This morning, republishing a modestly edited version of an essay from last year. The moment I capture below has had a profound impact on me as a mother. It led me to make a point of being more physically affectionate with my seven year old. It’s not that we didn’t hug and snuggle before, but that I’d somehow forgotten that she still needed the random squeezes and swings and tickles that I unthinkingly felt she’d somehow outgrown. She is so mature (!) for her age, but she still needs it. And I think this emphasis on physical affection has had a profound (good) impact on us, drawing us closer than ever.
****
A few nights ago, I was dancing in the kitchen with my son in my arms — his head tilted back in joy, a smile stretching across his face. My daughter found us:
“Now my turn, mama – now my turn!”
I told her she was too big to be carried, but she persisted:
“My turn, can I have a turn?”
My daughter is a newly-minted seven-going-on-seventeen-year-old, and knows how to huff and eye roll and stamp her feet with the best of them, often responding to my husband and I with a sarcastic “…really?”,
and the other day I poked my head out the front door to call her for dinner,
and didn’t recognize her shape in the neighbor’s yard.
She was wearing her new flared leggings (a specific, passionate request) with a braid down her back, and it was the first time I’d misplaced her figure.
In the hospital, bleary the day after she was born, I had panicked to Mr. Magpie after the nurses had taken her out of the room to the nursery so that I could try to close my eyes: “What if I don’t recognize her?” He assured me that all the bassinets were marked, and added:
“Are you kidding? You’d know that cry anywhere, already.”
He was right, of course. I could pick her sound out of a million near-identicals. Her smell, too. The way she runs. Her rippling laugh. The shape of her toes.
But I’d looked across the yard, and not recognized her for a split-second, and I think this mis-sighting blurred my vision for a spell,
Because that night we were dancing in the kitchen, after she pawed at my shirt for a turn, I sat down on the couch and pulled her into my arms and bounced her on my knees and tickled her arms and swung her back and forth in my lap,
and she laughed and laughed,
and I saw her at 1, and 3, and 5,
and as a newborn in a hospital bassinet —
all the versions of her, returned to me, as though a matryoshka doll unlidded —
and I realized that she is still my baby girl, still needing to be tickled and held and swung around in my arms. She is seven. She believes in Santa, and wonders whether her dolls get up to mischief when her back is turned, and lays her head on my shoulder while I read to her at night. Only seven. I can’t let her posturing as an older girl, modeled on the teens who baby sit her, and the fact that my husband and I are often mired in conversations about rule-setting and reinforcements, obscure this truth:
She is little, and she needs love in the big ways, but in the little ways, too.
She needs not only boundaries and homework reminders and “what do you think?” conversations but impromptu back rubs and hand squeezes and fingers-running-through-hair. We say “I love you” ad infinitum in our house — several times a day, at least — but I had forgotten that she can still fit on my lap, and be swayed back and forth, and that she craves these tendernesses, too.
There is a possibly apocryphal haiku attributed to the Japanese poet Basho that runs:
To quiet down
the unsettled heart
of the daughter
A beautiful portrait of motherhood, isn’t? A piece of it, at least — one glinting prism of the stained glass composite: the centricity, the purposefulness, of a mother’s quieting presence. Today I sit here and think:
How many nights did I rock my girl to sleep? How many mornings did I carry her, plastered to my chest, in her carrier? How lucky I am to have her still seeking umbrage in my arms, and how snugly she fits.
+But if you only buy one item from the Doen launch, let it be this top! I promise you’ll get a ton of wear out of it. Ultra-soft (like t-shirt soft), easy to tuck with no bunching. It is just as easy to throw on as a t-shirt but more interesting/polished.
+Pretty new wedding guest dresses for the season ahead: this Shoshanna, this HHH (I own it in a different print – super flattering and pretty), this House of Dagmar, and this Cara Cara.
+I love my Ossa phone strap. I’d sort of lost it / forgotten about it but just pulled it out again — lots of cute new options here! This one is spendy but reminds me of Simone Rocha!
