AROUND HERE

you know how every once in a while you keep intending to blog but don't, so you decide to do a massive photo dump to catch up? this is one of those times. 

my mom is in town! well, my mom was in town. she left last month. soo, just to give you an idea this is how far back we're starting. she was here to help with huck while i went for broke at my deadline. while she was here she had a birthday. 

we took her to aria, a small plate italian place that sydney and i happened upon once in the middle of a blizzard. i think aria might be on my short list of favorites. see also: huck continuing to master the art of eating like a gentleman.

speaking of italian! one afternoon while my mom was in town i ran downtown to meet brandon for a lunch date at eataly. he's been working in the flatiron area on a special project, which has been a total upgrade from his times square office let me tell you (holy crap). eataly is kind of a challenge to pull off with a kid in tow (packed, not many tables, totally seriously packed, many seating areas are actually standing areas... breakable groceries everywhere...), so it was an extra special treat on top of a perfect afternoon date with my red beard. we ordered a pizza to share. if you're looking for roberta's without the trek to bushwick, eataly's pizza is sort of in the same vein. i mean, it's not as good as roberta's. but then, nothing is.

  

we hit a milestone completely accidentally the other day and the holbrooks are now stroller-free! well, you know. we were trying it out tentatively, but it's stuck and we're going for it. it's freed up a million subway stations for one thing, and totally limited the amount of junk i can haul around with me for another thing, but so far it's been really great. hooray for legs! we'll use the stroller a million times more i'm sure for specific outings that require it, but it's not a part of our daily routine anymore. i'm sort of sad about it, sort of thrilled about it... exactly how i've felt about all of huck's big milestones. we've established hard and fast rules regarding street corner / crosswalk etiquette. huck knows exactly where to stop so i don't have a heart attack thinking he's about to run into traffic. so far so good! 

every day with huck is a total blast. he is hysterical. every day he likes to be something new. a bunny rabbit, a turtle, a polar bear, a pirate. every third block or so he decides to waddle like a penguin. he's just such a pal. in the mornings when he pops his head up from the pillow his first words are usually, "mom, can we make someping outta schtuff???" we've gotten pretty creative with our limited supply of craft paper and tape, huck's artwork is practically up to the ceiling these days. here we have some bunny ears a la his daddy. the other day i taped pasta noodles to his fingers to make polar bear claws. he's using up all of my eyeliner on whiskers, and one afternoon we went out to meet friends wearing full pirate gear, including eye patch. i think it's pretty fantastic.

at any given moment i have at least four completely bizarre toys in my bag, and probably two half-eaten sandwiches. and a pair of boy's undies. you know just in case.

heyyy, brandon makes the blog! over the weekend we helped celebrate our friend stanton's birthday (in his sick insane gorgeous brooklyn loft.. seriously...). we also helped take down this demon piñata that absolutely refused to die. huck had the time of his life. between the piñata, the yarn-bombed shopping cart he got to ride around in, the cake, the ice cream, the puppy, this party was his freaking neverland.

i've been so grateful for the crummy weather this week so we have an excuse to stay inside in our jams and fluff the nest. i've been moving this gorrrrrgeous weaving, made by the seriously talented maryanne moodie, all over the house. i love it in the bedroom, but i love it in the living room too, so the rooms are sharing custody until i make up my mind. 

i recently got to visit the show room at objects without meaning to collaborate on a fun little project. i love this brand! their line is entirely made in the US, which is really neat. i was also invited to the offices at rag & bone in the meatpacking district a few weeks ago, which was seriously a dream come true. i fell into a rabbit hole of amazingness when i found out the trim girl there used to work for forever 21 as a buyer. we could have talked for hours. (the things i learned!) getting to see a bit of the design process (as well as a preview of a few of next season's pieces!) of one of my favorite fashion houses was ridiculous. and next season looks good.

i declare it a good time to be a holbrook! good health, good friends, good things, good hormones...ish... (ladies, take your vitamin d!), we're counting our blessings with each rain drop. 

holbrook update over and out!

