The Power of Advertising: Shoes

I was contemplating a new pair of shoes. Actually they are sandals. So I went to Cole Haan's website to give them another look, but this time there were "other images" to click on. As soon as a I saw the picture of the chick playing her guitar in her closet while wearing the sandals, I knew they would be mine. I'm such a sucker.

They are the most comfortable sandal, and I can run around after my girls all day, not wishing that I was wearing sneakers or my usual flip flops.

Air Whitney Gladiator, colehaan.com

Swimming Pool Dreaming

Hot days deserve a swimming pool. Note, I didn't say that I deserve a swimming pool. Additionally, my yard deserves a swimming pool. If you took a picture of my back yard there would be a post-it note centrally placed that reads: insert pool here.

I've assembled a bunch of pools that I love from Apartment Therapy and various other locations (thanks!). Here they are:

Like a lake....I think this could be Sixx Design's home in Great Barrington.

For this one you'd need a pool boy.

Here's Maria & Larry just lounging on a Friday afternoon. I wish!

The pool at Chateau Marmont. I like that it's oval.

Simple pool, simple chairs, and a hedge of bamboo for privacy.

Babe Paley, the queen of Palm Beach cool.

The circular pool, like the house, seems to work with its environment, although it doesn't look like it should.

Realistically, I shouldn't even be pool-dreaming until my little angels are a lot older, or can at least swim. I just need to keep reminding myself, and when it's time I'll be ready with my idea folder. In the meantime you can find me cooling off in their baby pool.

Coppa Enoteca

You know I'm really fond of a restaurant when I say to my husband "every place should be like this." That means it's the whole package to me: ambiance, food, and usually location. That's how I feel about Coppa Enoteca. Like a lot of restaurants in Boston's South End it not only attracts the neighborhood folk, but also suburbanites like me, but it's no-reservation policy, and 40 seats luckily seem to hinder too many of us from making it uncool!

Coppa opened in January and is the latest and greatest from chefs Jamie Bissonette and the very busy Ken Oringer of Clio, Toro, and La Verdad (to name just a few) fame.

As you know, I don't hit too many hot spots these days, but we were able to get a table at the early-bird hour of 5:30 on a Saturday night. We thought our strategy was so smart, but we were wrong. The friends we were meeting began calling us at 5:10 saying the line was getting longer and longer. But don't let this deter you, because it's totally worth it just to try the Farro Salad, Salumi, Fois Gras (one of the best I've ever tasted), Oysters, Wood Grilled Pizzas, or any of the nine other small plates we ordered. Like most tapas menus prices range fron $5 to $15 per plate, and they recommend each person orders two or three and sharing is recommended.

The vibe's friendly and a little boisterous, a great place to meet with friends who will land the perfect table!

Like the kids on Yo Gabba Gabba sing: Try it. You'll like it. http://www.coppaboston.com/

To cook dinner or not to cook dinner

I was holding a crying toddler as I attempted to mash potatoes in my KitchenAid while talking on the phone to a friend who, hearing the panic in my voice and chaos in my house, asked me why I even bothered cooking "real" meals.


Now that's a good question. It seems there's something very un-progressive about 1) thinking your KitchenAid is cool, and 2) wanting to put a home cooked meal on the table almost every night. Almost is a key word here. Before having to provide 3 meals and multiple snacks every day for my twins, I loved to dine out, and still do. But now, even though their restaurant behavior seems to be fairly exceptional lately, it just seems to make more sense to eat at home most nights.


Maybe it's my own mother's model. Bless her heart (am I now a Southern belle?), the woman had a balanced meal on the table EVERY night. Though my sister and I didn't know it, we didn't have too many luxuries growing up, but my mom was and still is, a master grocery shopper, and always seemed to pick up special treats like artichokes and lobsters when they were on sale at the market. Truth be told it was cheaper to cook at home vs. in a restaurant or take-out, so the latter wasn't even an option, but let's give credit where credit is due, it takes a lot of effort to churn out decent tasting meals every night.


Luckily my husband picks up a lot of the slack and is always willing to help when he gets home. When we have guests, he runs the cooking show, thank God! He's a far better cook than me, and it seems to come naturally to him, which slightly shames me into trying to be a better cook. I have about 5 meals that I cook relatively well (more on that in the future), but even those I have the potential to mess up!

note: Ina's the BEST!

