Stretching in the sunrise before entering the madness.
I have never in my life been to a rave.
I think there was a period of time around age 25 when I really wanted to go to one, but for whatever reason (probably that I panic when it gets too late and my bed is still far away from me) it never happened.
Check out that lush, vibrant landscape.
Oooooh was our front yard ever not good. My favorite part was the enormous potted (and dead) tree tethered to the roof to prevent it from dropping straight to the ground. In second place was the red mulch surrounding the enormous (also dead) bush next to my garage.
Enter: a xeriscaper I found on Thumbtack. What is xeriscaping, you ask? Excellent question; I didn't know, either. Basically, it means taking out plants that need bunches of water and replacing them with ones that are drought-resistant, thereby lowering or eliminating entirely the amount of supplemental watering that your yard requires. It's also (in my opinion) very pretty.
When I was in my early twenties and pictured having a baby one day — a day that felt, from that vantage point, way off in the inconceivably distant future — that picture included things like a house. A job that made money. Probably a nursery furnished entirely from the Pottery Barn Kids catalog. What my life actually looked like when my husband, Kendrick, and I decided to have a baby wasn’t quite like that.
In the years before we moved to the West Coast, I became thoroughly disenchanted with New York City. It was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. It was too hard to get around the subway system with a stroller, and too expensive to take taxis everywhere. The restaurants were great, but after we moved to Westchester (despite our insistence that "Oh, we'll still come into the city all the time!"), we never went to them.
Not like we knew the good places to go anymore, anyway.
Last week I took a trip to New York that was technically a business trip but that I extended by a couple of days so that Indy and I could spend extra time with my parents, and ended up roaming the streets for hours at a time, stopping into places I remembered and places that only just sprung up in the months since I left.
What can I say? She's committed to her craft.
I mean, you kind of have to respect the sheer volume of effort my daughter put into this. She didn't just slap that diaper cream on; she applied it. Thoroughly.
So after I laughed at the sight of my marshmallow-child - because really, when things like this happen there is nothing else you can do (besides, of course, take a photograph to show your husband so that he believes you when you tell him exactly how bad your day was) - I started the extremely long process of figuring out what the hell to do when your one-year-old paints herself from head to toe with a product that is specifically formulated to repel moisture.
Sometimes you've just got to have a good girls' day out. Lunch at a restaurant with a sunny patio and good bellinis, ice cream with chocolate sauce for dessert, a little window shopping. Our girls' day included all of those things (plus a boy).
The outfit I'm wearing here is obviously nothing special - it's basically my default outfit for when I physically need to be wearing clothing but don't really care what I look like in it - but what's nice is that lately I've been trying to do what all those fashion-advice-type women on TV are always telling you to do, which is whittle down my closet so that it's stocked primarily with pieces I can just pull out and put on without really thinking about it. Like, say, a pair of jeans that feel like your most beat-up pair of pajamas (but aren't), and a pair of oxfords that feel like your most beat-up pair of sneakers (but aren't). So even when you're "not wearing anything special," you're still wearing something that kind of...is.
Also just while we're on the topic of oxfords, everyone in the entire city of New York has been wandering around in these for the past year and I loved them when I first saw them and continue to love them now.
I have wanted to do this for fifteen years. Did it. (They're these in mustard.)
Apparently vodka can taste like something other than lighter fluid. Good to know. (3 Simple Recipes For Making Vodka Taste Good, via Bustle.)
Who doesn't want a necklace inspired by Shia LeBouef's ponytail? NOBODY, that's who.
This post was created in collaboration with Clairol.
I asked Kendrick to take this photo the morning I left for New York, because I knew I was going to need a “before.”
Union Square Playground | NYC
OK, so New York City in October is the BEST. It's all crisp air and blue skies and apples and kids in jackets (but not gloves or scarves) playing outdoors because they still can and stuff.
And so what I packed for this week's trip was big chunky sweaters and hats and boots and a seriously cool army jacket that I bought on sale last spring. Yeah yeah yeah, the weather forecast said high '60s/low '70s, but weather forecasts can lie.
