You Know All Those Trips to Marfa Are Paying Off...

Daria Werbowy for Celine shot by Juergen Teller

When, upon spying the above Celine ad while watching you flip through the February Vogue, your daughter says, "Hey that reminds me of those smushed cars by that artist guy John something." (AKA John Chamberlain.)

John Chamberlain, Mobeetieaugratin (painted and chrome steel), 2010. Courtesy, Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco via Art and Seek.


Proud.

Some Random Bits...(On A Saturday)

That's right, a Saturday...I'm living on the edge here friends, mixing it up, keeping it fresh (and really it's the only time I've had to blog for the past three days, so there's that).

First up I had to post these images from the lookbook for kids' eyewear company Very French Gangsters spotted via the rockin' gals over at Honestly WTF. It is pretty much the cutest lookbook of all time, yes? I'm in love with that action in the bottom shot...all grey hoodie goodness and whatnot.

In. Love.

image via Carine Roitfeld Irreverent

Ok, next up some Carine Roitfeld for your reading pleasure. Specifically the Carine Roitfeld interview in the September issue of Town and Country (which, it should be noted, is a magazine that is totally killing it of late, but I digress). I love this description of Carine by the article's author, Justine Picardie:

"She's enthusiastic as well as chic; lighthearted yet hardworking; sexy and womanly, but not threatening."

But most of all, I love that Carine has managed to have such an amazing, inspiring career and a rock solid family.

I'm rather smitten with that Carine of late...just sayin'.

Ok and finally, my fantastically lovely friends Molly and Sally of A Piece of Toast kindly included me in their "Styled By" series, which was incredibly fun to pull together... Plus I'm still blushing over their beyond kind intro...Thank you ladies! For the record, I feel the exact same way about you. Exactly.

Happy rest of the weekend friends!

Scenes From A Recharge (a.k.a. Our Trip to Marfa)

We are back from our adventure in West Texas, and if not exactly "rested", for sure recharged and inspired and, most important, closer...

There's just something about a long road-trip (especially one that consists of vast, end-of-the-world desert landscape) that makes me feel like it's our little family of four against the world. Negotiating car music selections, minor squabbles, horrible gas station bathrooms, car sickness, and potential side of the road breakdowns (all of which actually happened) become battles to fight together. We're a unit, trying to keep calm and figure it out. It's fortifying stuff I tell ya.

We also had fun once we stopped the car and actually arrived in Marfa. Think: Donald Judd house tour, dinner at Buck and Camp's magical house, rooftop star gazing, Dan Falvin light sculpture frolicking, Food Shark eats, afternoon naps during afternoon rainstorms, margarita swilling, Marfa lights spotting, bike riding, icy spring swimming, a perfect meal at Cochineal, farmer's market perusing, collecting all manner of natural treasures (basalt lined rocks, tumbleweeds, smashed pennies, a perfect iridescent green beetle), plus loads of imaginary play by the girlies and their friend H, including the creation of their genius fictitious band, "Marfa Stewart and the Chinatis".

Now we're back to real life with its schedule wrangling and commitments and responsibilities. I'm in the (crazy) two week stretch before we send D Moms to press, the girlies are getting geared up for the new school year (excited, scared, excited), we're planning Audrey's upcoming birthday party...  All good stuff for sure. But I'm not going to lie. I wish we were back in Marfa.

The Summer Guilt

I try not to spend too much time wallowing in working mother angst.

There are moments when I succumb to the guilt, for sure, but for the most part, I try to focus on what's good about being a full-time working mom, namely that the girlies get to see me doing work that I truly enjoy, that excites me, challenges me, and (on most days) makes me a better person. I'd like to think I'm teaching them about balance, following your bliss, being accountable, having a strong work ethic. (And yes, I realize that you teach your kiddos all those very same things as a stay at home mom, it's for sure not an either/or thing...)

And not only am I lucky to have flexible job that I love, but I'm lucky that Bryan has an incredibly flexible job too. So while we miss some school parties and field trips, we cobble it together and make it work, and everyone seems pretty happy (most of the time). Guilt just feels fruitless, so I try with every fiber of my being not to succumb to it. Except in the summer.

