little things i love

Recent Posts

    • paris (and a camera phone)

      the seine

      It’s been a whirlwind couple of months: buying a new house, selling an old house (in that order) and turning 40! I’ve not had a lot of time to spare, but have been managing to squeeze every bit of fun out of this busy life as possible. We’ve just returned from a lovely Spring Break to Paris, a special trip in honor of the big 4-0. It was Drew’s idea that we celebrate my birthday in my favorite city, and who am I to argue? So even though the timing was a little crazy, we went for it and got lost in the world for a blissful week.

      It was the rainiest visit to Paris I’ve ever had, but typical I think for the springtime. We weren’t able to do quite as much strolling and sitting around in parks, but that left more time for eating and drinking, both of which are so good there. We had many fun moments curled up in the booths of cafes and boulangeries and brasseries together.the girls

      Since we were only there for a week, I relied on my iPhone for my photos and got to play with a few of the photo apps I’ve been so obsessed with lately. I had discovered Instagram a while back, but ever since my girls’ weekend in Chicago, where my friends Jean and Jen so kindly filled me in on the joy that is Picfx, I’ve been having so much fun playing with pictures and exploring several different and fun photo apps available. My current favorite is Camera+, and its “Fashion” FX effect is so cool.

      The only thing better for me than taking and looking at pictures of my precious girls, is taking the pictures and then getting to edit them over and over to my heart’s content – ahhhhh!! This is much to Drew’s dismay as he loves to tease me that there is no reason that a perfectly good picture taken in 2013 should look like it’s been dug out of a cedar chest circa 1973. But I say he’s wrong! There’s something alluring about these edited images, they seem somehow timeless. They’re fun, and they make me happy.

      So last week as I found myself in Paris, my favorite city, with my three favorite people in the world and my new favorite photo apps – I felt like such a lucky girl! And even though it was only a week, I have a lifetime of beautiful photos to help remember. Here are some highlights:

       

    • where the day takes you

      This past Monday was the only day my girls’ mid-winter breaks aligned, so I decided to make the most of it by heading out on a little road trip with my brother. I feel so lucky that he moved out west and now lives only 15 minutes away from us, much to his nieces’ delight. We had no plan for the day but decided on a whim to try to find a fantastic little hole-in-the-wall restaurant we’d been to once before on a road trip when I first moved out here and he’d come to visit. We couldn’t even remember how long ago it was, except that my now eight year old was in a baby car seat.

      Jason thought the restaurant had the word “anchor” in the name or there was some sort of nautical theme – that and the fact that we remembered it being in one of the small waterfront towns near a ferry port north of Seattle was pretty much all we had to go on. It was fun taking off for the day and retracing the steps of our past adventures. And as soon as we hit the little town of Anacortes, with its quaint historic downtown, it all came back. We’d obviously been there several times since along with Adrift (the restaurant we’d remembered with the most amazing burgers and shelves filled with old books), we also came across a pizza place and a country-style restaurant that we remembered going to.

      After our lunch, we continued road tripping to the amazing – but terrifying – Deception Pass bridge. Heights like that freak me out, especially since having children, and I wouldn’t even let my girls go all the way out to the middle. Yikes!! But we parked and had a cool little hike down to the beach below. The girls had fun being outdoors and hanging with my bro, and I gathered a few more of the beautiful colored rocks that you can only find out here on the beaches of the Pacific Northwest. Not a bad way to spend the day!