GET ME DRESSED // 002

getting dressed for a date or a somewhat formal event in the colder winter months can be a bit of a challenge. you want to look seasonally appropriate and warm, but not like a sherpa. my little sister is getting married in december, and finding a wedding-appropriate dress that will keep me warm outside for long periods of time without looking ridiculous in photos (photos photos photos!) has become a project and a half. 

i found the sweater dress at need supply and it's sort of made my life complete (it's since sold out). it's a hug in clothing form. not to mention it happens to have zero shape to it, which is a-ok by me. what is it with me lately? i love dresses shaped like potato sacks. they're all i want to wear.

this dream catcher necklace is a new favorite. it was a gift from Penh Lenh, a jewelry line in partnership with Abolition International, empowering Cambodian women to free themselves from former hardships, realize their dreams, and become whole again. it's a great cause, the pieces are beautiful, and i love the opportunities i've gotten to help get the word out for causes like this whenever i can.

this post was sponsored by No nonsense. follow No nonsense on facebook and twitter for all the latest news and updates on their stylish and affordable legwear.

on me:

hat: c/o bcbg max azria (similar)

dress: need supply co.

necklace: c/o penh lenh

tights: c/o No nonsense (in deep gold)

boots: madewell (similar)

on huck:

hat: zara

sweater: h&m kids

pants: c/o thief and bandit

boots: c/o polarn o pyret

p.s. that's a temporary tattoo! i'm still testing out the waters over here...

p.p.s. photos by brandon holbrook!

LET'S TALK ABOUT // SLOUCHY TEES

i've gotten a lot of requests lately for a round up of slouchy white tee shirts, and you know me, i do aim to please. 

i have a thing for basics. it's about looking effortless but more than that, it's about being effortless. and the thing about slouchy white tees is, well, i could go on and on about the thing about slouchy white tees but i'll spare you that and give you this: if you put the kid to bed, then hop in a nice hot shower, really moisturize your brains out, then toss on a slouchy white tee and black leggings and crawl into bed, come morning you're already 30% dressed. and since you're me and you're embracing your bed head and not brushing your hair all that much... i mean, brush your teeth though, and concealer, but seriously, you've basically woken up ready to roll. 

a white t-shirt goes with everything, no matter what. i've never experienced a situation where it hasn't. and i've had really great luck with the forever 21 tees too, i'm not kidding mine have lasted at least a hundred years. in the summer i like a good v-neck, but lately i've been gravitating toward the sloppy oversize crew, where the neckline looks to be just a liiiiittle bit stretched out. then you throw on a sweater and some boots and you're practically alexa chung already. (i almost wrote "and you've practically earned french citizenship already," but look, i don't want to overdo it, so i didn't. even thought that's basically what i'm going for all of the time, anyway, no matter what, always.)

all images via my pinterest boards. i take my pinterest boards very seriously.

HUCK THE PHOTOGRAPHER // 002

the other day i uploaded the camera memory card onto the computer and i found a very exciting surprise waiting for me. huck's been at it again, and i am so pleased to present a few of his more recent photographic masterpieces. judging by the moody interplay of light and shadow, and his focus on the straight lines of the dining room and entry way set against the odd angles of the composition, i'd say his work is a statement on the duality of domestic life and the inherent ennui of the modern female homemaker. or something. anyway he's quite prolific.

please enjoy.

find huck's previous work HERE.

INSPIRED BY // FRENCH BANGS

i've been feeling really inspired lately by the holy trinity of the french bangs (charlotte, lou, francoise, amen). the tousled hair, the fresh face, the rumpled-just-so look and the worn in jeans... i especially love their bangs. i love that they're thinner, narrower, and shorter than a typical blunt bang, and i love how fresh they look when parted haphazardly. (i'm also intensely into the tattoo on lou's arm, but that's another thing all together.) 

so, i've been listening to lou doillon's new album a lot lately, is how this happened. it's a good album for writing late into the night to, and sometimes i'd need a writing break and fall deep into youtube rabbit holes of charlotte gainsbourg live performances or old francoise hardy videos, and then there it was. 2AM, hovering over the bathroom sink, nail scissors in one hand, a hunk of hair in the other, total rash-decision style. and as i held the scissors up to what i'd guessed would be a good length to cut and thought to myself, 'i'm not really doing this am i," the hand that was holding the scissors slipped and suddenly i was really committed to it. they kind of came out exactly how i wanted them to is the weird part. this is not necessarily how i'd recommend anyone get a haircut, but somehow it's worked for me twice in a row now and i'm starting to wonder if maybe 2AM might be a mystical hair cutting time for me? the next morning i woke up and remembered what i'd done and then i realized with a big, fat "duh" that it was the beginning of november. i always threaten to cut my bangs in november, it's become kind of a thing in my life. i always want them but i always talk myself out of it and i never actually go through with it, except for this time, when i did. 

