
What are you up to this weekend? We had kind of an intense week for a few reasons, but this weekend Toby is having his 15th birthday party! (Feels like yesterday, etc.) I’m legitimately excited to host a bunch of sweaty kids, play basketball, and eat caramel cake. Hope you have a good one, and here are a few links from around the web…
Easy strawberry lemonade.
How to sneeze quietly. (Immediately texted this to my dad.)
Brooklinen, our favorite home and bedding company, is 25% off sitewide. We have their beautiful bundles on the beds in our house, and I sleep so well on their pillows.
How cool is this 400-square-foot German lakeside house?
Emails with my son about napping on the weekends.
7 things I spotted people wearing in Paris, including a very cool haircut. (Big Salad)
Can’t wait for tomato season. (NYTimes gift link)
An instant cure for restless legs. (via Haley)
10 things I’d tell my 16-year-old self. “There will come a time when you’ll crave your sister’s presence” and “Just because someone is an adult doesn’t mean they’re right.”
How incredible are astronaut Don Pettit’s photos from outer space? (NYTimes gift link)
Unsung heroes of motherhood. “Julie Owens, who bravely tugged on a tankini in mid-January in order to chaperone her twins to an indoor water park. After nearly swallowing a wet Band-Aid in the wave pool, Owens — in a show of tremendous valor — merely dry heaved thrice.”
Oh crikey.
Hahahaha.
Next Tuesday in Brooklyn, I’ll be in conversation on stage with my friend Adam Roberts, about his funny first novel — Food Person — about a cookbook ghostwriter. Please come join us, if you’d like!
Plus, two reader comments:
Says Jess on what glimmers have you seen lately: “Oh man, Jo, I wish I could send you a picture – today’s glimmer was passing a random shopfront here in Oxford, England, and seeing a lovely picnic set-up in the window (red-and-white blanket, wicker hamper, fake grass, etc) with a French bulldog lounging in the middle of blanket, staring out at me dolefully. A double-take confirmed that, yep, the dog was real! I think he must like that spot in the window, so the shop owners have given him a scenario. Heaven.”
Says Kate on four beautiful motherhood poems: “Not a poem, but this passage from Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng kills me again and again and again:
‘Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less. As a baby Pearl had clung to her; she’d worn Pearl in a sling because whenever she’d set her down, Pearl would cry. There’d scarcely been a moment in the day when they had not been pressed together. As she got older, Pearl would still cling to her mother’s leg, then her waist, then her hand, as if there was something in her mother she needed to absorb through the skin. Even when she had her own bed, she would often crawl into Mia’s in the middle of the night and burrow under the old patchwork quilt, and in the morning they would wake up tangled, Mia’s arm pinned beneath Pearl’s head, or Pearl’s legs thrown across Mia’s belly. Now, as a teenager, Pearl’s caresses had become rare — a peck on the cheek, a one-armed, half-hearted hug — and all the more precious because of that. It was the way of things, Mia thought to herself, but how hard it was. The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.’”
(Photo by Jacqui Miller/Stocksy.)
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