Filled me up

2014 Christmas card photo, taken by my sister

The entire holiday season has come and gone, without documentation of any kind in this space. It was probably the best one yet, but I didn't have any desire to write about it.

I've gone through periods like this before when I simply didn't feel like blogging at all, but after a little break, I would start composing posts in my head, feeling refreshed and exciting about Fresh Basil again. My mind is buzzing these days, but not with blog posts.

This was difficult to realize and accept, because this has been such a wonderful outlet for me over the years. I have loved having a place to write my thoughts down and neatly package our experiences at home and away into compact and well-defined narratives. I made this, I went here, I found this - you should, too!

This blog has filled me up at times when I was bored or lonely or felt stuck, and it's given me a space to share so many happy occasions, including the big ones like our engagement and wedding, buying and renovating our house, and pregnancy and the start of parenthood.

There will likely be times ahead when I am bored or feel stuck, and there will certainly be many happy occasions to celebrate. But it feels like the right time to stop maintaining Fresh Basil, despite the knot it gives me in my stomach every time I read over this sentence.

Thank you - so very much - for coming to this space to read and check in. It has been an absolute pleasure to keep up with old friends and make a few new friends here over the years. If you'd like to continue checking in, please do find me on Twitter or Instagram. Both are private accounts, but I would happily welcome any and all former blog readers into the mix!

Happy, happy new year, my friends. I hope 2015 fills you right up.

Introducing Fresh Basil Travel Services!

Ten years ago this fall, I returned home from studying abroad in Italy and wrote out a dozen or so pages of detailed recommendations for every place I visited in Europe. My dad still foists that crazy (and quite outdated!) document upon anyone who even mentions Italy.

All that to say, I've long taken great pleasure in sharing bits and pieces of vacation advice with family, friends, and even a good deal of strangers.

It's been lovely to have an excuse to share travel tips with all of you on Fresh Basil over the years, and I absolutely adore fielding questions via email about visiting the Berkshires or New York or Martha's Vineyard. But I've often thought that it would be fun to formalize that arrangement a bit and offer up my obsessive vacation-related research skills to the masses.

And so, I am absolutely thrilled to announce the start of Fresh Basil Travel Services! This is basically an excuse for me to do the crazy kind of vacation prep I would do for myself for you.

I love planning where to eat and what to see and do, but I know many people do not find that kind of thing to be very exciting. In fact, it can be kind of a bummer to sift through loads of blog posts and review sites and travel forums to plan your perfect trip (or so I've heard!). If you'd like to hand off that task and just get down to enjoying your vacation, I would love to help!

The State of Things

Asters in honor of a new September baby!

This was an exciting, tiring, fun, full week in our household. The biggest and bestest news is that our niece, Caroline, arrived! I got to swing by the hospital on the day she was born to meet her. She feels absolutely light as a feather compared to the heifer I usually tote around. She has a darling, sweet little face, lots of dark curly hair, and is just such a dear. Peter and Lizzy haven't gotten to meet her yet because they were both fighting colds, but I'm hoping they'll be well enough for introductions over the weekend.

Because of the new baby, my mother in law has been staying with us for the last few days, and it's been such a treat. Lizzy is loving the extra attention, and Peter and I are getting spoiled by her cooking.

Since going back to work, I look forward to our weekends so much. Probably too much, because I hate feeling like I'm just "getting through" the majority of my week/life. On most Tuesdays, though, you can find me tearfully telling Peter that the weekend is way too far away and I can't possibly make it. But then I do (time hasn't stopped yet on a Tuesday, but my fear that it will is alive and well!).

It helps - tremendously - that Lizzy is over-the-moon happy to arrive to daycare each morning. She spends her days there being smiled at, played with, given toys, and toted around, and I really think it's her idea of heaven. I miss her way more than she misses me.

I also completely recognize that we are in a very, very lucky position right now - this a Champagne problem. We are all healthy and happy, and I know how lucky I am to not only have a job, but one that I really enjoy.

Anyways, I feel myself rambling along. I started this weekend tangent intending to say that I look forward to having two uninterrupted days with my family so much that I feel like I need to pack them to gills with fun and productivity. Have meaningful time with Lizzy one-on-one! Go to the farmers market! Establish ourselves at our new local church! Paint furniture, vacuum, clean out my closet...on and on. I don't exactly know what to do about this because it is actually the best time to do many of these things, and I want to have a balance of fun mixed in with everything else that needs doing. I'm sure we'll figure this out, but if you have any advice, it would be most welcome.

