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Celebrating, Family-Style

Look. At these. Munchkins.

Over the past few months I've been documenting my family travel resolutions with Alamo, and for my final post as one of the company's ambassadors we decided to throw a party to celebrate a year that's certainly seen its share of travel - and not "just" travel, but travel that's actively brought our family together, exposing us to places, people and experiences that we'll carry with us forever.

Way back in March I wrote about my resolution to travel consciously, to make sure my kids feel not like they're just "along for the ride," but are an actual part of the process. I wrote about creating a travel journal for our family - a travel journal that I started on our house-hunting trip to San Jose, and that we ended up taking with us across the entire country, filling with jotted-down memories and pasted-in whatevers - and how I hoped that it would remind us that travel isn't just a way to get from one place to another.

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Retiling An Entryway: Before And After (Video)

blue tile encaustic cement

(Watch through to the end for a serious Goldie cameo.)

I've never had an entryway before. I mean, I've had doors that you walk through, and I guess the area on the "inside" side of those doors could technically be referred to as an "entryway," but in our Manhattan apartments those spots were really just "the living room." And in our Tarrytown place, the front door more or less opened directly onto the stairway, which was sort of weird (and sort of inconvenient, because it meant that there was also no coat closet, and if there is one thing you definitely need in Westchester it is a place to store your enormous, down-filled winter coat).

And now?

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The Great Goodwill Find

retro midcentury arc lamp

Oh hellloooooo, best Goodwill find ever.

Ya ya, I know everyone and their blog are all about midcentury arc lamps since like 2012, but I can't get over how much I love them: they're just so clean. And elegant. And timeless and lovely and chic and et cetera et cetera. I've always wanted one, but I have also always not been particularly interested in shelling out billions of dollars for a vintage original.

And then, a few days ago, I wandered into Goodwill, and:

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Dining Room Makeover

Da daaaaa!

OH I LOVE IT.

See, the thing about our old dining room furniture - that distressed round table and clear Ikea chairs - was that I loved it, too. But it really didn't work in the new space: our round table, which had felt so perfectly sized in our teeny colonial dining room, looked like dollhouse furniture in our California place (which isn't massive at all, but for whatever reason has a disproportionately big dining room).

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In The Real World

via A Beautiful Mess

Blogger homes really stress me out.

They're all fiddle leaf figs in adorable woven pots and white carpets that my dogs would destroy instantly and lamps that I can't afford and perfectly arranged gallery walls of expensively framed prints that look like they were collected during a succession of impossibly glamorous round-the-world trips.