PICNIC SEASON

it's "take off ya coats" week in manhattan, hooray! well, i guess i wore a coat today, but only because i'm a wuss and it was windy. (on a scale of one to hell, wind is right up there with chalkboard screech.)

but tuesday! tuesday was stell-ar. gorgeous blue skies, sunny and warm, the air smelled amazing. not like those pear trees smell, those must not be blooming just yet. all the magnolias have gone off, it's just the time to be alive out there. i'm having the kind of week that might turn out to be THE WEEK OF MY LIFE, which is silly because nothing at all has happened this week, except that i started becoming a functioning human again. i was scribbling in my date book last night all the things i have going on and the deadlines i have to meet, and i realized, this is the easiest my schedule has been in all my life since precisely the day before i signed on with babble. juggling babble and a blog and a young baby = that made me crazy. i wanted to quit that junk for ages but couldn't justify the loss of income, until the book happened! and then i quit the babble for the book and then the book ate my face off. (but how lucky am i to have gotten my face eaten off by a book? i just want to put that out there in case anybody thinks i'm complaining, because yo.) and now that that's done, and i'm purposefully not putting anything in it's place, i just feel like my LUNGS are working! i know i've already said this but it's just continually lovely how humanely my life is treating me these days. 

anyway this is about picnics. we took one on tuesday. doesn't it seem you should say "take" a picnic rather than "have" a picnic? i had my camera with me, so that happened. i always feel a little self conscious when i haul out the camera and start snapping hideous amounts of photos while we're out and about, i hate looking like 'that person.' but then i remind myself that the photo albums i make at christmas time are worth it. and they are. and also, identifying thought distortion is my new favorite hobby (mind reading! emotional reasoning! generalization!) so.... picnics!

watch out, here come some blossoms!

guys, i'm abolishing the term "selfie." from now on it's called a "photo." let's change the world!

i got to lay on this here picnic blanket for a solid hour and think of absolutely nothing at all while huck accomplished all the things on his checklist. such as....

climb a tree: check.

play tag with a group of kids sitting nearby: check.

pick a few illegal flowers before mom notices and makes him stop: double check.

and then, without any encouraging from me whatsoever, huck up and handed out his illicit daffodils to the some of the ladies around us. no joking, i'm in real trouble with this one. 

not to brag, but he gave me two. i attempted to get a photo of them in my hat. 

nnnnnno dice. but!

how do you solve a problem like maria?

you can hear it in your head, can't you!

p.s. on huck: shirt from hugo loves tiki, pants from zara (girl's section, you guessed it), chucks, sweatshirt

on me: hat from forever 21 two years ago / tee / jeans / past season rag & bone sandals via ebay / denim shirt from walmart seven years ago (yikes). 

i found that picnic blanket at a swap meet when we were in arizona, it's a saddle blanket. but these are similar and look like fun!

WHEN I WAS SMALL

something a little off the beaten path today, but back in the 'burbs while on a target run, huck + i came across this little book called when i was small. it's about a boy named henry and his mother, who, if you ask me, happens to look rather a lot like me. if you squint or whatever. i swear it was as though it had been written for the two of us. it's the sweetest little story, i get all lumpy every time we read it together.

there are two others in the series, when you were small and where you came from, that are equally as wonderful. especially where you came from; there's a page in there where henry's dad says they found henry in the garden, growing from a peony bush. come on. this is right up there with that time i finally read anne of green gables and suddenly my whole life made sense. i swear it couldn't be any more perfect.

anyway. we've been on a bit of a bed time book tear recently and are in need some fresh blood. any favorites you recommend that i should be checking out at the library? 

MONDAY

entirely unrelated photo of my stinkin adorable child wearing my glasses? check.

today i gave myself the day off for good behavior. i mean if anybody deserves it, it is probably not me.

i hadn't intended to "take a day off," whatever that means, but brandon had decided to work from home this morning and i had a post office run to make, so i pulled on my denim one piece jumpsuit (it makes me look like a mechanic), left my boys in their jams, and snuck out the door to the post office. it was so sunny out! and almost warm, it was perfect mechanic jumpsuit weather. (any day that starts with a denim jumpsuit is bound to be a good one, is the moral of this story.)

i took my sweet time at the post office. you guys, it's just that i really love the post office, i do. i like those automated machines. i like memorizing the order of the buttons to push and seeing how fast i can clear through the menu. no i would not like extra insurance! i don't know, it scratches all my itches. 

and then i got myself a little drink and plunked myself down at the crepe place for a ham and gruyere. i played candy crush a little bit, okay? it was fantastic.