Wishing you all a very happy weekend. TGIF to the max.

Oh, and P.S.! Thank you for weighing in on the island. I went with white, but did pale green stools. Looks cute! I owe you a pic.

(Un)tethered

I'd been dreading yesterday for weeks, so much so that I half convinced myself and my family that I had appendicitis because of a persistent pain that developed on the right side of my stomach.

Lizzy slept through the night, but I was up at 4:00 a.m. (Something no one told me is that when your baby first starts sleeping through the night, you won't necessarily be able to after months of waking up. Perhaps because it reeks of a humble brag?)

I went back to bed, but popped awake minutes before the alarm was set to go off. Then I proceeded to get ready, crying in the shower, while getting dressed, and eating breakfast. If Lizzy feared her mother had gone insane, smiling at her like a maniac with tears streaming down her face, she didn't let it get her down; she was her happy, bubbly self.

Getting off the train was the worst. I felt like I was impersonating my old life - working Julie, bounding around Boston into the office. I can't explain why those moments in particular made me feel so bad. When I arrived at work, I truly had the nicest welcome you could wish for, complete with flowers, a special breakfast, and lots of doting colleagues asking all about the baby. I tried to turn off my thoughts about Lizzy and dive in, only to have to turn them back on when it came to time to pump in the morning and afternoon. I tried to do a bit of work at the time - two birds with one stone and all that - but instead I left splotchy tear marks all over my papers.

And yet. In the afternoon, I dashed off to a meeting to discuss a new project that I'll be working on. I got to share some ideas I'd collected from previous jobs, and others nodded along. Walking back to my desk, I had a crazy sense of freedom. I was alone! But I was also toting around a small cooler of milk. Tethered to my baby, but on a longer rope.

When I got home, Peter opened the door with Lizzy in his arms, and she smiled and leaned out for me to take her, which she'd never done before. I swelled with equal parts happiness at seeing her again and smelling her delicious baby smell and sadness that I had to leave again the next day, and the day after that, on and on. More tears and maniacal smiles.

I know that she didn't feel the ache that I did, and I don't think she ever will. She was happily at home with Peter, and in a few weeks, she'll happily attend her tiny daycare for the time that Peter's at school. It's me that's getting in the way here, and the selfish feeling that I want to be home with her and also speak with adults and make some money at work. It will get better in one way or another, I know that it will, but for now, I'll be the crazy lady masquerading as someone who has her emotions under control.

Cheers to Tuesday, my friends.

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. 

Basic Tools for Your Old House

We've only been in our crazy old house for about 9 months, but now that we are closing the door on our final major renovation (I promise to share some pictures here soon!), I thought it would be fun to show you a few of the little things that have been life savers for us while doing house-related projects.

These are all relatively inexpensive tools that we've turned to again and again in the last year. I originally just wanted to write about my pry bar (top left) because it truly is my favorite cheap tool that has countless uses, but I thought that would be a boring post. I'll just give you a few sentences instead! I bought two of these when we were removing the carpeting upstairs, and it's great for that, but it's also incredible for removing nails from tight spots that the back of a hammer doesn't fit in, scraping mysterious gunk off of stuff, opening boxes - it's just the handiest thing to have around. $10 you won't regret spending!

This mainly applies if you have a dusty old house like mine, but I picked up a big package of respirators that we've used for painting, carpet removal, cutting the flooring, etc. I love my caulking gun because I believe there are very few household issues that can't be solved with a bit (or a bundle!) of caulk. I've used this to fill in gaps on windows and trim, when we installed our new counter top in the bathroom, to seal tile gaps in the tub, and on and on. When you buy the gun, go ahead and buy a kitchen and bath caulk and an adhesive caulk (only a few dollars each). This kind of goes with the poly foam caulk, which we've used to fill in larger gaps in windows and trim (and then covered up with white adhesive caulk after - I have no idea if this is the right thing to do, but it seems to do the trick!).

If you have a lot of painting in your future, go ahead and buy a big batch of foam rollers, the ceiling extender, the wood putty (if you have beat-up/new trim to paint), a few nice angled brushes, and a packet of artists brushes for touch-ups. I find that if I have all the supplies on hand, I'm much more likely to dive in and get a project done, so this is really just to save you from procrastinating.

We also bought a few basic saws that have come in very handy - a hack saw, a cross saw, and a coping saw, as well as sanding blocks in different grits and a pocket plane (great for getting new doors to fit in our wonky, off-kilter house!).

