Stay Awhile

a photo essay

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Linger."

Cousin Camp

The first time I heard about cousin camp was when my husband and I were newly married. We flew to Michigan to meet with his family at his grandparents’ cottage on the lake, all the cousins gathering together for a week of fishing, waterskiing and games of euchre just like what they had grown up doing in their childhoods.

We’ve kept the tradition going in our family with David’s siblings and the 10 (and counting!) grandkids. In the middle of every July, we meet up from our homes in SoCal, NV and TX for a long weekend for our own version of summer cousin camp.

We’ve done cousin camp in Tahoe, in Santa Barbara, at our homes in the OC. We’ve talked about going to Costa Rica and renting a big house with a private bus. We have big dreams of creating a family resort. But for the last two years, we’ve settled on glamping—low key, affordable, easy enough to do with a big group.

This year, we drove to the Palomar Mountains where we made s’mores, grilled burgers, and braved mosquitos. The kids decorated marshmallow shooters and had contests to see who could catch the most in their mouths. They wrote stories, painted rocks, and played Catan. We celebrated my mother-in-law’s birthday with a carrot cake from Martha Green’s, treebathed (at least one of us ;) ), and took family picture after family picture, all of the cousins in identical blue “Cousin Club” shirts, which they wore until three of the kids fell into the pond after a log walk.

It hasn’t always been easy, traveling with infants or making long drives with littles. The yurt was very, very hot and there was so. much. dirt. (And I did mention the mosquitos?) 

But was it worth it? One-hundred percent.

Favorite summer family tradition? “Worth it” moment? I’d love to know!

Summer Vacation

The sun sets earlier here.

I notice that because at 8:39 p.m. as I work in bed, I can see only the last parts of the burnt orange glow hovering above the hills across the street. I can hear the neighbor kids who are in their pool next door, and I realize I miss the hum of the cruise ship moving over the water as we sat outside our balcony room to watch the 10 p.m. sunsets.

The day after the big boys got out of school, we left for a two-week-long vacation. We flew to Seattle, traveled via cruise ship to Alaska, bussed to Vancouver (the trains won’t be running until the end of the year), then flew home to Orange County.

Since having kids, we’ve been almost entirely 3-day getaway people. Three days: long enough to do fun things, short enough to require minimal planning and no more than a weekend bag. Enough time to breathe different air, get a change of scenery. Not really enough time to shake you out of your routine. Just a little break.

When I left my full-time job in the spring of 2021, I envisioned wide open mental spaces, margin to the max. In reality, the school year that followed was chaotic: too many commitments, not enough bandwidth. Up until the plane left the runway, I felt like I was set to 2.00x speed, like the audiobooks that make sense to the listener once you’ve acclimated but that sounds incomprehensibly garbled to any passerby—didIremembertolockthedoorsconfirmationcodefortheexcursionpullupsforthetoddler—all in my head.

The tricky thing about vacation, of course, is that it’s still real life. You still bring along your anxiety over flying ever since that one rough landing that had luggage flying from overhead bins. There’s still laundry (when you only brought a carry-on each, and you had to pack bulky jackets and lots of layers for a 2-week trip). It’s still a frantic rush to get everyone on and off public transportation with rolling luggage and backpacks. There’s still sometimes too much screen time because you are pregnant and cannot walk around the city for hours on end. There are still emergency work calls (husband’s, not mine) punctuating the time. Still, just being in a new place infuses even the hard-ish things with a magical air.

From the beginning, we encountered delight after delight, even with the hiccups. The letterpress shop on the walk to our hotel. Brown butter popcorn in a pink foil bag. Rows and rows of fresh peonies at the market. Cold cherry apple cider. On the ship—the delight of post-dinner ping-pong games on the deck, an arcade next to the kids’ club, coffee delivery every morning, dessert after every meal: pina colada panna cotta, creme brûlée with berries, a chocolate tuxedo cake, unlimited ice cream. In Vancouver—the view of sunset over downtown from our hotel suite, a special spread of “sweet treats” before bedtime, the Japanese style wagyu hotdogs loaded with seaweed and fried onions. An impromptu date night to see Hamilton, showing at a theater just a two-minute walk from our hotel. The incredible maple walnut ice cream (My oldest son asking me, “Is this your favorite, Mama? Do you want Daddy and I to find it for your birthday?”). 