so i guess you win this time, november!

i've been really happy with them, i think everyone should do it! let's start a trend. and i know, who is this person who is me but doesn't freak out over hair decisions? it's creepy.

p.s. check it.

A FEW ITEMS OF A MISCELLANEOUS NATURE

i know it's only monday but boy does it feel like a thursday.

so first of all, huck. huck is it these days. good gravy. also he is potty trained. which went a lot easier and a lot faster than i expected it to and i know better than to think any of it had anything to do with me. chalk it up to my kid being rad, yet again. he makes it easy. before bed tonight we read one of our books about thanksgiving. it lists all of the things this little boy is thankful for, and after the last page i asked henry what he was thankful for, and OFF HE WENT. he was thankful for this, he was thankful for that, he was thankful for penguins, he was thankful for his "pack pack," he was thankful for his treasure map. and then he asked me, mom? what do bugs eat? and i said, bugs? and he said, "yes bugs. they eat poops. isn't that silly." he said this very serious-like, frowning the whole time. so i said, "what does henry eat?" and he said, "sandwiches!" so i said, "what does mommy eat?" and he said, "cereal" (guilty as charged), and then he said, 'what does caroline eat?" and i was like, caroline?! sort of out of the blue, but okay. what does caroline eat, huck? and he paused and looked thoughtfully at the ceiling and tapped his finger on his mouth and said, "probably grapes."

on saturday afternoon i got to run down to see the first new york screening of "breastmilk" at the new york documentary festival. it was kind of amazing. it was produced by the same ladies who did the business of being born (full disclosure, i didn't totally love that movie), and it was about breastfeeding and all of the hoopla that surrounds it. i get really fired up about this stuff, just because, i'm not sure why. raging feminist is probably why. but what i was most taken by and what i need to really explore properly sometime was this: there was a lesbian couple in the film who had had a child through sperm donation. the birth mother was able to breastfeed successfully, but not only that, the birth mother's partner, a woman who had never been pregnant and had never given birth, she was also able to breastfeed successfully. she latched that baby on for five minutes at a time, each side, a few times a day, and within a week she was lactating. that's it. she had milk. and even though she didn't nurse every day, she kept up a steady supply for whenever her baby needed her. isn't that amazing? the rest of the women in the film were followed from pregnancy through their baby's first birthday, and each one of them, without fail, said in their first interview before they'd even given birth, that they "hoped" to breastfeed. they "wanted to" but "most people can't" and "so many things could go wrong." and then... so many things did go wrong. because, well of course, things always go wrong, things always go wrong all of the time. but i've been i thinking about that woman who was able to nurse even after never giving birth in the first place, and i've been thinking about the lack of trust we women seem to have in our own bodies sometimes, and how we think we have to fight our bodies, and how we might assume they aren't good enough on their own, just the way they are, in whatever shape they happen to be in... and i guess i always think about this stuff when i'm trying to get pregnant, because these days i don't trust my body to do anything. but i'm starting to think our bodies are onto us. i think there's a healthy amount of fatalistic self-determinism happening here. and i sometimes wonder if maybe the only reason i was able to nurse as long and as happily as i did was because, stupidly, and for whatever reason, i went into it knowing that i would. i've never gone into anything knowing i could do it before even starting, and this is starting to make me rethink the whole way i live my life. 

so, like, see this documentary, if you're able to. really really great stuff in there. 