What are your must haves for home-ownership? I'm sure I'm missing some really helpful items!

Laundry

Laundry is getting very, very cute around here! I realize the novelty will soon wear off, but for now, good grief. Striped baby leggings and duck hats and teeniest, tiniest socks are filling me right up with happiness.

This is a silly question, but how many clothes did you bring to the hospital for the baby? Just one full outfit?! Any other strange things you placed in your bag that you were glad you had? All I can wrap my mind round is toiletries and magazines for me, and so I have a little bit of research to do...

Just beyond

A chilly weekend away in southern Maine at the end of March doesn't exactly scream "baby moon," but that's what we called it.

Over the last eight years, Peter and I have taken many, many trips - both big and small - together. Our first was to Williamsburg, Virginia about six months after we met. The town was all decked out for Christmas, and we bopped around eating and drinking and generally feeling extremely adult about the whole thing. That Sunday afternoon was drizzly and cold, but there was a promise of fireworks once it got dark enough, so Peter got a taste of how serious I am about pyrotechnics because we stayed on that town green until the bitter, celebratory end.

Then there were the weekends in New York, before we lived there. Weekends in D.C., after we lived there. Weekends in Boston, before we moved here for good. There were wedding celebrations in Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Illinois, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, North Carolina. Winter weekends skiing in the Berkshires, driving into the wilds of Canada, bopping down to Newport.

And big trips. Taking off for nearly a month to roam around Brazil, and then Hawaii. Week-long stays in Paris, and Charleston.

In the middle of our Brazil trip, which we took off on just days after getting engaged, we went to different beaches all the time, ate so much grilled meat, brought cards everywhere we went to play gin rummy because everyone around us seemed to be doing the same, and I remember one night, probably about halfway into the trip when Peter and I were out at bar where the floor was covered with a thick spread of sand underneath our feet, he said very casually, "It's so lucky that I get to spend all my days with you."

In celebration of these days together, when it is just an us, we ate fried sea food, and took a long walk by the steely grey water, perched as gracefully as possible atop bar stools, and toasted to this lovely, lucky life we have together, and to all the lovely, lucky things that await us, just beyond our line of sight.

Upstairs Bathroom Re-do

Last fall, I hatched a brilliant plan - we could give our upstairs bathroom a quick make-over during Christmas vacation!

(Ha. Ha, ha, ha.)

Initially, this space wasn't anywhere near the top of our priority list because, unlike almost every other room in the house, it functioned. Hideous, yes, but functional. But because we convinced ourselves that making this room a whole lot better would just involve a series of small upgrades that we could do ourselves, it moved rapidly up the list. Plus, it made me kind of depressed to imagine giving the baby baths in that putrid yellow tub. The pictures above are from when we first moved in (that's not my curtain - they kindly included it in the sale...).

The first order of business was the tile. Now, if we were planning to stay in this house for many years to come, or if our tile was in great shape (but was just an unfortunate color), we would have either saved up to totally re-do the tile, or had it professional re-glazed. But we decided a quick and easy fix was more than fine for our purposes, especially since the tile has some cracks - I think it was a somewhat poorly done DIY when it was initially put in.

I heard about tile paint in This Old House, and thought it might be worth a shot, even though it seemed almost too good to be true. Painting over ugly tiles for a bright white finish?! But as you can see below, it's pretty darn good! I buffed and cleaned the tiles one night and filled in all the cracks with caulk, and then Peter painted the finish on the tub tiles and around the floorboard tiles (I actually left the house in honor of our unborn baby's brain cells - this stuff was incredibly toxic smelling). Then - and this is the tricky part about using this product - we left the house for a week (it was Christmas to New Years) because the tile can't get wet for a few days.

After this, the series of updates runs together in my mind, but we painted the walls a really pretty pale blue, replaced the horrible track doors on the linen closet that were never on their tracks (this task nearly broke Peter because the frame was so far from being square it was crazy!), replaced the light over the vanity, took down the huge, glued on mirrors and replaced the one over the sink with a Home Goods find, and installed a new towel bar and toilet paper holder.

We lived with it with these updates for quite some time while we shopped for, ordered, and waited on a new granite vanity top and sink to come in. Earlier this month, we finally picked it up! Right before that, I painted the awful faux marble laminate vanity base with Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. I was very skeptical about this product, but it was amazing. It's strange stuff - very thick and matte - but the coverage was incredible. I did have to give it four very thin coats to effectively wipe out the marbling, but it was worth it.

