A Week in Maine

Earlier this month, we were lucky enough to join Peter's family for a week in Maine. The house was steps away from the beach, with a big deck in the back that looked right at the water. Heavenly!

It was a low-key week with lots of walking at the beach, big family dinners, and time spent making crazy faces at Lizzy in a attempt to make her smile and laugh. On the first night, we celebrated my 30th birthday with bubbly, lobsters, and cake - a completely delicious way to start this new decade.

We went into Portland for lunch and shopping one afternoon, and took home a box of potato donuts from Holy Donut. These are more like fried dough than donuts, but completely yummy nonetheless.

Peter and I went back into town later in the week for a belated birthday celebration, leaving Lizzy at home with her Nana, aunt, and uncle. We had the best time, first hitting up Eventide for oysters, and then Hunt and Alpine Club for fun cocktails and more substantial snacks. Lizzy was a hungry little gremlin by the time we came home, but they assured us that she was mostly well behaved while we were out :)

Summer is just the best-est, am I right?!

Mount Auburn Cemetery

One of the easiest things to do with a newborn around involves going out for walks and mini hikes. We've done many laps around our neighborhood, but we've also gone to the Arnold Arboretum, the Charles River Reservation, Crystal Lake, and the Cove in Auburndale.

Last week, we went to check out the lovely Mount Auburn Cemetery. There's ample free parking (it's a cemetery, after all, so people need to be able to come visit the sites of loved ones easily). The grounds are very large, and there are beautiful paths to take that lead through gardens, thick trees, and little lakes.

On the way home, I popped into Sofra for some of their fancy hummus. I'd heard so many wonderful things about it! I'm excited to go back for lunch sometime soon.

Stairs Re-do

This little re-do took a while to reach it's final (ish) stage. The weird cloth "curtain" came down as soon as we moved in; a few months ago, I stripped the stripped wall paper and the walls got painted; and then this spring the carpet came up. In the last few weeks, I painted the stairs, ledge, and installed the runner.

Hooray for a normal, non-scary stairway!

It's been great

I'm in the final days of my twenties, and I've been thinking about what a wonderful decade it's been. It started and ended with a bang. A few months after I turned 20, I hopped on a plane to study abroad in Italy, which made me feel like every day life can be a little adventure, and definitely fostered an interest in food and cooking that's grown and grown over the years. A few months before turning 30, I got to meet my sweet Elisabeth Mae, which was just about the most fun ever.

And in between - oh my, the in between. I went to Namibia, interned at the Treasury Department, met and fell in love with Peter, got my first grown up job in D.C., moved to Manhattan, survived a crazy job in book publicity (barely), moved to Brooklyn, made wonderful new friends, kept in touch with wonderful old friends, got engaged, went to Brazil, planned our wedding, went on our honeymoon, moved to Boston, bought our house, started working in higher ed, began grad school, and just generally tried to enjoy my days with lots of reading and a little bit of gin drinking and many made-up celebrations with Peter.

It's been great. 

And now, I am beyond excited to begin an incredible new set of adventures in this next decade. I will get to see friends and family celebrate their marriages and expamding families, continue creating a loving, lovely home with Peter, take new leaps professionally, exercise my creative muscles every now and again, and have a front row seat for watching Lizzy grow up.

It's going to be great. 

Happy Days

We are back from a not quite vacation/not quite staycation in the Berkshires. It was glorious! The week started on a serious high note. The first Saturday we were there was my sister's birthday, and she and her boyfriend were coming up to go to Tanglewood to celebrate. As soon as they walked in the door, she flashed us her sparkly new diamond ring. Hooray!

Joel has been around nearly as long as Peter has, so he's been regarded as a member of our family for ages. I adore my sister, of course, but I love Joel almost as much, and am so happy he'll become my official brother-in-law. I am so excited for a wonderful family wedding to celebrate these two next year! (Lizzy's mesmerized by Sarah's new ring above...)

On our anniversary, we took Lizzy to the Mount. It was super hot (very strange for the Berkshires!), but it was so lovely to walk around the grounds. They have a new set of sculptures up on the grounds. The one above was my favorite - it's called Kimonos. I thought butterflies, but you know, kimonos works, too.

That night we left Lizzy with my parents while we went out to dinner at Prairie Whale, which was recently included in the New York Times 36 Hours in the Berkshires. We loved it! Delicious cocktails, yummy food, and a very cute, casual dining room. And we only sent one probing text to my parents while we were out (which they didn't even respond to because they were both fawning over her during bath time, ha!).

The Fourth was a rainy disaster there, so we all went out for sushi at Bizen - another new-to-us spot that we really enjoyed. No fireworks, though, which is sort of tragic. Peter's going to be on the look-out for other ones this summer that we could see.

The next day we took a drive to Ashintully Gardens. There are gardens at the bottom that have a sort of back-to-the-wild look about them, and you can do a short hike up to the ruins of an old mansion - sadly, all that remains after a fire are those columns above, but the view of the Berkshires hills is lovely. 

All in all, it was a fantastic week. We've been going to the Berkshires for years, but my parent's new house is in south county (instead of north, where their condo was), and it feels like a whole new world for us to discover down there. Hope you all had a wonderful Fourth of July!

The Appliance Year

Do we trust this woman that the modern four year anniversary gift is appliances? I'm going to go with it, because we bought appliances out the wazoo this year, and I can honestly say that our new stove, dishwasher, and new-to-us fridge and microwave, have improved our marriage.

We are in the Berkshires this week, and have plans to take Lizzy Bean over to the Mount to show her where her parents got married. I'm sure she'll be super into it :)

I looked through my wedding pictures to find the one above for this post, and counted all the babies our guests have had since then - ten, not counting Lizzy, with another two on the way. Love just grows and grows.

Peter, I'm so happy that I get to walk (and cook!) beside you. Happy anniversary, my dear.

The Nursery

For obvious reasons, we referred to this bedroom as the "scary doll room" until it became Lizzy's cute nursery. Those dolls were haunting!

The first week we owned the house, we went over to strip the crazy blue wall paper, gave the walls a coat of white paint, and pulled up that nasty pink carpet. That made it livable for us for the almost year that we used this as our bedroom. This spring, once we finally decided to make it the nursery, it got painted a very pale grey, the closet door got painted white, and we added a real door instead of that crazy piece of folded paneling. Icky. 

Now this is one of my favorite rooms in our house. Her crib is the DaVinci Jenny Lind from Target, but I found it on Craigslist for a song. (The woman selling it bought it a few months earlier, and claimed her daughter refused to sleep in it?!) That Ikea chair was in our living room for years, but now happily lives upstairs. The curtains were a fantastic find from the Pine Cone Hill Outlet that my mom picked up. They were made for a Nordstrom's window display and were then sent back, and I think she got them for $15 a panel! They were picked up after she was born and we knew she was a girl :) The light was another great find from my Mom - I think it was $10 at a consignment shop, and Peter installed it for me.

I painted our Expedit duck egg in Annie Sloan chalk paint, and we attached her changing pad to that (inspired by Young House Love and Pinterest). I put a serving piece on her table to store burp clothes and swaddle blankets, wipes, and diaper cream, which is also an idea I saw on Pinterest. It's nice having all those things so handy.

That little corner of a quilt is from Peter's grandmother. I believe it was a blanket that was made for her when she was a baby! She gave it to us years ago, and I'm so happy that it now gets to live in our sweet daughter's room.

Lizzy has officially moved out of our room and into her crib, and the transition was an easy one - easier for her than for me, I think! For me it felt like her first little step toward independence...and for her, I think it just meant sleeping in a bigger, more comfy bed. Ooh parenthood!