Happy Friday! We’ve had a relatively quiet week around here, which has been a nice chance for me to feel like I have my feet back under me. Life has just been so busy and all over the place for the last six weeks or so and this week I feel like I had the chance to breathe and think a little more clearly.
Pictured Above: Coffee table | Pie garland | Living room rug | This is Home book | Clay pot | Bookshelf Lights
I’m rewatching Gilmore Girls for the millionth time. It’s just the perfect comfort food in show form. The show first came out when I was 17 and I loved it then, and then when Kennedy was just a newborn it used to be on in re-run form every afternoon and I would watch it with her and dance around the living room of our tiny Toronto apartment with her to the theme song. We watched the entire thing together start-to-finish when she was about 10 and she’s since rewatched it a couple of times on her own. So it’s a whole thing in our house, as it is in many other houses too. I just appreciate it more and more every time. It should be mandatory fall viewing as far as I’m concerned. 🙂
I took a little Instagram break for a few days. It seems to be a thing that people do, right? A social media detox? I have to say, I’ve never really considered myself a good candidate for this type of thing. It seems like people usually start to feel like they’re feeling really negative after comparing themselves or their lives to others, or they just get sick of seeing too much negativity and I never really find those things to be a problem. I think I’m lucky that I’ve ended up mostly following people who run really positive accounts and I feel like I get a lot of reassurance, comfort, and inspiration over on Instagram. But maybe a little too much inspiration sometimes. I was started to feel like my head was a really noisy place and endless ideas were just bouncing around in there. It seems like I see something that interests, excites, or inspires me every hour when I find myself mindlessly checking Instagram throughout the day and I started to wonder if I might maybe be differently inspired if I just stepped away and allowed the ideas to come through at a slower pace and give them a bit of time to settle in. In terms of incoming ideas, I found I was really enjoying just seeing what was coming in to my email inbox and nothing else. It was just nice. 🙂 One thing I do love about Instagram though is the ability to stay connected and stay up to date on what people are up to, and I definitely missed sharing and chatting about what we’ve been up to as well. So I will definitely not be deleting the app from my phone, but maybe I’ll take a quiet day or two away more often.
We took a quick day trip to Toronto with Kennedy to start to look at some of the schools she’s interested in for University next year and to check out some possible living arrangements for her. So exciting! It’s so funny to think that she could end up spending the next four years in exactly the same neighborhood that Chris and I lived in when we met. It’s just such a great neighborhood though. We had a great time walking around with her and pointing different things out, going on a few tours, eating our lunch on a park bench and watching all the Toronto people bustling around us, and finding a great place for pho (her favorite) in Chinatown when we had put in our 13 000 steps in just a few hours. Hoping we have time to do a few more in-person tours before it’s time to start applying and making final decisions because it was just fun. 🙂
Our town started a new (hopefully) yearly tradition this year, Crow Fest, which I think is delightful because crows are my absolute favorite birds. I just love the ambiance that’s created at this time of year when they return and fill the air with their calls. You just get a real sense of place and time. The crows are known as a bit of a nuisance in our town, actually, because they crowd park trees during the fall and winter, leave droppings all over side walks, and get into people’s garbage. We’re lucky out here because we just get to experience their beauty without any of the downfalls. They really have no interest in our garbage cans when the fields all around our house are full of corn and wheat leftover from the fall harvests. They visit all our big maple trees around our property, but they really cause no problem at all and they fly away as soon as we open the front door. So I love crows. 🙂 In the past, our town has had “crow culls”, but this year they decided to start a new, more positive crow tradition and I think it’s great. There were crow-themed parties, contests, and galas, and on the weekend they shut down our town’s mainstreet and big downtown park, and filled them with street performers, bands, and vendors. There were bundles of cornstalks on the lamp posts, and lights strung up in the trees, and it was just a great atmosphere as the sun set on Friday night, and actually was much more well-put together than I thought it would be. Anyway, if you’re local and you missed out on it this year, it’s definitely worth popping downtown to check out if they decide to do Crow Fest again next year.
