A Few Good Gems

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Happy Friday! It’s Memorial Day weekend, so yay to a work holiday! And boo to quarantine conditions (will this ever end and don’t answer that).

How’s the COVID life going for you? Houston is slowly coming back to life, but the dire predictions that hit me like a fire hose every time I open my browser have me feeling more uncertain than ever. We will be cooking at home, doing home church and playing it safe for quite some time.

The good news is that I’m finally getting into this whole work-from-home thing. While I still miss the free-wheeling banter of office life, I’m now enjoying slower mornings, Netflix at lunchtime and lots of quiet time. I’m making buckets of lemonade over here . . . from all of those 2020 lemons. Yikes.

In fact, I’m about to pour you a tall glass of lemonade in the form of a few good gems — little Internet notes of interest to fill your long quarantine days.

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I love this painting titled “Dakota Woman” by Harvey Dunn. Quaranting makes thinking of homesteading (from my very-urban loft, I know). I’ve been baking bread, saving out ingredients for “special” dinners and generally making due. Honestly, I’ve never really gotten past Little House on the Prairie.

I just want to put this out into the universe: I acquired my sourdough starter pre-COVID. It was only like three weeks pre-COVID, BUT STILL. I gotta tell you — I love the process of making the bread just as much as I love the product. If you have any inclination to give sourdough a try, this is the recipe to start with. Don’t get scared off by the long list of steps. Each step takes less than five minutes. This video is super helpful to guide you through your first attempt. Not interested in so many steps? Make pancakes! Or crackers!

My sister gave me a subscription the The Atlantic for my birthday, and now I know absolutely for certain I want to write for The Atlantic when I grow up. It’s actually very difficult to pick just one article to share with you, but this one — about the patchwork way America is experiencing the pandemic is worth a thorough read. {Pro tip: The Atlantic has an awesome crossword puzzle that starts out super easy on Monday and increases in difficulty throughout the week. On Mondays? I’m a rockstar. On Fridays I’m barely literate.}

The New York Times is sharing their journalists’ personal lists of what they are doing to keep themselves engaged and entertained while quarantining. I’ts called Notes From Our Homes to Yours, and I’m here for it.

Do you guys remember the golden days of blogging? If so, you might also remember Door Sixteen. Anna Dorfman shared her renovations of a number of her homes in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Well, SHE’S BACK! She has moved to Santa Fe and is chronicling her new southwestern design adventures. Several parts of her kitchen redo are on my vision board. I adore her minimalist aesthetic.

I made these! online cookie class given by @arloscookies.

I made these! online cookie class given by @arloscookies.

Many months ago I fell down the rabbit hole of cookie decorating via Instagram. Here are some of my favorite accounts:

Gosh, this got long. Kudos if you made it to the end! I’m gonna head out and gear up for a big weekend of organizing my closet and searching for a new Netflix binge — and I might throw in a few bike rides for good measure. Have a great weekend!

. . .

Watching: Survivor (There are 37 seasons on Hulu. Maybe we will have a vaccine before I finish them?)
Listening (Audible): Stephen King’s The Institute, Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur
Cooking: Bon Appetit’s One-Pot Gingery Chicken and Rice with Peanut Sauce

A few good gems

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Hello, hello! Happy weekend! Do weekends still have meaning for you or are they the same as every other day? For my crew here, Saturdays still feel a little different—a little more free with no work or school—and Sundays still feel special since we still do home church and even dress up (a little. sometimes.). This weekend, of course, is Mother’s Day. I’ve always loved thinking about the mothers in my life and celebrating them but I know the day can be fraught with undertones and pain, too. Whatever the case, be gentle with yourselves.

As always, we’ve been collecting a few gems from the internet for your weekend pleasure:

Cards Against Humanity has come out with a free, printable family version that looks fun. They’ve cleaned up their original version for a younger audience—but you may want to still screen them and just use the cards that seem right for your family.

These Sweet Potato Oven Fries were a hit at our house. Queen Ina never disappoints.

Have you ever watched Pointless, the British trivia game show? We LOVED watching Pointless when we lived in Australia and recently found that there are many episodes uploaded to YouTube (or, if you have BritBox you can watch it there.) If you like trivia, this is for you and your crew.

The Thayer estate in Lancaster, MA, is for sale and it’s a bargain! It was used in a few scenes of the recent Little Women movie and boasts 47 bedrooms and 28 baths! Let’s all pool our money and make it happen. (Thanks, Tona!)

Design Mom’s reno of her newly-purchased vintage French home is lighting my life right now. I especially love her Instagram stories every day, taking us through the daily details of tinting plaster, fixing up the garden, etc.

