Things I Love Lately

Drama Queens – this excerpt from Lisa Damour’s upcoming book, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood, really spoke to me.  It was fortuitous timing – and a loud message from the universe – when my friend Lisa Heffernan sent me an ARC of the book just a couple of days later.  I can’t wait to read it.

On Life and the Pathway to Joy – this piece by Tina Bustamante is just gorgeous.  So much I can relate to, even though some of the particulars are different.  “Life is filled with beauty and wonder and grandeur and also overwhelming loss.”  Yes. Tina points out that things happen that we don’t recover from, and asserts that there’s a certain power and loveliness in moving forward anyway.  I thought of Anne Lamott’s famous quote about learning to dance with the limp.  Truth.

Boys Have Deep Emotional Lives – I loved this Atlantic interview with Rosalind Wiseman, who has just published a book about boys, Masterminds and Wingmen (her Queen Bees and Wannabes was hugely influential, for good reason).

Katie Den Ouden – I’ve written before about Katie Den Ouden, and of how much I adore her work.  She leads regular cleanses (my experience with them is here) as well as an annual Skinny Dip Society program.  Katie helps women make choices that support energetic, happy, full lives, and I am in full support of her mission of empowerment, liberation, and health.

We’ve been baking and cooking, as befits the Boston winter.

Smitten Kitchen’s whole wheat goldfish crackers are a new obsession.  I make them in little squares, as you can see, not in teeny goldfish shapes (there is a limit to my craftiness) and they are delicious.  The adults in our house prefer when these are made with sharper cheddar, and the children prefer more mild.

We also baked bread for the very first time successfully using Mark Bittman’s No-Knead Bread Recipe.  For full disclosure, this was our second attempt, and the first failed.  The only change we made was to bring the bread dough, while rising, into a warmer part of the house (the bowl sat on my desk overnight, not in the kitchen).  The bread was delicious, and the house smelled fantastic.  Highly recommend.

What are you reading, thinking about, and loving lately? 

I write these things I love posts approximately monthly.  You can find them all here.