I'll use it forever...I promise!!!

Haven't we all justified a splurge-y purchase with the little promise to ourselves that "we'll use it forever?" or that we "won't need any other bag/shoe/whatever?" Of course we mean it at the time, but let's be honest--3 or 6 or 12 months later, don't we break down and buy another bag or pair of shoes or whatever? I know I do. I'm weak. And I'm a liar. What can I say?

But since I am a mother now, and as such am trying to be more fiscally responsible, I've been ignoring those empty promises as I've been eyeing up this Kate Spade baby bag for months (like, since before I was even pregnant...seriously, I've been going on KateSpade.com at least once a week since probably November). However, at $425, I just couldn't justify buying the bag, no matter how much I'd use it.

But guess what? Last week I got an e-mail that it had FINALLY gone on sale!!! And on top of that? It was an extra 25% off!!! And on top of that?? FREE SHIPPING!!! And on top of that??? I still had money left from my 2009 bonus from work!!!

So guess what?!?! That little ole baby bag shipped to me today!!!

And you know what?!?! I'll use it FOREVER!!!

(Well, at least for the next few years, anyway!)

Pretty Movies

While spending most of January and February laying in bed was frustrating, it did give me a chance to catch up on several movies that had been sitting in our Netflix queue for ages and ages (fyi...the Roku is the best thing EVER when you're under the weather--you don't even have to get up to change the disc in the dvd player!!!).

Three flicks I enjoyed immensely were the 2008 version of Brideshead Revisited, because I love a good doomed romance (and I love the book!)...

the 2007 adaptation of Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes because I can't resist a good tear-jerker about hard-on-their-luck orphans who triumph in the end (and I love the book!)...

and the 2000 version of Love's Labour's Lost. Shakespeare + Cole Porter + Kenneth Branaugh?! Oh yeah!!! And Alicia Silverstone was surprisingly good, too! (Plus, I love the play!).

But what I enjoyed most about all these movies is that they are set in the late 1920s/early 1930s, which means the costuming is just glorious. From the flapper frocks to the school uniforms to the ballgowns, I want to wear them all!!! As someone who has to fight the urge to be matchy-matchy, you can imagine my delight at how the costumer for Love's Labour's Lost used a consistent color scheme throughout the entire movie for the wardrobe of each couple. I'm alllll about the signature color, so this subtle touch tickled me to no end!

What are your favorite "pretty movies"?

Blue Monday...on Tuesday

(This was supposed to go up yesterday, but since I couldn't get the pix to work, here it is a day late!)

I'm so obsessed with anything vaguely espadrille-esque right now. And--OMG--have you seen these new wedges from the Robert Clergerie/Opening Ceremony collaboration???

I'm not sure I've ever had shoe lust quite this bad.

(via Elle.com)

What up, Blogger?

Anyone else having issues posting pictures today? I've tried a bunch of times to no avail. I'll post extra tomorrow--PROMISE!!!

Birthday Girl

Today is the 9th birthday of someone very, very special: my sweet, sweet Zelda. She's the best buddy a girl could ask for and truly my canine soul mate. Since I got pregnant, we've gotten even closer than ever; she's been my constant companion and protector, even following me into the bathroom when I was sick just to make sure I was okay. And now that we'll be totally outnumbered at home (that's right--we found out yesterday that the twins are both boys!!!), something tells me we'll be even closer...something tells me it's going to take both of us to keep those boys in line!

Happy weekending, ladies! Zelda and I are off to PA to stay with my parents while the hubby heads to Baltimore for his favorite day of the year, his fantasy baseball draft (do your significant others play fantasy sports? Is there something I'm missing about its awesomeness?). My mom is making her amazing clam chowder tonight for dinner--can't wait! It's one of my guilty pleasure foods...even after becoming a vegetarian, I never gave it up. It's just too good!!! Maybe I'll try to get the recipe out of her and share it next week!

xo

Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog!

I have a deep and abiding love for children's books and adolescent fiction. Chalk it up to never growing up, I guess. I'm constantly adding to my collection of Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton, and Trixie Belden mysteries and love finding a new, adorably-illustrated and well-written story for the under-10 set.

So imagine my delight last summer when I stumbled upon Mo Willems' Pigeon series while browsing in the most awesome toy/book store in Glens Falls, NY. I love the clean, graphic illustrations, the irreverent storytelling, and the subtle moral to these stories. But most importantly, Pigeon completely cracks me up!