My brother told me about Public Domain Review, a terrific website that catalogues loads of images and files that are in the public domain (and therefore open to use). It’s a really fun place to explore. They’ve done a free PDR coloring book and even have formatted and provided some pretty cool Zoom backgrounds for your next class/meeting, like this one:

 ""The Hall of Stars in the Palace of the Queen of the Night"", Act 1, Scene 6 — by Karl Friedrich Schinkel for Mozart’s Magic flute

""The Hall of Stars in the Palace of the Queen of the Night"", Act 1, Scene 6 — by Karl Friedrich Schinkel for Mozart’s Magic flute

One of the websites I like to visit every day lately is Jenny Rosenstrach’s blog Dinner: A Love Story. During the pandemic, she’s posting daily in three categories: project, pantry (recipes), and purpose.
It’s like chatting with a good friend while browsing through her favorite recipes. (And she’s got some great ones! We loved her roast chicken AND her granola, both in this post (photos via her site, below):

Happy Mothers Day and Mothering Day weekend! Here’s to those who nurture and raise, who lose sleep and a little sanity, who try and fail and try again for the younger humans in our lives. It’s not about perfection, it’s about the endeavoring. I loved this NY Times series of short essays on How Motherhood Changes Us All. Especially these and this one and this one.

. . .

Watching: The Missing series, The Last Dance (Michael Jordan series), Pointless (see above)
Playing: the game Azul, the game Codenames (online with whole family)
Listening: Don’t Delete the Kisses (Wolf Alice), Ina Garten’s Trip to Paris playlist

What are you watching / playing / listening to these days? Any other gems you’ve come across that you can share with us all?

The wolf in the background

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A few weeks ago I was out on a morning walk in the canyon where we’re living right now. (We’re currently hunkered down in Utah, having left Abu Dhabi in early March.) It was a beautiful morning and, since it’s a dead-end canyon, there was hardly any traffic of the car variety but plenty of the bird kind. There’s a nest of herons up on the hills who perform a terrific morning chorus as they stretch their legs and shake the night from their wings. (I just looked it up—did you know a group of herons is called a siege?!) Canada geese and mallards fly up and down the Weber River as though it’s their commute highway. In the distance, up a side canyon, I even heard some coyotes call back and forth to each other. I thought Huh, I didn’t know we had coyotes around here. But there are moose, bears, and foxes up in the these mountains so I guess a few coyotes aren’t that surprising.

I walked along the canyon road for about an hour and then turned around to return home. I had just recorded a Marco Polo to my college roommate and decided to also send one to my daughter Maddy while I walked. (Note: I am a supremely awkward Marco Polo-er but I love doing them nevertheless.) A few minutes into my riveting description of the weather and my workout outfit, I had that tingling sense that someone was coming up quickly behind me. I turned and my heart stopped. It was a wolf. Or a coyote. A wild thing*.

Here’s an actual transcript of how I processed my unexpected visitor:

Oh! I have a…oh my goodness, I have a…dog or something…following me that’s really scary.
Hopefully he’ll go on his way.
Let’s see [flustered, trying to stay composed]…what else can I tell you…?
Um…just on my way along here [clearly distracted by the wolf and trying to stay calm]
and oh I hope it’s not a wild dog, Maddy [shaking voice],
I hope this doesn’t scare you too much to get but…hmmm…what else can I say?
Um…I want to keep talking so he doesn’t…I don’t know…I want him to go away.
Um…let’s see. We’ve been watching Parks & Rec and yesterday we watched the one where—okay he’s going away, no worries—where Tom Haverford is trying to get together with Ann Perkins and it’s Jerry’s birthday surprise…

So, yes, this was terrifying. As it unfolded I remember feeling so sorry that Maddy was going to get this recording of her mother’s terror and potential death but felt the responsible thing would be to document it so people could find my body. (Yes, I’m apparently a worst-scenario person by instinct. Who also, hilariously, turns to Parks & Rec plotlines in times of terror?) I immediately sent her a reassuring text saying “Sorry about the scary Marco Polo I just sent. I’m fine!”

The weirdest, most impactful thing about the experience, though, was watching that video afterwards. There I am joking and sauntering along and you can SEE THE WOLF APPROACHING in the background. The obvious metaphor is that we never know what’s coming, what events or diagnoses or surprises may overtake us. That’s pretty humbling.

But the more comforting takeaway for me was this: Maybe most of life’s wolves just end up walking with us for a few minutes—if we just keep going, keep talking, keep connecting, they eventually turn back to the hills. And we go on.

