Have you ever heard of tangrams? I hadn't until I came across the concept during a late-night Pinterest session a few days ago but now I am obsessed. Tangrams, which are puzzles made up of seven different shapes that form a square, have been around for thousands of years and used for everything from entertainment in the trenches during WWI to modern day...
I've had a bag of sand hanging out in the garage since I planted my raspberry bushes a few months ago (they like a mix of sand and soil for good drainage). The hardware store where I bought my bag only carried sand in 50 lb increments, and I only used about 2 lbs in my planting, which means I have 48 left...
Last week, I took Anne to see her first actual in-the-theatres movie. We were very excited about it -- so excited that I ignored a little bad behavior the night before that I really shouldn't have just so that we would still be able to go. We were that excited. We looked up the showtimes to see what was playing, watched some trailers together,...
I love creative playdates! A week or so ago, Anouk and I joined friends to go and see visiting artist Gianni Toso work live in the Chrysler Museum's glass studio. And it was probably my favorite of our adventures around town to date -- such an inspiring, educational, and colorful experience. I've never seen anything like it before (not even in all my...
Over the past couple of weeks, our family has developed a little bit of an obsession with the egg cream, which, like a Linda Richman joke, contains neither egg, nor cream but is rather a mix of milk, chocolate syrup, and seltzer. The history of the egg cream varies widely according to whom you ask -- a few minutes of internet research turned...
A couple of weekends ago, my sister came into town from DC, and my uncle noticed that the Norfolk Tides, our local minor baseball league team, were offering a deal for Buy 5 tickets, Get 5 tickets free. Put them together and what do you have? Family baseball night. Hooray! We set out to Harbor Park on a drizzly Saturday night hoping that...
It's August, and therefore time for another 12 photos in 12 hours. I feel like every time this project rolls around we have a really boring day and I long to be able to put my camera aside and wait to shoot when something more interesting is happening. It's hard to find the inspiration when you're just not feeling it. But I guess...
It's been a few weeks since we last wrote about it, but that doesn't mean that we haven't been hard at work on our Pollinator Protection Project. One of the duties under the Pollinator Protection Pledge is to create and protect bee nest sites, and after noticing a few mason bees swarming around the yard at the beginning of the summer, we decided...
Two, because one of my favorite memories from growing up is going through a big stack of records with my dad and listening to his favorite songs, which became favorites for me, too -- Pure Prairie League's "Amie," Stephen Stills' "Four and Twenty," even some Hall and Oates ("I Can't Go for That" is a quality song, I don't care what you haters think). So it's especially nice to share some of my favorites with Anouk.
I made a Spotify playlist of some of the songs A. and I have listened to the most over the past few weeks/months, the ones that will always bring me right back to Summer 2013 whenever I hear them in the future. I left off "Blurred Lines" which is probably THE official song of this summer in our house because I am actually really sick of it (I'm sorry Robin! I still love you!) But the rest I could listen to over and over -- in fact, I am now, as I write this. :)