff she steals from her brother while screaming “THAT’S MINE!” at an ever-increasing decibel level until she reaches the point where he must pinch her and/or burst into tears).
The gold mirrored side table that I had put next to her bed for the sole reason that I already owned it (and, fine, because I thought it was pretty)? “Functional” isn’t exaaaaactly what I’d call it; a more accurate way to describe the piece would be “massively impractical, highly breakable, and wildly unsuitable for a child’s bedroom.”
And so I transferred that impractical, breakable, and unsuitable (but pretty) gold mirrored side table into my office, where it makes far more sense, and replaced it with my antique shop find. Goldie is now the proud possessor of a tiny (yet enormously useful…not to mention PINK) warehouse for her books and special toys and Elsa hairbrush, and at present her room is climbing the Feng Shui charts like whoa.
(Or, okay, her room scores like a B in Feng Shui terms. But at least we’re moving in the right direction, which is via miniature baby steps away from the quagmire of “cluttered and weird” and towards the distant, sunlit shores of “serenely awe-inspiring.”)
