Sometimes I feel like I need to check in with my iPhone to see if things in my life really happened. That is the case last weekend- I arrived home from NYC at midnight on Thursday and scurried for the next 36 hours to pull together E’s birthday party as well as a porch photoshoot. Despite an amazing level of stress, fast food, acne and lack of showers- we got it done. I can’t wait to show you all the pictures! Here’s what I do have (from my iPhone.)
Tomorrow night we will be having a sleepover with 13 girls. Oye. I can’t believe my baby is 8!
Have you seen Serena and Lily’s fall catalog? It’s hard to beleive that they started as a children’s line… ’cause they’re all grown up. I love their shop by color option.
Not to mention their new wallpaper collection.
And their kid’s line just keeps getting better and better. Here are my two faves.
I adore these tassel panels.
(btw… check out how they inexpensively framed fabric with needlepoint hoops- genius!)
And these color framed shams work for kids of all ages! Lurve.
Am I psyched about summer being over?.. a little. My kids were at each other’s throats the last two weeks due to a little too much quality time together. Friday we took them to meet their teachers.
And yesterday, we sent them off. I literally felt nauseous putting my little Louie on the bus. It didn’t seem this hard with E. Lou is my baby, my last baby and it felt completely weird to come home to an empty house… to drive to work all alone. I miss my lil sidekick. Sometimes I just get so sad thinking about how fast time goes by. I just wish the world could stop turning- just a little bit.
Today is certainly not the best day. Eight years ago today I lost my mother to a very long battle with cancer. I miss her every day and think of her when I look at my girls and how much she would eat them up. I was devastated when she died just two weeks shy of E’s birth. But she lives on in them and most importantly she lives on in me. I am a better mother for having known her and (although it sounds weird) for having lost her. I have a legacy of greatness to live up to. I love this quote shared with me by a friend who also lost her mother. It’s by author Cheryl Strayed (aka: Sugar.)
The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: your mother would be proud of you. Finding a way in my grief to become the woman who my mother raised me to be is the most important way I have honored my mother. It has been the greatest salve to my sorrow. The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you experience my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place. I’d give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. It showed me shades and hues I couldn’t have otherwise seen. It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.
Since I am a teenage girl at heart, I have a playlist dedicated to my mom. This song is the very first track. It makes me smile, it makes me cry, it makes me know how lucky I am to have had her as my mom.
Summer is winding down. We actually have our end of summer neighborhood ice cream social tomorrow night. In my dream of being a perfect mother, I would be making these. Reality?… I will race home from the office 30 minutes late schlepping a melted carton of ice cream and whatever toppings are in our pantry. The good news is that I am starting to realize that it doesn’t matter. I need to CTFD.