But, reader, I haven’t been on a morning walk since then so there’s also that.

p.s. Right afterwards I sent this follow-up video to Maddy. Just keep walking, guys.

*I actually don’t know what it was! After doing some research, I’m pretty sure it was a wolf. Or an escaped wolf-looking dog that had been living in the wild?

What wolves are you walking with this week?

What kind of crisis person are you?

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Posters of affirmation have started showing up in my neighborhood park. This is Corona-love.

Posters of affirmation have started showing up in my neighborhood park. This is Corona-love.

When I was in the third grade, a tornado ripped through our small Texas town. We lost electricity for what seemed like several weeks (but was maybe two days). I can remember standing over the kitchen sink, my hands sunk in the soapy water, hot tears streaming down my face. I was absolutely beside myself over the herculean task of washing the dinner dishes BY HAND. Please keep in mind that there were eight people in my family, and I was a wee helpless babe. My mother walked over to me and said (rather sternly if I remember correctly), “Right now you are deciding what kind of person you will be in a crisis — how you will act when times are tough.”

I decided right then and there that in times of crisis I would be a whiny, crybaby.

Since then, I’ve slugged my way through Hurricane Rita (epic evacuation), Hurricane Harvey (epic flooding), and now COVID-19 (epic everything). And for the record, let’s also count raising four kids as an integral part of my crisis management portfolio, because COME ON.

Guys, in each of these situations I’ve been a whiny crybaby, a take-charge woman, and a long-sufferer. I’ve been hopeless, optimistic, resolved, logical and out of my ever-lovin’ mind. I’ve been all of the things. And right now? I’m often all of the things in the course of a single afternoon. But what I do know is that I have to keep moving. I have to keep trying to do better and to feel better, to be kinder and more gracious. Because what else is there to do? (Besides Netflix obviously.)

Do you follow @MaggieSmithPoet (of Good Bones fame) on Twitter? In 2018, as Smith’s marriage was ending, she started working through her grief and disappointment in a series of posts that always included the sentiment “Keep moving.” I love these tweets and will often jot them down in my daily notebook as new ones arrive.

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Lucky for us, Maggie Smith has a Keep Moving book coming out in May. I’m anxiously awaiting its delivery.

And that’s it fellow quarantiners, my advice to all of us is to keep moving. Do one thing today. And then another tomorrow. What’s your ONE THING today?

Hello (is it me you're looking for?)

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Hello, dear ones! Does it take a major pandemic to kick us into gear and start publishing Nest & Launch again? Apparently. In the midst of this global quarantine, I’ve been reminiscing about the joys of creating for Nest & Launch. Writing daily. Connecting with you across the miles. Collecting bits of life, culture, and loveliness to share. I’ve missed you and our ongoing conversations about nesting and launching!

So. I hereby proclaim this here site revived. (And, if it’s not too much bother, let’s go ahead and just restore the entire blogging world to its former glory, okay?)

By way of quick update, I’m writing this from Utah. We’re waiting out the coronavirus in the middle of (yes, another) international move from Abu Dhabi, where we’ve been living for the last couple of years, back to Boston. It’s not the easiest time to be moving—selling and buying a home, scheduling movers, figuring out logistics—but we are grateful to be healthy and hunkered down. It’s three of us together: Greg, Sam, and I. (The girls are in their respective homes: Lauren is in Georgia and Maddy in Virginia.) Like every other school, Sam’s university sent all the students home and, just like that, the remainder of his freshman year went online. 

How about you? I’d love to hear what’s happening in your world. In the immortal words of Lionel Ritchie, “I wonder where you are and I wonder what you do. Are you somewhere feeling lonely or is someone [there with] you?” Comment below if you’d like to answer any of these questions:

Where are you?

Who’s there with you (if anyone)?

What are you grateful for today?

What disappointment or challenge have you been navigating?

What’s your favorite happy diversion (aka guilty pleasure) lately?

A Few Good Gems

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Happy Friday! September weekends rank right up there with the best of them, I think. What's on the docket for you? G and I are in Utah right now so we'll be heading up to Logan for some family time, hikes, breakfast at Herm's, and maybe even a USU football game (go Aggies!).  Before we take off, I wanted to share a few good gems from around the internet:

  • Harvest season means awesome veg-and-flower centerpiece opportunities! I'm loving this one:
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  • I'm sorry I missed this Kennedy Center performance in January with Sara Bareilles and Ben Folds but, happily, they filmed it. I could listen to Sara hum all day long and this song is one of my faves of hers:
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  • I just noticed that all the haircut idea photos I've been gathering and pinning lately look something like this. Is it time to bring back the Princess Di cut? 

