GUAPO

the boys are back together again, and all is right with the world.

as i type this, huck and his grandpa are curled up on huck's tiny toddler bed in huck's tiny toddler closet bedroom, my dad's legs sticking out of the doorway, having themselves a pirate powwow. this is the thing about my dad, is that my dad is my baby's soul mate mostly.

the other night my dad spread out our stash of crayons and got to making huck his very own treasure map to go along with the pirate treasure chest they'd brought from portland, to go along with huck's pirate costume that he still, most days, is almost always wearing. it was so exciting for me. i took about a million pictures of my dad drawing and teared up about a million times, because i am a ninny. the map came together pretty quickly, and then my dad took the time to carefully shade in the ocean and make sure those octopus limbs curled just right, and then i hung it up on the wall in huck's bedroom before huck could even have the chance to play with it because i am a killjoy.

when i was a kid my dad used to tell us the story of the threeeeee dooooooogs. it was a multi-episodic tale of puppy mischief, there were voices involved, the whole thing. it was the iliad and the odyssey for us girls. (i wrote an essay in honor of it a few years ago.) one morning in church a long time ago my dad sketched me up a little picket fence with a red dog house out front, and then each one of the three dogs from the stories. and bless my little nine-year-old heart but i held that drawing carefully in my hands all through three hours of church, and put it away carefully in a folder when i got home, and it's moved along with me everywhere i've been since. i had it framed after i was married. it's on the save-in-a-fire list, that sort of thing. and i have to say, getting to share my dad with this kid has been one of my favorite parts of parenting. the two of us, we're the fan club. president and co-president. (we're also on the art preservationist team.) huck's got the best grandpa around, and my old man's not so bad, either. 

p.s. thank you to carousel for huck's rad sweatshirt

FOR THE LOVE OF PEANUT BUTTER

hey, my parents are in town this weekend! they landed at jfk this evening and got in a cab, then got out of a cab and stepped into our doorway, and not two minutes after they'd barely sat down and started to ease in i launched myself at my mother with full force and literally talked a hundred miles a minute at her for two solid hours. all about myself. ME. 

i have had the kind of week--the past three weeks in a row, actually--where bombs of chaos keep dropping. psssszzzzzz BOOM. and then instead of being the kind of bomb they started out being, they'd change in midair sort of and land completely not how i expected them to land, sometimes softer and sometimes weirder... morphing disasters, in kind of a comical way actually, and i have things to sort out and the bad news for everyone is, i sort things out verbally. by talking at you. taaaaaaaalking aaaaaat youuuuuu. honestly my mom got here just in time (making this the third freakishly serendipitous situation i've found myself in this month), because otherwise i was going to have to talk my feelings out at BRANDON and look, we all know how effective boys are at sorting out the inner workings of a woman's brain. 

the good news is everything is fine, and actually, things are looking up. most of the bad news has become a blessing in disguise, except for the stupidly bad news i got last week, in the "you are way more infertile than you thought you were and may never have any more children" vein, only to have that reversed to "just kidding! but yeah, you're still as infertile as you thought you were, here let's throw some more drugs at you." which was where i was before, you know, only the difference is before it felt pretty crappy, and now it feels like a vacation! compared to what it almost was. i'm just saying, i'm all over the place. it's a long and very involved story and, like i said, still sorting through over here, but the conclusion seems to be thus: everything is going to be great. i have no freaking clue what i'm doing. i am going to try really, really hard to become a more gracious human being. and i'm lucky to have good parents. and a patient husband. okay well he's patient about 70% of the time, but also he deep cleaned the house for me yesterday so that more than makes up for things.

anyway the reason i came here was because in the middle of all this nonsense i baked some stupidly good cookies (therapy baking!) in exchange for a black sweater i'd forgotten somewhere (gratitude baking!) and so here we are. 

peanut butter cookies

(they're sort of a work in progress)

(just like me)

(now that i think about it, i think i found an early version of this recipe on nie nie's old cooking blog)

1 1/4  cups peanut butter 

(next time i'm doing a cup and a half) 

(you can do either smooth or chunky, this is something you'll have to ponder on your own time.)

3/4 cups sugar

1 cup packed brown sugar

(bonus points if it stays a little clumpy, it bakes up really good with a few pockets of carmelized brown sugar here and there.)

2 eggs

1 tsp baking powder

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

dash of salt

1 1/2 cup flour

this makes a really thick dough. 

roll the cookies into balls then flatten with a spoon or your hands on a greased cookie sheet. 

don't forget the fork marks, you know. 

at the last minute i rememebered i had a costco bag of peanut butter cups sitting around and so i thought, why not!

bake at 375 for 8 minutes.

i'm sort of on a cookie roll! for my next trick, i want to try and figure a way to make banana bread  in cookie form. if you know of a recipe that exists for this already, please pass it on! i don't know, it just seems like banana bread cookies would be mind-blowingly good.

this post has been all over the place. and good night!