Pictured Above: Rug | Felted wool garland | It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown DVD | DIY 2×4 candy corn decor
Halloween is nearly here and I’m a mix of excited and sad. Halloween night is such a magical time, isn’t it? I love how the streets fill up with kids and parents, all the decorations come out and it feels like there’s something new, exciting, and a little bit spooky to discover around every street corner. I love decorating the house for Halloween, as long as it’s short-lived so it doesn’t just start feeling cluttery and claustrophobic and I’ve realized over the years that I love more of a cheerful, vintage, classic Halloween look, rather than a creepy one. I’m working on adding a few new Halloween items to my decor stash every year and it’s truly a delight to decorate the house every year now, even if it’s just for a week or so. I’ve come to realize though, that you can’t have it all and this is the one time of year where I really miss living in a neighborhood instead of out here in a more rural setting. We really miss out on a lot of the fun when we don’t have kids coming to our door to trick-or-treat, and I’ve always loved just stepping out of my front door into all the spooky magic, instead of having to drive into town for trick-or-treating like we do now. It won’t be too many more years until our kids are past trick-or-treating age and then we may miss out on all the fun altogether. I’ll definitely have to come up with new Halloween traditions when that time comes because I just love it all. As for this year, we’re still right at the peak of trick-or-treating years, he’s got his costume (a vampire) and I’m looking forward to getting to see it all up close with him in a few days!
NEWS AND FINDS
-Jack and I have decided that these are our favorite pyjamas. They were our Christmas pyjamas last year in our Christmas Eve Box and we all ended up wearing them throughout the entire year whenever it was a chilly enough night. I’ve washed them about a million times so far and their colors have remained bright and the fabric is still super soft. I love that they’ve maintained their fit and proper drape unlike a lot of other traditional-style plaid pyjamas that we’ve tried in the past that seem to shrink and crinkle up and need constant ironing to maintain any kind of decent shape. Bought them again in a different plaid for this year!
-I almost missed sending in my magazine project idea submissions for Fall ’23! Whew! These deadlines seem to be coming up more and more quickly. Of course, I don’t have to submit anything for consideration to be published, but it almost seems silly not to when I know that I’ll enjoy adding another magazine to my stack of publications that I’ve been mentioned in at this time next year if they do decide to accept any of my ideas. So I just keep sending them in. 🙂
-I’m currently living off of the fall line of Stash Teas. I bought all of them. I couldn’t help myself. 🙂 Highly recommend the Cranberry Pomegranate and the Maple Apple Cider!
-I’ve had this bean boot key chain for a couple of years now and I find it no less delightful now than I did when I first got it. Would make a great little gift for the ll bean fan in your life!
-The search for the perfect, simple button up shirt has been going on for years for me. They’re just always way too big or too long on me, even for an oversized fit or they just don’t fall quite right. I had an a-ha moment a few weeks ago and decided to just go with the most classic version I could think of – an actual school uniform Oxford shirt. 🙂 Of course, kids’ sizes are almost always the answer for me, but I seem to have to re-learn this lesson over and over again. I ordered this Oxford shirt from Amazon in a size 14 and it couldn’t be more perfect. The fit, the length, the curve of the hem at the bottom. Classic in every way. The 14 is great for me as an oversized shirt on its own, and I got a 12 as well, which works nicely layered under a sweater for winter. So happy to have figured out this piece of the wardrobe puzzle and I always have to share in case there are other short people out there trying to figure out the same thing.
-Another thing I’ve been hunting for for years? A good, basic cookbook stand. Most of them that I came across were either cheap or cheesy looking. There are some really nice ones out there, but they’re like $250 and quite distinctive looking. I wanted something a little simpler so that I could get good, long-term use out of it both at home and for shoot styling. I randomly came across this $20 option on Amazon and I thought it must be too good to be true, but I ordered it anyway and it’s exactly perfect! Well worth the wait. 🙂
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