Happy weekending, friends! What gems have you found and enjoyed this week? We'd love to hear and share!

The College Mirage: Helping your freshman navigate the first year

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Last year at about this time of year a student came to see me. She was a new freshman and, a week or two into her shiny, sparkly college life she was feeling neither shiny or sparkly. While she was loving college in general, in some ways things weren't working out the way she had expected--her roommate wasn't her soul sister, there weren't endless dates, her class load required a lot more work than she had needed to do in high school, and she was still figuring out how to find her way in this new place. In some ways, the shiny sparkly college life felt like a mirage--one that had been the promised land all through high school and one that all of her friends on social media seemed to inhabit.

photo via

photo via

I've been thinking a lot about college transition and freshman loneliness ever since--as a professor who studies & teaches human development, as an advisor to freshmen students, and as a mom to three college-age students.

We tend to prepare our children for college like getting in is the hard part, the finish line. After lavishing all that energy and attention on those entrance exams, applications, GPA maintenance, extracurriculars, no wonder they internalize the message that once you receive that acceptance letter, you've made it! Everything else will fall into place! Books, tv, movies, social media all highlight and glorify the golden glow of the college years. But, like most things in life, the reality often doesn't live up to the hype. 

Meanwhile, if they want to, new freshmen can manage to keep up the image that the hype lives on, curating photos and posts and emoji-adorned texts to downplay the real emotions and loneliness (or even depression and anxiety) that might be happening beyond the tiny phone screen. 

Just at the point when parents begin to acclimate to their child's absence in the home, across the miles for many freshmen students, the orientation parties and excitement of meeting all these new people wears off. The reality of the academic workload sets in and some students manage this better than others. Some sail through pretty well but many don't want to disappoint their families that their grades are lower than they've grown used to getting in high school or that they still haven't found their tribe.  

Last year, Cornell freshman Emery Burgmann created this video about her college transition for a class assignment on transformation. It's a funny, poignant window into the freshman transition ("I feel like this friendship-hungry gremlin...") and the Youtube comments on this clip attest to how common these feelings are:

We parents are pretty good at prepping our kids' dorm rooms and outfitting them with the school supplies they'll need. Just as important (arguably more so), having family conversations leading up to the college launch can ease everyone's social/emotional acclimation to this huge milestone.  We can paint a realistic view of what this next level of study and life will look like rather than glorifying (or trying to live vicariously). In the months and years leading up to the transition to college, try to have open conversations that are sparked by questions like these:

  • What kind of living/dorm situation will open you up to connecting with others (single occupancy rooms might seem ideal but they can also lead to isolation)?
  • What will you/can you do when you're lonely (because everyone feels lonely sometimes, especially during transitions)?
  • What if you get overwhelmed with the workload?
  • What resources are available on campus for talking to a trustworthy, informed adult?
  • How will we stay connected so you can share your good times but also your struggles?
  • What are the signs you can watch for to check on your emotional wellbeing and mental health?
  • Did you know you can drop a class? Or withdraw from one, even, if things get overwhelming?
  • How will you let me know if you are really really struggling (some families even have a family signal word that means "help!")?
  • How will you navigate roommate differences and disagreements?
  • What activities can balance out your schedule or provide an outlet for stress, anxiety?

If you're the parent of a college student right now:

  • emphasize that friends are made gradually and it's completely normal to feel at sea during a big transition. It often takes years to find your "tribe."
  • just listen, hear, and validate the emotions. You don't need to solve the problems, just be a guide through them. Share your own hard experiences and how you navigated them (but first just listen listen listen).
  • make time to Skype/Facetime/Marco Polo and talk on the phone. Texts are marvelous for check-ins and logistics but can be misleading, minimize, or mask real emotions. If possible build in a set time each week to really connect.

Interested in reading more? Check out:

  • The Real Campus Scourge by Frank Bruni (New York Times). Emily references this article in the video above; it's the article her mom sent her.
  • What Made Maddy Run (by Kate Fagan), a heart breaking and eye opening book looking into the death by suicide of U Penn star athlete Maddy Halloran. For a shorter peek, try this NPR story and this podcast with author Kate Fagan's insights and takeaway messages.
  • Practicing mindfulness has been linked to healthy college transition. Another study here.  
  • Great tips here for college students, including keep your door open and spend as little time as possible in your room--hang out in common areas and study in the library.

What do you wish you knew when you started college? What helped with the transition? What didn't?