+Pretty eyelet shorts, on sale, for the spring ahead. More early spring finds here.
By: Jen Shoop
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One long freeze has settled in along the East Coast this month. Even in the sunshine subtropical city of Raleigh, North Carolina, where I spent 36 hours this week, it was sixteen degrees above nothing, and birds and critters hiding in the oaks had to learn to shrug the rime off in the morning. I watched the robins on the frozen grass in the front yard of my friend’s home, pecking at the earth for worms, and I wondered if they were confused by the frost, by the sudden seeming dullness of their beaks. They could not possibly understand the new verglas separating themselves from their morning meals, or that it was a temporary condition.
These cold weather ministrations are of course as essential as breathing in the tundralands up north — life continues apace in sub-zero conditions in my former hometown of Chicago — but not in the South, and not even in the Mid-Atlantic. In Montgomery County, we have had three snow days and multiple late starts since the dawn of the year, and I can’t tell you how many activities have been postponed, canceled, delayed besides. This month has felt a like calendar whack-a-mole: this and that rescheduled for then and there. My mind has become a porous fog of fungible deadlines and dates. Weird how that happens: the city comes to a slow stop, as though freezing itself, liquid turnt solid, and then here are the parents, swimming frantically in vast volumes of thaw on the other side, our flailings met with cold disinterest.
But as I anthropomorphized those Raleigh robins, and I know I shouldn’t have — could in fact remember the birding guide in Aspen chastising my sister-in-law for making a joke about the rituals of the male kingfisher relative to the female one — I thought to myself: “but this is a temporary condition for me, too.” This short freeze in which I am, like the robin, pecking frantically at the hoarfrost, will eventually thaw.
I wish I were as easy as the birds, just taking things as they come, trusting.
******
I was in Raleigh this week in order to hand-sign, hand-number, and package a limited-edition collection of prints that my friend, the talented artist Inslee Fariss, and I collaborated on. I absolutely cannot wait to share these, and the full backstory, with you when they launch this Wednesday, January 29th, on Inslee’s site. This is the first time I have ever made my words available in a tangible format that you can put on your desk, or hang in a special nook of your favorite creative corner, and I couldn’t be prouder that I brought this to life in collaboration with a woman I deeply admire as an artist and treasure as a friend. A creative sisterhood! Just like the community here at Magpie. This project has been a dream come true for me.
My latest Veronica Beard blazer acquisition. I treasure my collection and they are honestly wardrobe workhorses. They are the foundation of my “hero dressing” formula when I don’t know what to wear — jeans I feel good in, a high-quality tee, and a great blazer. // New bronzing product from Isle of Paradise — not a tanner (I have bad luck with those) but a bronzer / illuminator you can apply all over. Can’t wait to try. // Crown Affair just released a new shampoo and conditioner that people are freaking out over. I’m obsessed with their dry shampoo so MUST try this next. // Really love Tory Burch’s latest bag shape, the Romy. Polished but slouchy-casual. Like the Lee Radziwill bag’s downtown cousin. // Isabel Marant’s Beth sneakers are a perennial favorite. // Always love Lizzie Fortunato jewels — this pair of drops are fun. // $25 scallop edge throw pillows! // Saw these jeans on someone and thought the fit was perfection. Look for less with these!
By: Jen Shoop
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+ON CLUTTER: In support of my oddball resolution to spend less time tidying in 2025, I loved this quote from Anne Lamott: “Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived…Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation… Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.” I don’t know if I have fully befriended the mess, but after reading this quote, I realized that it has been a constant companion in my creative undertakings–and that I mind it a lot less in that venue. How can I apply a writerly mindset — the understanding that all good things start with half-formed ingredients? — to my home space? Creating, and life, are full of middles, and middles are messy.
