A mudroom! This space is one of my favorite places in our farmhouse. I’ve always wanted a mudroom. I grew up in a small apartment and never lived in a house until we bought the one in NJ that we left last year. Years of looking at design magazines, and my year as an interior design student in college, just left me with this picture in my head of what domestic living should look like. And one of those pictures is having a happy, functional space for the mess of everyday life. Not to hide it away, but to give it its own room to kind of revel in the mess of family life, without destroying the rest of the house. This is also the height of privilege, having an entire room in a home that’s basically for dirty shoes, but as a kid with limited privacy and space it’s just something I dreamed of. And here’s the before and after for ours.
It’s here, the milestone is here. I’m 40! I don’t remember the specifics of when I turned 30, but apparently I was in a cruddy mood all day (thank you, 11 years of blogging). I wasn’t taking photos of myself regularly then, and I thought I should start. When I’m 50, I want to know what I looked like today.
We’ve been bombarded with snow this week. Today’s Saturday, and the first storm was last Sunday night. School was closed for two days, and then another (smaller) storm came in Friday at lunchtime, so all the local schools closed early. My birthday is just a few minutes away now, and yet another snowstorm is set to head our way either tomorrow night or Monday, I think. And here’s the thing we’re learning about Washington–they don’t have a lot of snow plows.
Whoopie pies are just the best, and they’re easy to make at home with kids. Whoopie pies, we’ve learned, just aren’t really a thing in Washington. And they’re H’s favorite treat, and something she’s been missing from NJ (Whole Foods made really good ones back east, but all the baked goods at Whole Foods here in WA are too…healthy). So, I’ve started making them. The Christmas batch was such a hit that she wanted to help me make some more this past weekend. Sunday night while my beef roast cooked we made them for dessert.
I feel really good about the start of a fresh new year, especially since 2018 was so eventful. I’m trying to dust off this blog a little–it’ll turn 11 in April, and even though I spend most of my social media life on Instagram I’m not ready to abandon it. So, the first big thing we’ve done this year is take a little last-minute mommy/daughter/pup road trip to Canada.
Last year was unlike any other year I’ve ever had. I think the silence on this blog kind of reflects that. Trucking along in a quieter-than-usual but other wise normal year, and then June 17th comes and off the grid I go. That’s when we finished packing up everything we owned in NJ (everything that was left after weeks of purging, yard sales, and donations), left the house we’d owned for 10 years, 7 months, and 12 days, spent a week driving across the country to Washington, moved into a rental apartment, spent three months looking at houses/putting offers on houses/buying a house, and then moved into our farmhouse on the 28th of September. It’s on six acres of forested woodlands, it’s beautiful, and I’m so in love with it out here.
It’s been a little more than six months since I last posted here, which is a record. This blog is ten years old, and I’ve never gone that long without posting! But it was kind of a welcome break–I needed to concentrate on packing up, moving from New Jersey to Washington, getting settled, finding a house, getting H settled at a new school. It’s been a ride, and we’re just starting to settle down.
We put our house on the market last month and have started packing away. Which means it’s a little quiet here on the creativity front–we’re keeping the house tidy for showings, so no ongoing projects out and taking over my studio. I’ve already started packing some supplies, and the stuff that’s boxed up now I won’t see again until we’re in a house in Seattle, after we rent for a few months.
We have some news—we are moving to Seattle this summer! Well, to the Seattle suburbs. An opportunity came for us to go, and we’re taking it. We went out in early March to look at schools and neighborhoods and fell in love with the area.
This was, by a mile, the best birthday party H has ever had. Four of her friends and their moms met us in Brooklyn at Brooklyn Owl, a unicorn horn store, for a day out in NYC. The moms went for coffee, and Adam and I stayed to take photos of the girls picking out their own special unicorn horns, making unicorn crafts, eating unicorn cupcakes, and solving clues for the store’s magic mirror, which spoke to them and transformed them from little girls into magical unicorns. We could not have packed more unicorns in if we tried, it was fabulous.