In the summer all bets are off. I am Guilty McGuilterson. I am guilt personified. I am a total wreck.

See I had lazy, boring, totally relaxed summers when I was a kid... My mom stayed at home, so just "hanging out" for three months was a totally reasonable proposition. We played games, swam at the neighborhood pool, ran around with our buddies, watched television. We got a break. A nice, long, mellow break. Those summers of my youth are burned on my psyche as the type of summers that I think the girlies should be having, and they aren't. So I feel like a big, fat, guilty fail.

My girlies go to summer camp every day. Sure they swim and do ceramics and paint and have adventures with their camp buddies and play tennis and go on field trips and watch live monkey shows (don't ask). They're happy. They pop out of bed every morning raring to go even...but still I feel bad. I hate that their little lives are already so structured year round. I wish they had that long span of time where they got to stay in their PJs until 2:00 and eat too much ice cream and complain that they're bored (because being bored is the starting point for all the really magical stuff) and watch Gilligan's Island for three straight hours... (Well maybe not that last one.)

So I try to make up for it. We play long matches of UNO and War after dinner. We swim in the dark. I let Audrey stay up way too late watching the movies of my youth while we cuddle on the couch munching on microwave popcorn (last night was a screening of the dramatic classic, The Karate Kid). I let them eat ice cream every night and wear the same outfit to camp two days in a row. It's wheels off this cobbled together fake summer of ours, but you do what you can, right?

Operation "Loungify the Patio”

Last week I mentioned a that I've been working on our patio for a fun little project...

Those kind and helpful purveyors of all things home improvement, Home Depot, invited me (along with several other design bloggers) to style our outdoor spaces around one of their seating sets, and the final product is officially up today over on the Home Depot blog.

I chose that hunk of burnt orange loungey goodness above as my jumping off point for transforming our little back patio from "sadly neglected wasteland" to "lounge central". Out went the uncomfortable metal furniture that nobody ever sat on, and in went all sorts of furry/textured bits to up the cozy factor.

As a point of reference (and because before and after photos are fun), here is a snap of our patio from four-years ago in all its uncomfortable (dim, slightly dreary) metal furniture glory...

Re: this photo, it also should be noted that I searched for over an hour through all my past posts (over 1500 holy hell I've had this blog for a long time) to find this particular photo, so determined I was to show you some "before" action. And during that hour (who am I kidding, it was two hours), I teared up more than once (and not just because I couldn't find the damn photo). It was an emotional jaunt down memory lane courtesy of the old blog. Those girlies of mine...they're big. They're not babies anymore. (Case in point, that's Audrey up there looking so little and Millie-esque.) It's freaking me out. Melancholy city friends. 

But back to the patio (and sorry for the massive digression)... Pre-operation loungify, we never sat out there. Now, we're out there all. the. time. We are officially patio dwelling peeps. Morning coffee, evening G&Ts, plowing through a massive stack of magazines on Saturday morning, hanging with the girlies and Bryan, typing this post. I never want to leave the freaking patio. I'd sleep out there if I weren't too chicken to sleep outside.

It's good stuff.

A Girl Crush Times Three

I was flipping through the (excellent) No. 6 Spring lookbook and found myself instantly scheming ways to be friends Adrienne, Jaclyn and Teddy (above). They just look so confident and interesting and fun... total girl crush material.

Their photos also made me think about something I read recently on The Littlest about raising girls, as encountering poignant images of compelling woman inevitably gets me thinking about my own girlies and the adults that they'll one day become. I loved Elizabeth's thoughts on the attributes she hopes her daughter possess when she's older:

confident, playful, kind, creative, adventurous, unafraid, compassionate, intelligent, nonjudgmental...

Ditto Elizabeth. Ditto.

Millie's Pins

Friends my Pinterest addiction has reached a bit of an all-time high.