*i guess i should clarify that this was MY experience with breastfeeding, and that i am in no way trying to minimize what other women go through in their experiences, when we all have very, very different situations from each other. and also, i should clarify that if just believing you could do something were enough, obviously i'd be pregnant by now! so that is NOT what i'm trying to say, and i apologize if it seemed like it was. i was mostly just thinking out loud in the middle of the night, which, obviously, is never a good idea.

huck! huck is solidly between sizes of clothes, it's funny. nothing fits him! he swims in 2T and pops out of 18 months and have i mentioned he is three? sigh. short genes. here he is in this really cute get up that was sent to us from the sweet folks at carousel and these pants remind me of luke skywalker and i can't wait for him to grow into this stuff. particularly those pants, they are the raddest.

the central park zoo got some new baby snow leopards this fall, so we went with my parents last week to coo at the cubs and take the mama a casserole. which remiiiiiiiinds meeeeeeee. after huck was born some friends brought over an entire pot of beef stew and i'm not kidding, it was the greatest thing in the entire world. beef stew. 

brandon took these photos, and basically someone at national geographic needs to snatch this dude up already. crap.

aaaaand a sea lion.

lastly i will leave you with this. this year for thanksgiving we up and got reservations at landmarc for the macy's parade. it's genius. you go eat brunch, you watch balloons go by out the window without freezing yer bum off or having to wake up at 5am, and now i shall include the photos i took a million years ago the last time we were at landmarc, since they're now related only slightly.

worth it.

oh wait!

also.

spiderman.

the end.

GET ME DRESSED // 001

the early part of fall found yours truly on a serious hunt for a leather jacket. i was willing to invest, but it had to be perfect. the trouble is, i'm extremely small boned (related: avian bone syndrome), and everything i tried was too loose in the shoulders or too long on my arms. i promised i'd keep y'all abreast of the jacket situation should i ever find a winner, and check it: i did! finally. a few seasons ago topshop carried an insanely great cropped motorcycle jacket, and while it's long gone in stores it'd been popping up on my "leather jacket xxs" eBay search feed. since european sizing is generally kinder to us small peeps, it was surprisingly inexpensive, and since nothing else was working anyway, i went ahead and bid on it and when it came and it fit like a glove i cried tears of joy. my leather jacket soul mate! i was thrilled. i've been wearing the hell out of it, and here is what i've been typically wearing it with, for the most part. you could accuse me of having a uniform and you wouldn't be wrong.

jeans // jacket // sweater (similar) // boots // bag // tee // bracelets: one two // necklace

i feel like this is a really fun time in my life. every now and then it occurs to me that i am the age my mom was when i was 9, which is weird, and i'm also starting to feel really comfortable in my skin and in my style, which is rad. i always thought adulthood would be the best, and it turns out, it is. so there.

this post is part of my collaboration with eBay. you can follow my collections HERE. #followitfindit

p.s. this is also the first in a new style series here on the blog. i hope you'll enjoy it!

THE GUGGENHEIM

one thing i love about my mom is how much fun we have when we go to museums together. we get the audio tour, we stroll real slow, nobody gets rushed. we make a good team. my mom has a really great eye for design and i'm not afraid of looking at penises in front of her if you know what i'm saying.

my mom has been to the city so many times now that there aren't too many things we have to hit while she's here, apart from pretzel croissants. but we hadn't been to the guggenheim yet, so off we went over the weekend. and while i didn't get see much anatomy, we did see the christopher wool exhibit, which was gorgeous. really graphic and emotional. 

by the time we'd walked there and walked around, then walked back across the park and halfway home to the south, then impulsively changed directions and walked north to momofuku for pork buns and city bakery for pretzel croissants, we'd walked so much that i actually got sick of it. not as in tired, as in bored. i just wanted to stop walking, i couldn't stand it. not another step! i've never had that happen to me before. it started to set in as we passed 81st street for the third time around and then around 75th street it reached its zenith. so i shouted, I'M SO SICK OF WALKING! which made me feel better. (zenith is a really great word.)

anyway huck came with us and like always he was a total trooper. and on the way home he got to enjoy his second stroller nap in as many days. that's one thing i love about cold weather--the stroller naps come back with a vengeance. and now we are potty training. so there's that.

i love the guggenheim, it might be one of my favorites. (i think the moma might be my all-time favorite, in case one were curious. why would anybody be curious though?) you should definitely check out the christopher wool show at the guggenheim if you're in town, and here's a little tip from my mom to you: always get the audio tour, and always come packing with a box or two of nerds.

i can't believe there is an entire website dedicated to pretzel croissants.

the end.

