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Love

Up (And Off) The Wall

Kendrick and I go to the movies a lot.

It’s partially because we really like going to the movies – I personally enjoy the experience of being required to do absolutely nothing at all except for ingest salt-encrusted carbohydrates for two hours – but also partially because over time going to the movies has kind of become our default date. We don’t even usually go to dinner beforehand, because honestly? I am a crazy popcorn person and would rather eat more popcorn than less popcorn, and I don’t want to spoil my appetite with things like actual food.

Default Dating is something that happens to lots of couples, especially those who have been together for awhile. And there’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s not exactly…exciting. Or memory-making. It feels good just to get out, of course, but not like “dating” used to feel, which was sort of…great.

We make an effort to do lots of out-of-the-box-style activities with our son pretty much every weekend, but it’s rare that we take off on an adventure on our own. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that doing cool stuff together can be something that sort of gets away from you if you don’t pay attention.

Lifestyle

Date Ideas For You

Alright, so my plan was to show you three of my favorite HowAboutWe Couples Dates…but I need to post more than that, just because I think you will love them all. How HowAboutWe works: it's free to sign up and browse the curated collection of offbeat date “experiences” (all at a price significantly lower than the retail value of the date). All you do is make sure you're a member, pick your date, and off you go.

Back to those favorites I was talking about:

Couples Archery Lesson in Queens ($21 on HAW; $60 retail)

InstaGlam

Daily InstaGlam

You have arrived, and you are even more glorious than I dreamed.

These are the Nine West + InStyle: The Collaboration Gamin that I was going on about, and they are PERFECT and weirdly comfortable for how high they are, and I love them and their price and would like to give them a gold star. They're sold out in leopard - although this shoe is very similar - but are still available in my two other favorite colors, red and gold.

Click here to check out my interview with InStyle about the collaboration.

My Looks

Pants That Work For Work (And Weekend)

I found the perfect pair of pants once: they were silky, black, and bootcut, with a mid-rise waist and a neat hook-and-eye closure. I spent way too much money on them because they were perfect, and perfect pants can feel impossible to find…and when you do find them it seems like you should probably buy them (preferably in triplicate) just in case you never come across another pair that fits you that well ever again.

That was about a decade ago. I wore those pants for years and years until the hems frayed and the seams fell apart and they ended up in the donation box, headed straight for Goodwill.

Finding a great pair of pants shouldn’t be especially difficult. But apparently it’s not just me who has trouble with this particular undertaking: pants, it turns out, are a tough buy for pretty much everyone. LOFT did a study with 10,000 real women in which the participants tried on hundreds of pairs of pants and explained exactly what they liked and didn’t like, and found that for most women buying a pair of pants is even more challenging than buying a swimsuit. In response, they set out to completely reimagine how women approach the experience of shopping for pants….and it worked.

What LOFT came up with: a Fall 2013 collection that includes 45 different pants options and a “fit tree” that helps women find the perfect pair for them.

Love

Weekend Snapshots: Scarecrows & Dinosaurs Edition

I am sad summer is ending, obviously.

I'm also SO EXCITED summer is ending, because the Hudson Valley in autumn is like a kid who's been practicing for a performance all year long and finally gets to put on his costume and go on stage. I've now become one of those people who actually reads Westchester Magazine and calendars upcoming events in her iPhone (although that is the only Westchester Mom stereotype I will concede to...aside from, perhaps, a not-so-hot understanding of exactly what is going on with the highways and parkways and throughways around here and how one might learn how to navigate them within this century), and one of the events that I calendared way, way back was this one:

Love

Nyack Night

Sometimes, when I am very sleepy or scattered, I ask Kendrick to take a quick look at what I've written before I hit "publish". I just asked him to do that with this post, and this is a decent approximation of the look he gave me:

Here is what I thought seemed like a good idea to put on the internet:

"Kendrick arrived home on Friday afternoon, and the second - I mean tersecond - he stepped through the doorway, two things happened:

Eat

Cucumber Yogurt with Mint & Olive Oil

Doesn't that just look like a perfect storm of good things?

Last weekend, when we were wandering around the city, Kendrick and I passed a little frozen yogurt shop and peered in the window to read the menu of specialty concoctions. I was confused for a moment as to why anyone would put cucumber and olive oil on frozen yogurt (not that that's necessarily a bad idea, just a slightly confusing one), and then realized: oh. Not a frozen yogurt shop. A yogurt yogurt shop. (Chobani, specifically.)

We ended up continuing on our way without going in, but I kept thinking about that cucumber and olive oil yogurt all week long, and so today I thought I'd give it a shot myself.

Style

New Nudies

Not that kind of nudie.

This kind.

Francesca and I found the pair of nude flats pictured above during a shopping trip when she was visiting last January...and I've worn them so much over the past few months that they've fallen apart. Like, they are literally in pieces. I was going to take a photo just because it's actually funny how completely destroyed they are (and funnier still that I was wearing them up anyway until two days ago), but I can't find them anywhere. Maybe they went and threw themselves out because they were tired of waiting for me to do it.

Love

Get It Done

(Re-posting this ridiculous video because of high relevance to what I'm talking about below. Also because it's ridiculous.)

OK, so Kendrick's been an official full-time student for about three weeks now.

And while life hasn't made a 180 or anything - things are more or less clicking along as usual - there are definitely some differences between what life was like Before Grad School and what life is like During.

Style

What. Are These?

They're crazy is what they are. They're crazy and they make me want to dress up as a '70s-era Catwoman for Halloween but also maybe every day leading up until then and I love them and that's that.

(They're here.)