I need some pinning action right before bed; I'm jonesin' for it the minute I wake up... I'm going to eventually need help. And if that wasn't enough, now I'm pulling my loved ones down with me, as (after partaking in a few pinning sessions with her on my lap) Millie's hooked too. She calls it the "pinning game", and she asked me if we could play it before school this morning.

I've sunk to a new low.

There is, however, an upside. These joint pinning sessions have forced me to let up a bit on my staunch rule to only pin things I absolutely love. So now amidst all my beloved pins there might pop up, say, a dog wearing a pom pom topped party hat or a row of ballerinas sporting neon pink tutus. I figure what I'm giving up in aesthetic rigor I'm gaining in my attempts to be a more laid back parent. (At least that's what I'm going with.)

Millie now officially has her own board, aptly titled, millie's pinnin with me. She calls it "her gallery". Man the apple didn't fall far from the tree with that one did it?

Some Awesome (Sartorial) Simplicity

I had a wicked case of insomnia last night, resulting in madly clicking through fashion week street style images at 4:00 am. Suffice to say, it was a bad scene friends.

It could have been my bleary eyed exhaustion, but, after a few minutes, all the outfits started to just sort of blur together in a giant mash-up of cobalt blue and Celine bags and dashes of neon and brightly painted nails and wrists full of bangles...

Don't get me wrong, there was some major sartorial eye candy happening in these formidable ensembles. And certainly I admired the wearers' boldness and fearless embrace of color and pattern and accessories (boldness and fearless embrace in matters of dressing not being my strong suit), but because everyone looked exactly the same, nobody looked fresh.

I was quickly bored with all the excitement.

But then that image above of Vogue editors Meredith Melling Burke and Hanneli Mustaparta popped up, and I was shook out of my visual stupor. They just look so modern and easy and, well...awesomely simple. Not overthought or self conscious or uncomfortable. They look like women there to notice rather than to be noticed. I've been thinking about the image all day, which is not something I can say about any of the other photos (and there were hundreds friends, did I mention it was a bad scene?) I came across during my early morning Internet-fest.

Hmm...

More Dispatches From the Land of B+ Parenting...

I love this excerpt from Stila founder Jeanine Lobell's interview on Into the Gloss:


"When I was eighteen, my dad was visiting me in New York and he said to me, ‘Honey, see that guy over there, with the hot dog stand? There’s nobody standing there, telling him to spread the mustard this way, or that’s how much relish to use. You need to get your own hot dog stand.’ I think that I’m lucky that my dad knew that I just couldn’t function like that—that I was never going to be able to work in a traditional job. I’m lucky though, because most parents would be like, ‘What the hell, you can’t even keep a job?’ So I would say that I’m very lucky that he just knew who I was, and didn’t have a problem with it."


But I especially love that last line, as that's the really the magic bullet, don't you think? This ability to really know your children's characters -- their habits and passions and interests and then helping them become the best possible version of themselves (rather than trying to mold them into exactly who *you* want them to be) is just huge.

I hope I can pull that off with my girlies...

Some Letting Go... (Clothing Edition)

Audrey in her (self selected) Tea Collection duds...

A couple of months ago, the folks at Tea Collection asked if I'd like to select a few pieces of their girl's clothing and then share them with you guys. It took me about 1.5 seconds to accept, as we've long been big Tea Collection fans. In fact, Tea is Bryan's mom's go-to when she wants to buy clothes for the girls... it's incredibly durable, the prints are super cute and everything matches (like a hipper take on Garanimals).

But rather than just picking out some basics for the girls, I thought I'd use the opportunity to practice some "letting go" in the form of Audrey's wardrobe... engage in a little B+ parenting if you will.

Now here's the thing. Audrey is my practical one. In terms of clothing, she likes comfort above all. She likes to feel cozy and understated. Audrey's wardrobe predilections have a sort of (I'm about to go out on a major limb and make all sorts of far-fetched correlations between sartorial choices and life paths, but just go with me here...) "Woman's Studies major at Wellesley headed to the Peace Corps post-graduation" vibe. Or in simpler terms, she just has bigger fish to fry than what she's wearing.