GUAPO

the boys are back together again, and all is right with the world.

as i type this, huck and his grandpa are curled up on huck's tiny toddler bed in huck's tiny toddler closet bedroom, my dad's legs sticking out of the doorway, having themselves a pirate powwow. this is the thing about my dad, is that my dad is my baby's soul mate mostly.

the other night my dad spread out our stash of crayons and got to making huck his very own treasure map to go along with the pirate treasure chest they'd brought from portland, to go along with huck's pirate costume that he still, most days, is almost always wearing. it was so exciting for me. i took about a million pictures of my dad drawing and teared up about a million times, because i am a ninny. the map came together pretty quickly, and then my dad took the time to carefully shade in the ocean and make sure those octopus limbs curled just right, and then i hung it up on the wall in huck's bedroom before huck could even have the chance to play with it because i am a killjoy.

when i was a kid my dad used to tell us the story of the threeeeee dooooooogs. it was a multi-episodic tale of puppy mischief, there were voices involved, the whole thing. it was the iliad and the odyssey for us girls. (i wrote an essay in honor of it a few years ago.) one morning in church a long time ago my dad sketched me up a little picket fence with a red dog house out front, and then each one of the three dogs from the stories. and bless my little nine-year-old heart but i held that drawing carefully in my hands all through three hours of church, and put it away carefully in a folder when i got home, and it's moved along with me everywhere i've been since. i had it framed after i was married. it's on the save-in-a-fire list, that sort of thing. and i have to say, getting to share my dad with this kid has been one of my favorite parts of parenting. the two of us, we're the fan club. president and co-president. (we're also on the art preservationist team.) huck's got the best grandpa around, and my old man's not so bad, either. 

p.s. thank you to carousel for huck's rad sweatshirt

FOR THE LOVE OF PEANUT BUTTER

hey, my parents are in town this weekend! they landed at jfk this evening and got in a cab, then got out of a cab and stepped into our doorway, and not two minutes after they'd barely sat down and started to ease in i launched myself at my mother with full force and literally talked a hundred miles a minute at her for two solid hours. all about myself. ME. 

i have had the kind of week--the past three weeks in a row, actually--where bombs of chaos keep dropping. psssszzzzzz BOOM. and then instead of being the kind of bomb they started out being, they'd change in midair sort of and land completely not how i expected them to land, sometimes softer and sometimes weirder... morphing disasters, in kind of a comical way actually, and i have things to sort out and the bad news for everyone is, i sort things out verbally. by talking at you. taaaaaaaalking aaaaaat youuuuuu. honestly my mom got here just in time (making this the third freakishly serendipitous situation i've found myself in this month), because otherwise i was going to have to talk my feelings out at BRANDON and look, we all know how effective boys are at sorting out the inner workings of a woman's brain. 

the good news is everything is fine, and actually, things are looking up. most of the bad news has become a blessing in disguise, except for the stupidly bad news i got last week, in the "you are way more infertile than you thought you were and may never have any more children" vein, only to have that reversed to "just kidding! but yeah, you're still as infertile as you thought you were, here let's throw some more drugs at you." which was where i was before, you know, only the difference is before it felt pretty crappy, and now it feels like a vacation! compared to what it almost was. i'm just saying, i'm all over the place. it's a long and very involved story and, like i said, still sorting through over here, but the conclusion seems to be thus: everything is going to be great. i have no freaking clue what i'm doing. i am going to try really, really hard to become a more gracious human being. and i'm lucky to have good parents. and a patient husband. okay well he's patient about 70% of the time, but also he deep cleaned the house for me yesterday so that more than makes up for things.

anyway the reason i came here was because in the middle of all this nonsense i baked some stupidly good cookies (therapy baking!) in exchange for a black sweater i'd forgotten somewhere (gratitude baking!) and so here we are. 

peanut butter cookies

(they're sort of a work in progress)

(just like me)

(now that i think about it, i think i found an early version of this recipe on nie nie's old cooking blog)

1 1/4  cups peanut butter 

(next time i'm doing a cup and a half) 

(you can do either smooth or chunky, this is something you'll have to ponder on your own time.)

3/4 cups sugar

1 cup packed brown sugar

(bonus points if it stays a little clumpy, it bakes up really good with a few pockets of carmelized brown sugar here and there.)