The small narrow shelves to the left of the vanity had shudders that were falling off (this house is FULL of shuddered doors!). I took the measurements to Home Depot and they cut me new pieces of wood, and I bought some basic trim pieces to finish them off. I added the same new hinges and knobs to these that I used on the vanity.

The final-ish task was taking off the old vanity top and sink and replacing it. My parents were in town last weekend, so Peter took off the top and disconnected the water in the hopes of finishing the job when they were around so they could help lift it onto the vanity. The pipes were so old that they weren't standard sizes, and our new sink didn't line up exactly with these old pipes. Nightmare! After hours, Peter basically gave up called our plumber on Monday morning. The plumber assured him he was super close to finishing and gave excellent instructions, and he was able to finish the job.

I can't believe how much I've written about this bathroom update, and I know most of it wasn't exactly riveting. But I am incredibly proud of this project. My mom calls it the "painted everything" bathroom, which is fairly accurate, but it's also a place where we - and particularly Peter - did some things that we both would have happily left to professionals just a few months ago. With the electrical work, carpentry, and plumbing tasks, I feel like we made huge strides in our confidence to dive in and figure things out in this crazy old house.

And now, of course, I'm not at all depressed about giving the baby a bath in this pretty little room :)

Getting Ready

This semester, one of my classes is being taught by the editor of The Horn Book. Yesterday we got to visit their offices, which featured stuffed shelf after stuffed shelf of children's book - essentially, heaven. I love the magazine's most recent magazine cover from the lovely Jonathan Beam.

It's fitting on multiple levels right now. I could practically build a snowman this large with the amount of snow in my tiny yard. And we're getting ready to go back into building, renovating, and construction-mode in our house. The plan is for the latest (and maybe final?!?) round to be done by mid-April, leaving a couple of weeks to clear the dust ahead of my due date (which I share with Grace and Olivia, weirdly enough! Also, those are two names are on our long list of girl's names, ha.). If the baby comes early, though, hooooooly cow.

I'll be able to give more of an update about our plans later, once we review all the quotes and make our final-final decisions about what to do. Suffice to say, I'm having frantic thoughts at 4:00 a.m. about setting up our dressers in the bathroom upstairs and assessing how many slow-cooker recipes are actually in my repertoire (not nearly enough).

Plans for the weekend include watching the open ceremony tonight with take-out, lots of school work, and hosting friends for a dinner party on Sunday. I have zero ideas about what to make, which isn't like me, but I'm sure it will come together just fine. (Just kidding, as I was reading over this post, some inspiration struck: meatballs with braised onions and mashed potatoes, carrots and fennel, and the most perfect brownies would all be good.)

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, friends!

Last hurrah in the Berkshires (for now!)

My parents condo in the Berkshires recently sold, and we're all going up this weekend to help pack everything up. Of course, I'm thrilled for my parents - this is exactly what you want to have happen when you put something on the market! - but it's bittersweet, nonetheless. That space has been such a haven for Peter and me, and I'll miss it.

My parents bought it about a week after I left for college, and it's been a steady presence during my entire young adult life. I spent a somewhat lonely summer alone there interning after I returned from studying abroad in Italy, but I really fell in love with the area during that extended stay. One year later, I was able to bring Peter to the Berkshires over Labor Day weekend. We've spent dozens of afternoons skiing at Butternut and on the lawn at Tanglewood, and many hours eating cheese and drinking wine in the living room. We've celebrated birthdays, hosted friends, and one morning in July, upstairs in my crazy pink bedroom, I got ready for our wedding.

This weekend will be filled with packing and purging, but it will also be a lovely last hurrah (for now!) since we're all going to Rouge tomorrow night for a fun dinner. And we might even get to tag along with my parents on a little bit of house hunting!

Happy Friday to all!

Vacation Days

Happy New Year, friends! I hope you had a lovely close to 2013.

For the last few days, I've been thinking about how very different my life is now compared to this time last year. I desperately wanted to be pregnant, and we were desperately searching for a house to buy. Both were more difficult to achieve than anticipated! There is something strange - and wonderful, of course, so, so wonderful - about getting the things you want most. Things felt somewhat lonely and sad last winter, wishing for these things to come into my life that turned out to be quite out of my control.