+THE INTRINSIC VALUE OF DOING THINGS JUST BECAUSE: In the introduction to Fox and I, Catherine Raven writes: “I realized that a fox, like a rainbow and every other gift from Nature, had an intrinsic value that was quite independent of its longevity.” I thought for some reason not of the foxes in our yard that have become something of a personal cipher, or the the now-fat redbirds in the trees outside my window that charm me, or even the roses on the far side of our home that remind me of Elizabeth, but of how sometimes I “waste” time drafting fiction that I know, even as I write it, I will never publish. How this creative wandering can seem like time poorly, or foolishly, spent. And yet. The act of writing, the communion with the blank page for no purpose other than imaginative expression — it, too, has an “intrinsic value,” independent of its landing place, or reception, or even its accidental deletion at some point down the road.
+V. GOOD SALES: (1) Ann Mashburn has further reduced its sale prices. Don’t miss this wool shirtdress (their shirtdresses are impeccably cut) or these joyful flats. The flats!! They’d make a simple pair of jeans and a button-down sing! (On the button-down front: my girlfriend Inslee was wearing one of these boxy, cropped button-down shirts from TWP when I visited her in Raleigh and I was obsessed! The afore-linked Julia Amory shirt is a good look for less.) (2) Veronica Beard’s sale section is almost entirely 70% off. One of my most-worn blazers is now $209. I love an ivory blazer! It goes so well with dark wash denim, light wash denim, cords!
+WHAT I ORDERED THIS WEEK: Two new beauties from Veronica Beard: this blazer and this denim vest, plus the Julia Amory top I just mentioned. While visiting Inslee, I brought her this gorgeous poetic book on the Greek gods — such a source of inspiration for me — and these beautiful trinket plates from potterist Laetitia Rouget. For home: some new folders to organize paperwork and this water bottle storage solution. New-to-me intimates label LDMA is sending me some of their gorgeous underthings, too!
+LANDON’S BIRTHDAY: At this point in our lives, Landon cooks 100% of the time. I enjoy cooking but he is far more talented, motivated, and passionate in the kitchen, and I am the happy beneficiary of his culinary enthusiasm. I was reminded this week when I offered to cook him a birthday feast of just how complex and time-consuming it is to meal plan and prep around the normal business of our lives…! Feeling doubly grateful for his commitment! I spent more or less two days running errands, prepping, cooking in order to make him a Spanish feast inspired by our trip to San Sebastian about a decade ago. We enjoyed two tapas: a bacon-shrimp skewer dressed in a sweet pepper and garlic vinaigrette and served over a slice of baguette, and croquettes with ham in them. The latter was quite an undertaking (frying!), but Landon helped me out with having some homemade bechamel in our freezer that I used as the base. For the entree, we had a clam and rice dish and a cauliflower-marcona-almond-arugula salad in a parsley-garlic vinaigrette. I got all the recipes except for the cauliflower dish from this Basque cookbook. For dessert, I made a classic yellow cake with chocolate frosting from this baking cookbook Landon got me for Christmas. Everything went well and it was fun to make the tapas, enjoy those with a glass of cava, and then return to the stove to make the entrees. (I’d parcooked multiple elements from the entree course to make this happen. It required so much careful planning!) Very leisurely pace to really celebrate the man of the house. How do you celebrate birthdays in your home? For us, the birthday dinner is the big event.
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We’re not taking the kids to Disney until later this spring, but this hasn’t stopped me from assembling a hefty wishlist of warm weather finds, organized in a few mood boards below. (In fact, we have several brief trips planned before then, but all to cold climates.) You’ll notice a lot of that powder blue…!
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I had never been a big athleisure lady — until this past month or two. With my new approach to working out (I strive to move my body for a minimum of 20 minutes each day, usually doing a Physique57 or Heather Robertson video, with a goal of two longer cardio workouts per week, where I run or cycle and then do a core workout video), I find myself wearing athleisure to school drop off and morning errands more often than not, as I do not have the time to shower and dress. Something’s gotta give; tradeoffs. I am going to write more about this soon, but I’ve been thinking a lot about something I read recently: everything is a tradeoff; you just need to figure out which emotional consequence you are more willing to accept. As in: you can either move your body and show up looking a little less polished (resulting, for me, in a feeling of not presenting my best self), or you can skip moving your body and show up fully dressed / appointed (resulting, for me, in a feeling of inertia / blah-ness that lingers throughout the day). When I compare the two emotional outcomes I anticipate, the decision is much easier for me to make. I want to be clear here and say that some (most?) women probably don’t even think about this as a tradeoff, and that’s of course correct, too, and even admirable to me. I grew up in a fairly formal household (my mom has worn jeans…twice? in her life and gives me a hard time if I’m wearing distressed denim; I distinctly remember her laying into my brother and his friends for wearing baseball hats at the dining room table — major rule), and I also dedicate a lot of my professional time to fashion, and so the inputs may be different for me.