2 eggs

1 tsp baking powder

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

dash of salt

1 1/2 cup flour

this makes a really thick dough. 

roll the cookies into balls then flatten with a spoon or your hands on a greased cookie sheet. 

don't forget the fork marks, you know. 

at the last minute i rememebered i had a costco bag of peanut butter cups sitting around and so i thought, why not!

bake at 375 for 8 minutes.

i'm sort of on a cookie roll! for my next trick, i want to try and figure a way to make banana bread  in cookie form. if you know of a recipe that exists for this already, please pass it on! i don't know, it just seems like banana bread cookies would be mind-blowingly good.

this post has been all over the place. and good night!

AUTUMN COMES TO CENTRAL PARK

saturday was such a good day i could probably go blind tomorrow and feel like i'd seen it all. i kid you not, THEEEEE perfect day. mother nature freaking KILLED. the leaves were on fire, the sky was an icy blue, the air was scientifically the perfect temperature. i swear they've probably done studies on it. at one point i shouted at brandon--no i really shouted at him in the middle of the park--BRANDON THE AIR FEELS LIKE NOTHING! I CAN'T! FEEL! THE AIR! and then we walked through the mall with all the arching canopies of pumpkin-y trees and it was like shuuuuuut uuuuuup. leaves like confetti twisting through the air, and the crunch! don't even get me started on the crunch. it was so perfect it was stupid. there were so many people in the park that day and all of us with our cheesy grins on, looking up into branches with our mouths open in awe, we were all just IN it. we all knew, it was like we could all tell deep in our bones that this was the last day of it. the last day before it got too cold, too dark, before all the leaves dropped and turned to mushy stew on the ground, the last day before daylight savings time came along and pooped on all of us, and so we were doing it. we were all DOING IT.

we stayed outside until the last drop of sunlight had disappeared, finding excuse after excuse to stay out, walking down path after path to delay going home; we even camped out under a fir tree in the middle of a sudden short-lived downpour, because even covered in raindrops the day was too good to miss. 

and then it went dark and we all went home, and pulled on our coziest socks.

it's all going to go too fast from here on out, you know. after halloween comes the marathon, after the marathon comes the thanksgiving parade, and then come the christmas shops and the ice skating rinks and the santas and the trees all lit up, and before you know it it's over. we've been chugging uphill and chugging uphill and saturday was the top of it, the very tippy top, where you could see it all; everything that came before and everything that is coming next. the holidays are like a slide where you speed all the way to the bottom. this is our reward for a year well done, this exciting slide of autumn into the holidays and christmas and joy and it all happens far too quickly and it ends before you know it. and then it is january and you're like, now what.

we stared it down on saturday. we opened our arms wide. we felt the breeze. and now we are ready. 

here we go. 

p.s. my loafers are from zara!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

after a really strange halloween last year, this year has been just what the doctor ordered. we could really "feel the spirit" of halloween again, if you know what i'm saying. we made it to a few fun halloween parties, huck is at the age where he can differentiate between creepy and scary and really enjoy all of our favorite halloween movies with us, and last week we even found a sitter in time to see the procession of the ghouls at the cathedral of st john the divine. (they play a creepy silent film with a live organist, followed by puppet ghouls parading down the aisles of the church in the dark. st john's is the largest gothic cathedral in north america--you can see a few of my instagrams from the night HERE and HERE. the whole thing was wild). 

after an insanely busy day working, we were able to run up to 69th for some trick or treating on our old street. it was just really nice. we saw a few of of our favorite neighbors and got ourselves a big old bucket of sugar. lemme tell you, huck was a natural. he had all the ladies slipping him extra candy, and by the end of the night he was working three suckers at once like a pro. dude knows what he's doing. 

69th street is nuts this time of year. we really miss it. halfway through our trick or treating brandon said, "it SMELLS like 69th street!" which was funny but also i totally knew what he was saying. the air is different over there on the east side of the west side.

and then we attempted to recreate this old shot, because, meeeeeemoriieeeeeeeess...

we ended the night at crumbs for a halloween cupcake that brandon had seen in a window and fell in love with (more sugar, obviously), and then huck tanked out on my lap while watching nightmare before christmas... still in his pirate costume. it was just about exactly the way any toddler's dream halloween should go. and then his parents ransacked his candy stash. not bad all around.

happy halloween!

love, pirate henny huck and his two scurvy parents

  △ photos above by the supremely talented mark weinberg. △

p.s. so many thanks to H&M for huck's pirate costume! 

FYI: 25% of H&M's All for Children autumn proceeds are going to UNICEF. it's a really, truly great cause.