i walked home really slowly. i'm normally booking it to just about everywhere we go because walking faster than everybody else makes me feel like a super hero, and because normally i'm pushing a stroller, and something weird happens when i'm pushing a stroller, i can't explain it. but it was just so sunny. i could feel it bouncing off the top of my head. and my whole body felt heavy--in that good way, you know--where you feel grounded and calm. i read all the movie posters at the movie theatre, i smiled at puppies out on their daily constitutionals, i caught my reflection in the shop windows--hey, jumpsuit! it was grand. i enjoyed myself rather immensely. 

i got home and brandon was taking a call in the bedroom and huck was watching a pixie hollow movie. see, we've gone clear past peter pan and on into the peter pan ancillaries over here. actually, the pixie hollow movies aren't half bad, if maybe a little melodramatic, though huck had long since lost interest and was creating a giant boulder of play dough at the table, each color bleeding into the next like eons-old layers of sediment. i pretended my laptop full of emails didn't exist,  plopped onto the couch and put my feet up, and then actually got super engrossed in this movie. you guys, the winter woods and the pixie dust tree, this is drama. i was into it. and the point of this is, i noticed toward the end of the movie when the autumn forest was un-freezing itself that my heart rate had been completely normal, like, all day. relaxed. i was feeling relaxed. and i laughed because the last time i felt relaxed i think i was in uteri? no no, anyway, it's been a solid year plus since i've felt relaxed and it was sort of the hugest. i think the craziness of all of everything is draining out my fingertips and it is hells bells on fire good.

see also: easter candy. 

(oh and this old video i found and then died a million times watching.)

so next i decided to take myself on a date to see the grand budapest hotel because i was on a roll. and why not? that movie was insane. quite literally perfect. and then when i was laying down with huck at the end of the night, taking notes into my phone of all the cool things he wanted to do with me tomorrow (picnic in the park? check. peppa pig? oink), i thought to myself, yep. there it is. good to have ya back, life. let's go get some sunshine. 

SEDONA

a few photos from our day in sedona.  we drove up from the valley to visit jerome, the town where my grandma grew up, and then we kept on going till we hit the red rocks for a little mini hike. 

CAN YOU GET OVER THAT RED ROCK!

huck + theo are the best little duo. their temperaments are so well-matched, they don't wrestle over toys too much, they seem to move about the same pace and like all the same things. they had such a blast playing together, it broke my heart to split them up. brandon's been telling "huck + theo" stories at bed time all week, it's huck's favorite thing. they always start with theo meeting huck at the airport in arizona and usually end up involving lizards somehow. i have a ton of photos just like these from when we were at the native american crafts market. the boys found themselves a table to crawl under and then passed this ice cream cone back and forth, taking turns having a bite, laughing hysterically the whole time like they had just invented the funniest thing anyone could do. it was so adorable i sort of had to roll my eyes. huck is really into talking about what makes something funny these days. he's always doing goofy things around the house and then saying, "mom, that's a pretty funny thing to do, right?" 

related: the other night huck was holding a few bananagram tiles and needed to free up a hand, so he stuck the tile in his left hand between his chin and his shoulder, like you would with a phone. brandon and i started to laugh, and henry stopped what he was doing and looked up at us in slow motion from one side of his face, trying not to let the tile slip out, with this ridiculous look on his face. we started laughing harder, and he got it, he knew it was funny, but he didn't want to let the tile drop, so he'd laugh with us and then clamp his neck shut and then we'd all laugh even harder. i mean, i guess you had to be there? anyway, huck. 

thirty minutes in this spot trying to nail a decent family photo. did we get one? nnnnnope.*** so, yes, there were t-shirts involved with this reunion. each of the original siblings picked a color for their families to wear, and three of them chose slightly different shades of red. we're the ones in the brown-red, you see. maroon. oxblood! you should have seen us at the haunted hamburger in jerome. we took over, all these silly t-shirts and the waitress standing there in the middle of us with her hair falling in her face and this crazy stressed look in her eyes. brandon, patron saint of waiters, made sure she got a good tip. (brandon worked as a waiter through college, so tipping well and being kind to waiters is his superpower.)

amanda did the whole hike with a fat baby strapped to her chest. super woman! (she's got him in a beco for those who are curious.)

knew those old cowboy boots i found at the thrift store in idaho six years ago would come in handy one day :).

and thus concludes the 2014 lovin reunion posts.  

***update. we did get one! here it is, thanks sandy!