AUTUMN COMES TO CENTRAL PARK

saturday was such a good day i could probably go blind tomorrow and feel like i'd seen it all. i kid you not, THEEEEE perfect day. mother nature freaking KILLED. the leaves were on fire, the sky was an icy blue, the air was scientifically the perfect temperature. i swear they've probably done studies on it. at one point i shouted at brandon--no i really shouted at him in the middle of the park--BRANDON THE AIR FEELS LIKE NOTHING! I CAN'T! FEEL! THE AIR! and then we walked through the mall with all the arching canopies of pumpkin-y trees and it was like shuuuuuut uuuuuup. leaves like confetti twisting through the air, and the crunch! don't even get me started on the crunch. it was so perfect it was stupid. there were so many people in the park that day and all of us with our cheesy grins on, looking up into branches with our mouths open in awe, we were all just IN it. we all knew, it was like we could all tell deep in our bones that this was the last day of it. the last day before it got too cold, too dark, before all the leaves dropped and turned to mushy stew on the ground, the last day before daylight savings time came along and pooped on all of us, and so we were doing it. we were all DOING IT.

we stayed outside until the last drop of sunlight had disappeared, finding excuse after excuse to stay out, walking down path after path to delay going home; we even camped out under a fir tree in the middle of a sudden short-lived downpour, because even covered in raindrops the day was too good to miss. 

and then it went dark and we all went home, and pulled on our coziest socks.

it's all going to go too fast from here on out, you know. after halloween comes the marathon, after the marathon comes the thanksgiving parade, and then come the christmas shops and the ice skating rinks and the santas and the trees all lit up, and before you know it it's over. we've been chugging uphill and chugging uphill and saturday was the top of it, the very tippy top, where you could see it all; everything that came before and everything that is coming next. the holidays are like a slide where you speed all the way to the bottom. this is our reward for a year well done, this exciting slide of autumn into the holidays and christmas and joy and it all happens far too quickly and it ends before you know it. and then it is january and you're like, now what.

we stared it down on saturday. we opened our arms wide. we felt the breeze. and now we are ready. 

here we go. 

p.s. my loafers are from zara!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

after a really strange halloween last year, this year has been just what the doctor ordered. we could really "feel the spirit" of halloween again, if you know what i'm saying. we made it to a few fun halloween parties, huck is at the age where he can differentiate between creepy and scary and really enjoy all of our favorite halloween movies with us, and last week we even found a sitter in time to see the procession of the ghouls at the cathedral of st john the divine. (they play a creepy silent film with a live organist, followed by puppet ghouls parading down the aisles of the church in the dark. st john's is the largest gothic cathedral in north america--you can see a few of my instagrams from the night HERE and HERE. the whole thing was wild). 

after an insanely busy day working, we were able to run up to 69th for some trick or treating on our old street. it was just really nice. we saw a few of of our favorite neighbors and got ourselves a big old bucket of sugar. lemme tell you, huck was a natural. he had all the ladies slipping him extra candy, and by the end of the night he was working three suckers at once like a pro. dude knows what he's doing. 

69th street is nuts this time of year. we really miss it. halfway through our trick or treating brandon said, "it SMELLS like 69th street!" which was funny but also i totally knew what he was saying. the air is different over there on the east side of the west side.

and then we attempted to recreate this old shot, because, meeeeeemoriieeeeeeeess...

we ended the night at crumbs for a halloween cupcake that brandon had seen in a window and fell in love with (more sugar, obviously), and then huck tanked out on my lap while watching nightmare before christmas... still in his pirate costume. it was just about exactly the way any toddler's dream halloween should go. and then his parents ransacked his candy stash. not bad all around.

happy halloween!

love, pirate henny huck and his two scurvy parents

  △ photos above by the supremely talented mark weinberg. △

p.s. so many thanks to H&M for huck's pirate costume! 

FYI: 25% of H&M's All for Children autumn proceeds are going to UNICEF. it's a really, truly great cause.

WHAT WOULD FELICITY PORTER WEAR?

since re-watching all four seasons of felicity with my husband in practically one sitting this summer, i've had felicity porter late-nineties fashion on the brain. something about those cozy knit sweaters, sensible shoes, faded brown leather, and thick wool socks feels really relevant to me right now, especially with all these cooling temps and crisping leaves and apple ciders going around. i even have an entire eBay collection dedicated to my felicity fashion obsession (you can see it HERE), it's getting pretty serious.

find a fisherman sweater five sizes too big and get really introspective, start saying, "hey" a lot, put mazzy star on the record player (they have a new album out!), not a bad way to do it.