I can't say that I'm grateful for that time, or that I learned lots of profound lessons. Really, I just wish I could go back and tell myself to be a bit more zen about everything. I'm trying to carry that message into this year, and have been thinking a lot about patience, and how much I'll need to cultivate it in the coming months. Patience with our slowly evolving house, with myself during the rest of pregnancy and new motherhood, with finding my footing professionally during all this change, with Peter and our new baby.

Last night, we went to our dear friends' apartment in the South End for a small New Years party, just like last year. The food was incredible, we played games right up until the ball drop, and then we toasted each other at midnight with Champagne. Today, I'm making corn bread and hoppin' john while forging ahead on back issues of the New Yorker and my big stack of library books, just like last year.

But everything looks different in this bright new light.

Half Bath Mini-Makeover

Yay, a completed mini-makeover to share! Over the weekend we painted the entryway (still being set up, but pictures coming soon!). There was half a gallon of that pretty green paint left, so I couldn't help but add the half bath to the list, too.

I did have grand plans to go with a cute stripe in here, but laziness won out. Maybe in a few years when everything else in the house is done / adorable (HA!), I'll have the motivation to tackle more creative things. But for now, this feels like a big victory - one (itty bitty) room in our house is now looking a-okay.

The before shots above are actually better than what I was starting out with because there were two truly horrible bathroom cabinets over the toilet and sink. You can see the creepy shadows on the walls where they once were. Since we have a full bath upstairs with storage aplenty, I was fine with getting rid of those cabinets down here, and there's still some storage under the sink for my blow dryer and cleaning supplies. 

This room was clearly a blank slate, and we certainly won't be don't anything major to it in terms of renovations. But if I had been the one designing this bath, I would have gone with pedestal sink to free up some real estate - it's a very narrow room. And for the love of Nancy, I would have centered the toilet on the wall (!!!).

I've tried to counteract that left-leaning toilet by centering the art work above it (obviously), but also adding a free-standing toilet paper thingy-majig and putting the tissues in the middle, too. It helps a little? If anyone has any additional brilliant ideas, I would love to hear!

More Children's Lit Favorites

  

  

  

  

I may complain a bit about the workload in my class, but I am LOVING the books we've read so far. This list tends toward the dark and serious - even brave - end of the children's literature spectrum (with the exception of Building Our House, which is pure sweetness and delight).

I hadn't read any of these as a child, so I came at them with only my adult perspective, of course, but to me it seems that these titles require a lot of trust in child readers to handle the "big" stuff of life - poverty, racism, abuse, violence, death, heartache (I'm probably not doing a great job convincing any of you to pick these up!). But these intense topics are handled with such sensitivity and grace, and leave room for so much discussion and dialogue. Tricky issues without answers in many ways, making them brave books for readers of every age.

Sending the Carpet Bagging

This is the long narrow bedroom I mentioned earlier - beautiful contact paper covering the walls!

Last weekend after we came home from a blissful two weeks of vacation, we ran right over the new house. We hadn't spent much time there since closing, and moving day is fast approaching. We needed to make it a bit more livable, especially upstairs.

We went armed with carpet removal supplies - pry bars, flat head screwdrivers, pliers, utility knives, and dust masks.

Pulling up the actual carpet was a breeze, and super satisfying. Your floors are revealed! We have a dumpster outside at the moment for the other work that's being done in the house, so we threw all the old rugs and padding right in there.

Not a glamorous job...

What comes after the carpets are gone is way worse - hours spent pulling up the carpet tack strip and hundreds of stubborn staples that were scattered all around. Our backs were so sore by the end!

I cleaned them up later with Bona floor cleaner, so the floors now look slightly better than they do above. But because we're going to be shifting walls around up there in the not-so-distant future, we're not worrying about them too much. After that work is done, we'll see if we can patch and have them re-finished, or we'll put new hardwood down.

But for now, it's no longer a pink and green allergy fest! Thank goodness.

Noanet Woodlands Hike

I've said before that I'm not much of a hiker, but a few weeks ago, I found myself talking Peter into a trip to Noanet Woodlands for a little walk. If I refer to it as a "walk," I feel less intimidated. Ha!

I asked Peter if he would have carved our initials into the tree if we had been dating in high school, and he said, "Ummmm..." Rule following above romance! Peter, if we were dating high school, I would have tagged a barn with our initials. Oh yes, I would!

That's the Boston skyline up there, do you see it?! And those people below had a really impressive picnic with lots of snacks - I was jealous.

We did a three mile loop up to the summit - pretty easy, and really pretty. I'm basically an expert hiker now.