My bff's sister and her family are here visiting this week, so in honor of our pre-summer hot dog cook-off the other night, I decided to take the two little guys in attendance each a copy of The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog! It felt so good to finally buy Pigeon books for some real kids!

p.s. Want to kill some time at work? Check out the super fun web site, Pigeon Presents.

Favorite jacket, maternity-style

Starting to put together a maternity wardrobe has been a fun challenge for me. I'll be the first to admit that my regular wardrobe is way too large, so the idea of building a small, well-edited selection of clothes--on a teeny budget--seemed like an interesting way to start transitioning my shopping mindset from a dressier "work" wardrobe to more casual, versatile "mom" clothes.

I really have a jacket fetish (along with my shoe, belt, bracelet, and scarf fetishes...) so one thing that has helped to sass up some of the very basic maternity pieces I've purchased so far is that most of my spring jackets still fit (although they may not close!). For the last three years one of my most favorite jackets is one I scored during my brief stint working for The Carlisle Collection. It's the softest tan twill, edged in buttery pewter leather. If any piece of clothing expresses my style perfectly, it's this jacket--kinda classic, kinda edgy.

Here are two ways I've recently styled it up:

Heathered gray jersey dress, Old Navy Maternity
Gray tights, Target
Gray suede booties, Newport News
Silver Gilda hoop earrings (hidden by my hair), Stella & Dot
Hammered silver owl necklace, gift from bff Rach from her trip to South America (thanks, Rach!!!)

(For those of you who don't know, I'm 5'11", so this picture totally cracks me up because my legs look sooooo short. Apparently the Fug Girls are right: longish top + short pants = stumpy!)

Taupe jersey studded-waist top, Liz Lange Maternity
Skinny black ankle pants, Old Navy Maternity
Black suede flats, Sigerson Morrison for Target
Smokey quartz earrings and necklace, Tracy Matthews Designs
Smokey quartz ring, Judith Ripka (gift from my mommy)

Belly Update

First off, thanks so much for the warm welcome back last week, ladies!!! I missed blogging so much while I was sick and am slowly catching up on everything you were up to while I was away. I promise that Shell is not exclusively going to become a pregnancy blog, but it is obviously a huge part of what's going on with our life right now, so you'll be hearing a lot about it. Hopefully, you'll find it interesting!!!

Anyhoo...remember back in January when my belly looked like that, up there? The irony is, I really felt like I had a big belly! At that point, I had gained about 10 pounds from the fertility drugs, so I was definitely feeling a lot thicker and more bloated than usual. Of course little did I know what was to come...

...because here I am last week!!! Big difference between 5 weeks and 17 weeks, eh? I keep joking with my bff that I think my belly is bigger now than her's was at a full 40 weeks, but I have to keep in mind that there are TWO babies in there!!! Honestly, so far I think having a belly is pretty cute, but I'd be lieing if I didn't admit that I am scared about how enormous I'll be at the end if I am this big already.

I signed up for these weekly pregnancy e-mails from WebMD and the American Pregnancy Association, and for the most part they are kind of worthless, but it is nice to get the messages each Monday if only because it helps to keep in perspective all the craziness your body is experiencing. For example, today's messages told me the babies are each around 6" in length, which means I have almost of a foot of babies inside me. How crazy is that?!

Cycling

So I know this might sound sacrilegious to many of you, but I actually hate riding a bike. I don't know if it comes from being a kid in the late-'80s/early-90s when the cool thing was to have 10-speed bikes, which--let's face it--have the most uncomfortable seats EVER; or maybe it comes from living in a town where at least a 1/3 of the population bikes everywhere and although there are signs wherever you look that say "Share the Road," the cyclists just don't seem to think it applies to them, which makes for harrowing driving on Ithaca's narrow, curving roads, topped with a fair amount of annoyance. Either way, I just really, really don't like it.

I will say, however, that when the hubby and I took a long weekend to the Jersey Shore last summer, the b&b where we stayed had bikes for guests to use, and we took the longest, loveliest pre-breakfast bike rides down the boardwalk and all around town. That weekend started to change my feelings about bikes. There was something so relaxing about tooling around Spring Lake on a Sunday morning on our bikes, working up an appetite for the Johnson House Inn's infamous Finnish Pancake.

But what could really make me reconsider my long-standing ban on biking are the new Liberty of London bikes at Target. A pink and lavender floral-print bike for a grown-up lady? Yes, please! Totally reminds me of my very first bike, the awesomely awesome Huffy Desert Rose.