Anyhow, even in athleisure, I like to feel as polished as possible. My secret to feeling pulled together is wearing mainly monochromatic sets and layering with non-athletic accessories and outerwear. Above, a typical morning look of Beyond Yoga leggings, a Beyond Yoga top, Varley fleece, and tall socks. The sneakers are actual gym shoes (the best ones I’ve found for doing lateral and forward movements — good ankle support, and I’ve needed them while doing side lunges!) but if I were running to school, I’d probably swap out for my Inuikiis, Adidas, or Veronica Beard sneaks. It’s been so cold out, I have been throwing on my white wool coat over the top!
I’ve been doing a little hunting to make some updates to my children’s rooms and — at least for me, I don’t want to make huge investments in accents and particularly upholstery that will likely be destroyed in a few years time. Below, some very chic finds at reasonable price points for the coastal look I’m after:
01. Woven swivel chair in a gorgeous sky blue. Great for a little reading corner in a child’s room.
We’ve watched movies together as a family for many years now, but typically, we’ve made the experience matinees, or sometimes dinner-and-a-movie specials. (Our children typically go to bed between 7:30-8.) Over the Christmas holiday, however, we let our kids stay up late two different nights to watch a movie after dinner with us. It felt like a rite of passage, one of those invisible parenthood thresholds: we have now officially entered the phase of true family movie nights, where the movie is the activity, and it’s dark out, and we’re snuggled on one couch under multiple blankets, and we’re all watching something we independently find enjoyable. We watched “The BFG” one night (my daughter is obsessed with Roald Dahl) and “Wild Robot” the other. I’d strongly recommend both, but especially “Wild Robot.” I teared up several times, as it tugged on multiple heartstrings while broaching the themes of watching your children grow up and fly the coop, identity as mother, outsidership versus community, and kindness in the face of austerity and even cruelty. There is a moment in which one of the characters tells a gosling learning to fly: “You’re not meant to fly like others; you’re meant to fly like yourself.” (!)
I’m wondering if you can share a few of your favorite family movies so I have a good lead list as we tuck into this new stage of family life? We’ve done a lot of the Disney animated classics already, so mainly looking for wholesome, feel-good live action films at this point. “Matilda” (old 90s one) is next on our list — my daughter and I are almost done reading the book together and I know she’ll love this!
A few movies we’ve watched and enjoyed together in the past year or so — please add to this list!
“The Sandlot”
“The Mitchells vs. The Machines”
“Robot Dreams”
“Homeward Bound”
“The Velveteen Rabbit”
“SpiderMan: Across the SpiderVerse”
“Babe the Pig”
Movies I remember loving but not sure if they’ll still hold up? — please weigh in!: “The Little Giants,” “Baby’s Day Out,” “The Apple Dumpling Gang,” “Grease,” “The Secret Garden,” “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken,” “Goonies,” “Richie Rich,” “Back to the Future,” “Parent Trap,” “Willow,” “Sound of Music,” “Rookie of the Year,” “Mighty Ducks,” and “The Little Rascals.” Please share thoughts!
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+Tuckernuck’s sample sale starts today, with items up to 80% off! I haven’t had advanced access to which products will be included (sometimes brands give me an early glimpse so I can share) but will try to update this post later today with any can’t miss items.
+So obsessed with this new capsule from Posse! It’s everything I want to wear this spring/summer — elegant, slightly preppy but made modern, easy. I love this top, these pants, this boatneck, this matching skirt, this vest…! There are also gorgeous pieces in butter yellow…I want it all.