I think the key is organization. For example, I started a Capponata while making the girls breakfast, but this is rarely an option since most days my girls won't stand for anything but my undivided attention. Maybe they're taking a turn, and won't need me to watch Sesame Street with them anymore. Regardless, I'll keep plugging away at my little menus inspired by Ina, Tyler, and Giada and try and hold on to the easy, fast, yet amazing ones so that I can perpetuate my Donna Reed facade.

Just when you thought your life was crazy.....

Bravo (my fave channel) has introduced "9 By Design," a docu-drama about Cortney & Robert Novogratz who have, get this, seven children, and a fabulous design/house-flipping business in NYC. Why so many kids I wondered? I gather they're both from big southern families and just think that's how you do it. They have two sets of twins in the bunch, and a new baby.

The Novogratz kids include Wolfgang, 12; twins Bellamy and Tallulah, 11; Breaker, 9; twins Five and Holleder, 4, and Major, 1. Did you notice that Five is #5? I love it!

The homes they design are fabulous, and have sold for record prices even by NY standards. But I really love their parenting style. In the first episode, Cortney sends the 4-year-old twins into a hall closet to play.

It seems they live in the houses for a while before they sell, and keep moving into two-bedroom apartments. At nearly nine-months pregnant Cortney also appears to pack her own house and move all in one day. I'm so impressed by this superwoman.

Watch it on Tuesdays at 10pm on Bravo. http://www.bravotv.com/9-by-design

I Should Be Dancing

I've loved this photo of a dancing Brigitte Bardot since I saw it on another blog over a year ago. I actually wish I owned it so that I could frame it and hang it on a wall somewhere in my house. Yes, it makes me that happy. She's so young, beautiful, carefree, and epitomizes "the look" of the moment" in her miniskirt, boots, and straight long hair. Although I share zero resemblence to Lady B, it reminds of me when I was fun. More than likely, however, I was dancing and embarrassing myself, but that's okay too.

Now I wait until weddings and other major life events to embarrass myself (I mean, dance) in public.

Sleeping Like Gypsies

Our family of four sleeps together. This statement elicits different responses from different people. Some are horrified, and say “get those kids out of your bed ASAP,” while others think it’s completely normal usually because they shared a bed with their children (co-slept) at some point. Recently a Ukrainian woman informed me that my family sleeps like gypsies! I think she meant that as a not-so-great-thing, but I have a mild obsession with gypsies so I thought it was fantastic.

It wasn’t always this way. In preparation for the girls I read “Babywise: Giving your baby the gift of nighttime sleep” like it was the bible. I was convinced that if I did everything this book said, my girls would sleep through the night on their own. They did not.

When the nurses at Beth Israel instructed us to swaddle the girls, always put them to sleep in separate cribs, and NEVER let them sleep with us or on us (for their own safety), we complied. I thought it made sense since they were so little it would have been too easy to suffocate them. But at about 5 months-old, we realized that they would sleep infinitely longer if they were cuddled in bed with us, and so it began. We tried a handful of times to sleep train them in their cribs, patting their backs without picking them while they wailed, making our way closer and closer to the door, was torture for my husband and me. So we moved a queen-sized mattress to the floor of the nursery so they could sleep there without risk of falling out of our high bed (my dad's idea), and they could come find us if they woke up in the middle of the night. This worked for a time.

Basically I think we’re too lazy to start a sleep battle with the kids. I asked a friend with pre-teens what she thought and she confessed that she’d done the same thing. I love the advice she received from her pediatrician. He told her that these years (infant through pre-school) are the “comfort years” and it was completely natural. I'm embarrassed to confess that I lied to our last pediatrician. She adamantly believed the kids needed to learn to soothe themselves and sleep in their own cribs, and was pretty inflexible on this point, so I lied, so that I wouldn't have to be lectured by her. Needless to say, she's no longer our doctor and I promise not to lie to a physician again.

I envy mothers whose babies sleep in their cribs and had the backbone to sleep-train their little ones. If I had it to do over again, I probably would let them cry-it-out at 6 months-old, and they’d never have know any differently. But I am now a defacto “attachment” parenting mom, and I’m okay with it. Sophie and Sienna may be the only children I have, and eventually they won’t want to sleep with me (they probably won’t even want to talk to me when they’re teenagers), so I’ll keep them close to me as long as possible.