We spent hours between meals exploring the ship. I found a library (with a surprisingly great collection of books), and we discovered that the observation deck was the place to be for a late afternoon lunch of chicken salad croissant sandwiches, clam chowder and cocktails (or mocktails, for me), sun shimmering off the ocean. For the kids, the total novelty of getting pulled in a cart by Alaskan huskies and watching lumberjacks (“the engineers!” said my 3-year-old) fake-compete in a show was captivating.

Then there were the surprises. Chocolate covered strawberries delivered to our room! A pillow concierge! Mini robes and matching small slippers delivered to our suite in just the boys’ sizes. The full rainbow at dusk in Victoria. The funny bird that showed up on the windowsill of our hotel room on the 9th floor of the Fairmont Vancouver who “sat” just like a trained puppy for broken pieces of $15-a-bag vanilla caramel sea salt popcorn we bought at Pike Place Market.

For the first time in two-ish years, I made zero lists. I didn’t think at all about goals or plans for the rest of the summer or how we should celebrate our anniversary in July. Instead, I got lost in a novel, finished sudoku puzzles, and just sat, doing nothing but soaking up golden hour. Fourteen continuous Yes Days.

When our trip came to an end, I wondered, how can we bottle all of this up? The delights, the memories, the magic of the little things? What can we bring home? Maple caramels? A suitcase sticker from each city? New traditions? A refreshed sense of wonder? A different way of living? A fresh well of inspiration? The expectancy of wide-open days full of endless adventures?

Vacation was a glorious break from routine that reminded us to pay attention to our actual lives, to learn to appreciate the “first” things again: the boys’ first bus ride and sky train; their first little robes, their first 10 p.m. sunset. These are the gems, and it’s easier to see them when we are looking for them.

This vacation has spurred in us a new summer rhythm, a new beat, a reset, and for the rest of the summer, this is my takeaway (and maybe yours, too?)—Be on the lookout for new and amazing things. Delight in the days. Experience little joys and small surprises as daily gifts.

Not just coffee delivery to the hotel room door in the morning or a fridge in a lounge fully stocked with free boxed alkaline spring water and bottles of Perrier. But the small joys of the first vending machine popsicle (Spiderman, of course) of the season at our neighborhood water park. The joy of dinner with old friends in our backyard on the first night of summer. The everyday delight of peach bellini sparkling water over ice in a glass with a wedge of lime. 

The feeling that anything is possible.

The Vibe Five: White Space, Color Palettes and Nature

In her Masterclass on interior design, Kelly Wearstler talks about the “vibe tray” that she curates in the preliminary stages of designing a space. She pulls together samples and objects that begin to tell a story about the space. I’m incorporating this practice into my own creative journey—consider this my visual “vibe tray.”

1. Jill shared this on our team Slack, and I immediately downloaded the image. What I love about it: the typography, the white space, the streaks of pastel that remind me of Zebra mildliners.

2. That one time we stayed at the Proper Hotel Santa Monica and my outfits matched the actual wardrobe. I’m inspired by the color palette of salmon, terracotta, and goldenrod with pops of glossy white and creamy lace and want to renovate our master bedroom closet using the same paint color.

3. Another mom drew this flower in chalk at our neighborhood park, and I couldn’t help but snap a pic because the colors felt so vibrant and fun. I loved the colors so much that I purchased this set of notebooks in a similar color palette specifically for my morning pages. Day one of morning pages complete, and I already have a new idea for the MOPS talk I’m giving. I thought about picking up a cheap (under $1) notebook from Target, but in the end, I’m glad I went with these ones—a little bit of pretty goes a long way to inspiring creativity.

4. These Whitney English day planner tabs capture pretty much all of my favorite colors: lagoon blue, seaside turquoise, citron, rose pink. I’m taking cues from the Nov-Dec-Jan tabs for the foundation of our master bedroom redesign, and the May-Jun tabs are giving me all the Valentine’s/galentine’s decor vibes.

5. I’m trying to pay closer attention to the natural beauty around me: the smell of the forest, salty ocean air, and shades of green—balsam, jade, moss, emerald.

What’s setting the tone for your creative projects?