+I’m in the market for a proper desk for my daughter. She’s been using an all-purpose table with a small chair for awhile now — and she’s outgrown it. My top picks right now are this, this (the hutch is appealing — extra storage), and this. One thing I keep asking myself is whether she the styles will feel babyish when she’s getting into her teen years. I’d like to buy her something that could potentially go with her to college if need be! Crazy to imagine thinking like that…!
+And for you for a warm weather getaway: fun new statement raffia Mary Janes from Prada, these shorts, and this perfect Alemais dress. And of course if you missed out on the Follow Suit Flora at Tuckernuck (now sold out — soo many of us bought these), you can still find them in a bunch of colors here.
+Adorable $29 raincoat for a girl. Have also bought my kids these $31 raincoats for multiple years in a row. Best colors and have a nice, soft cotton lining.
By: Jen Shoop
The following content may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through the links below, I may receive compensation.
Prada set the scene for this season’s trendiest color with its recent runway shows — powder blue feels soft, sophisticated, retro, and somehow new again. I mean, pastels for spring are nothing novel (are we all thinking of the same Miranda Priestley line about flowers?), but it feels appropriate even now, in the bleak midwinter; I love the way it pairs with soft, browns, and even blacks. Above, wearing the most gorgeous sweater from La Ligne in the chicest blue shade. It photographed a bit darker than it is in IRL — I absolutely love her.
What does it take to draw you out of the sublunary fracas and into the heart of things?
More often than not: my son’s moondrop eyes, the sun on my skin as I sit on our pavestone patio, the no-sound-no-smell of snow, standing still by running water, the shape of my husband shoveling in the drive. What I mean is: many ordinary things are fragile bells calling me to the other world, that boundless meadow of goldenrod, that peaceful Olympus undisturbed by wind. That other world that is love only.
The secret is training to listen for their tintinnabulation, and then making the listening as essential to your day as breathing. I am not there yet. I make the bed in distraction, or make the breakfast in a hurry, when I should be making room for the holiness that reminds me of how good life is, how giving. My children downstairs, my husband at his desk; the memory of the raspberries we take from the garden in summer; the joy of writing; the gentle weather in the window; the soup on the stove for later lunch. There, while folding sheets, and putting away the discarded clothes of my children, and pecking at my keyboard, I can hear the chimes and faintly —
+I’m having my photograph taken for something and one of the options I ordered was this denim skirt (more sizes here) with matching top (more sizes here). SO chic. I’m very into the idea of a denim skirt so also ordered this style to compare.
+We just did a huge pantry clean out over the weekend – it felt SO good. We actually had a good supply of these bins and by the time we’d thrown out all the expired flours, spices, etc, we didn’t need any additional ones! So delightful to have all the flours, sugars, etc organized. The only new org solution I ordered was this water bottle rack (stackable!).
+Speaking of org, Pehr just restocked their fabulous canvas bins. We have lots of these in different shapes, colors, patterns. Great for organizing smaller sets of toys, or for nursery — diapers, swaddles, burp cloths, etc. I love to use these as the “gift basket” for baby showers. Fill with books, baby essentials, etc and then wrap in cello with a big ribbon.
+I just added this stick lamp to my closet and it is sparking so much joy! To have this soft light on top of my dresser in there — it adds instant ambiance (and brightness).
+Annie Selke makes the best rugs and I think for fairly reasonable prices given quality / pattern options / etc. Currently 20% off!
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J. Crew’s new arrivals grabbed my attention — loving the way they’ve jumped on a lot of the micro-trends I’ve been loving this season (pastels a la Prada, fine rib knits a la Leset) but given them their signature “crisp” J. Crew twist. I already shared my obsession with this new denim silhouette (seen above and below), and a few Magpies wrote to say that they are very similar to Agolde’s Ren jeans, but a fraction of the price (and available in petite and tall inseams)! Truly love the styling below. Should I order?!