To that end, 99% of the time, she asks me to pick her clothes. (Millie, on the other hand, has a very, very strong opinion about what she wears and wants me to have pretty much nothing to do with the process, but that's another post for another day.) It's only very recently that Audrey has started to voice an opinion about what she wears, or want to go shopping and pick things out on her own. And herein lies the problem. I've become extremely comfortable being "the decider" in her sartorial matters. It works for me. I like it. Which, for her decision making development, is not such a good thing.

So my plan was to let her be totally in control on the Tea thing. I pulled up the website for her, explained roughly how many pieces she should select and encouraged her to avoid shorts and sundresses (since she'd be wearing the things to school in the cooler months). And then I stepped back. (Actually I left the room completely... I know myself friends. Had I stayed in the room, I couldn't have resisted input. It's just my way.)

When she called me back in to "review" her selections, I was oh so close to making a gentle "suggestion" or two, but I resisted, with the single exception of asking why she had picked the exact same dress in two different colors, to which she replied, "because I like it." Um, duh.

But clothing selections aside, she had all sorts of big girl pride as a result of the exercise. She wears her picks non-stop and with mad confidence and a sort of sense of ownership... It's really sweet to watch.

This letting go, it's a lovely and bittersweet thing, yes?

Some Random Bits on a Friday...

Just a few things to take us into the weekend...

First up, I posted a few photos of my amazingly talented friends Alica and Adam Rico's house over on tinyDallas today. It's definitely worth a peek!


Next, after last weekend's malaise, I keep coming back to this quote I spotted on Pinterest, and I think it's officially my new mantra. Now the key is figuring out what falls into the "anything" category-- in another words I need to prioritize my time and decide what not to do -- always the tricky part, yes?



And finally, I just had to share how much I'm digging watching the girlies together of late. Sure they bicker, sometimes they even partake in epic "throw-downs" (I reason this is an essential part of learning how communicate and work out differences, right?, right?) but mostly they are besties. It's just a really lovely thing to watch them play and plan and create, all heads together and partners in crime. It's blissing me out big time.

Ok that's it friends...Have a splendid weekend! I'll be back Monday with tales from my (hopefully more laid back) one.

Some Scenes From the Weekend -- Audrey's Birthday Edition

Me, Christine + Shannon and Kayli (the amazing ladies behind Oil and Cotton where we held the party...) hanging out in the teepee before the festivities started.









Clearly the big event of the weekend was Audrey's birthday celebration...

The party on Saturday was a success, and all the sweet girlies seemed to have fun making their little dream catchers (which I have to say, wasn't easy). But I think beyond all the obvious festivity of a birthday party, for me, the loveliest part of the day was watching 20+ five-eight year old girls have such an appetite for art and a willingness to help each other. I hope that desire sticks with them, as I truly believe so many amazing/powerful things come out of women banding together, but I digress ;-)

I'm also especially proud of how the party turned out, as I literally have never put more work into homemade decorations...(Let's just say, I spent an insane amount of time wrapping embroidery thread around a branch.) The effort was equal parts highly satisfying, exhausting and, well... humbling. The humbling occurred late last week as I toiled away for the third night in a row while gazing out the window at Bryan and the girlies happily splashing around in the pool. Later that night when Audrey and I were snuggling and reading a couple of books before bed, she declared she had a really good idea and proceed to gently suggest that I, "work on the branch after we go to bed so you can spend more time with me". Ouch. Talk about providing some perspective. I swear that one gets smarter with each passing year.

Needless to say, I took heed -- i.e. I stopped wrapping the branch and just slapped some paint on the bare bits of bark and nobody was the worse for it...

The rest of the weekend was spent reveling in A's b-day with lots of mellow family moments, and it concluded last night with dinner outside (in the amazing mid-80 degree weather!) to celebrate the exciting news that lovely cousin Erin and boyfriend Ben got engaged... So major goodness all around.


Hope you guys had a fantastic weekend!