Unhappy Hipsters

Have you seen the Tumblr Unhappy Hipsters? I'm obsessed. It's so clever and sardonic. Plus, being the lover of modernist interiors that I am, the photos do make me drool a little bit. I mean, how awesome is this fireplace?

Seriously, add this blog to your daily reads if you haven't already. You'll get at least one good chuckle a day, I promise.

(via Unhappy Hipsters via Dwell)

My Vegetarian Pregnancy

One of the really crazy things that happened in my time away from the blog was that after 17.5 years of being a vegetarian, I tried (emphasis on the word tried) to start eating meat again. My decision to do so did not come easily. Although it was partially fueled by fear of the insane amount of protein you need each day when you're having twins (100g!!!) and also pressure from people who kept telling me I'd simply have to eat meat to have safe, healthy babies, I feel like I know enough about diet and nutrition that I really came to the conclusion on my own that it was the right thing to do. And what finally spurred me on was that my body reached this point where I was just so starving from being so sick that I felt like I needed something substantial to fill me up, and meat seemed like the best solution.

The first thing I ate was a meal my mom used to make me as a little girl when I was recovering from the stomach flu or some such ailment. It's a really simple dish of stewing beef (we used grass fed organic beef, of course!), egg noodles and beef broth. Taking the first bite was so gut-wrenching and scary! I mean, after such long time I had NO idea what real meat tasted like, what the texture would be, and morally it was just so, so hard. But frankly, the very worst part was that the beef actually tasted really, really good, and it did provide me some momentary relief from the nausea and the hunger.

But from there it was all downhill. I tried turkey bacon (threw it up), chicken cacciatore (ew--don't even get me started), my mom's ribs (delicious, but they still completely grossed me out), my bff's chicken salad (again, super delicious, but the chicken cacciatore had already done me in for being able to enjoy chicken), a slice of pizza topped with proscuitto (the one meat I always regretted not being able to try was disappointingly chewy, fatty, and tasteless). Trying to eat meat and think about eating meat became this vicious cycle that was making me even more sick. Every day I would think, "I should eat meat today!" I would try to force myself to find something that would sound good and then I wouldn't be able to eat anything, which only made me sicker.

So I gave up eating meat again--almost before I had really started. I decided that getting back to a place where I was eating something was way more important than eating meat and that ultimately I needed to stop listening to outside opinions and do what was right for me and my babies. I started doing research online about vegetarian pregnancies, bought the book Your Vegetarian Pregnancy, and met with a veggie friend who is a nutritionist who helped me put together a plan to reach 100g of protein per day without eating meat. So far, so good. Yesterday I topped out at around 90g of protein, and it was actually pretty easy!

Sorry this was such a long post...it just feels like we have a lot to catch up on!

LBD Love

I just got out of the house to do some spring/maternity shopping two weekends ago, and I just loveloveloved the plethora of navy I saw everywhere. Navy has become such a staple for me over the past few years. It's slowly replacing the black in my closet because it just seems so fresh and cool and preppy. That said, I have purchased two maternity l.b.d.s (I'm praying they are slimming!!!), but isn't a little blue dress just as versatile?

I've been patiently waiting for this shirt dress from Gap to go on sale, and now that it is, it's mine, all mine!!! I can't wait to wear it with the collar popped and a pair of stripey espadrilles once the weather warms up!

Growing babies is hard work!

...and I'm back from my very unexpected (and unappreciated) break from blogging. The past two months were two of the hardest I've ever lived through, leaving me with barely enough energy to get to the bathroom to be sick, let alone to blog. But thanks to some meds I started two weeks ago, I'm now slowly coming out of the ordeal of morning sickness and am finally starting to really get to enjoy being pregnant, as well as return to life as normal (well, sort of, anyway).

The above ultrasound picture of the twins is from two weeks ago. Sadly, the only picture we got of both of them was of just the tops of their little heads, but we love it anyway! They are sooooooo cute and are growing really, really well (they are actually ahead of where they need to be, which our doctor says is super important because invitro twins have a high risk of being low birth weight). We hope they stay that way!

I have sooooooo much to catch up on, things to get to people...but it feels good to be back in a physical and mental place where I can actually think about doing anything! I missed you all TONS and can't wait to check up on you and see what you've been doing, wearing, eating, etc., etc.

xoxoxo

Testing...1...2...3...

Is anybody alive out there?!?!

(via booklover)