Welcome, little Margot

Last week our sweet Margot Julia joined us! She is the tiniest little peanut - just barely six pounds - but we can already tell that she'll be just as fiery and independent as her big sisters! :)

It wasn't nearly the dramatic birth story that Evie had, but Margot came just as fast! I went in for my 38 week appointment on the morning of the 14th and found out that the baby had flipped and was breech again! It was hugely disappointing for me. I had worked so hard to get her to turn three or four different times - it looked like she just preferred to be head up for some reason. I had gotten more comfortable with the idea of a c-section (whatever it takes to get them here safe, right?), but I still wanted to try to avoid surgery if possible since I had been able to with my other births.

The last couple of visits, the umbilical cord had been wrapped around Margot's head, but this time the cord was out of the way and my doctor wanted to turn her. He scheduled a version procedure at the hospital for that same afternoon, which is where they try to manually turn the baby. It is about as uncomfortable as it sounds. After almost an hour of digging into my belly (which is bruise central now), my doctor finally got Margot to turn head down. We talked and talked about our options and we decided to break my water and get her delivered before she could flip again. It was a hard decision, because I don't really love the idea of an induction, but I really didn't want a c-section if it could be avoided.

Just a few short hours after my water broke, tiny, perfect Margot joined us. I feel like I got so much insight into what happened with Evie's labor this time. I learned just how fast my body goes through transition - I went from 4cm to a birthed baby in about 30 minutes! That half hour is insanely intense, but also kind of great that the really hard part is over so quickly, right?

We have the most serious perma heart eyes for Margot. I have a feeling this kid will never learn to crawl or walk - she is being held for about 23 hours a day! We just can't get enough of her. I pretty much just want to stare at her for the rest of my life.

I'm easing my way back into work (slowly) and have a goal to post here a couple times a week. And of course I'll be on Instagram  and Pinterest every day. As always, thank you, thank you, thank you for all the support and well-wishes about Margot. I really love and appreciate you guys. It has been amazing to get to share my life with you all for the past seven years and feel you cheering me on every step of the way. xoxoxo

Mixing It Up This Thanksgiving!

We're getting ready to head up to my parents' house for Thanksgiving this week. We all pitch in and help with the meal, but my mom is a force to be reckoned with in the kitchen! Her pies are legendary and I can't wait to over-indulge on Thursday (shhh - don't tell my doctor).  My favorite part of Thanksgiving though, even more than the eating, is actually the cooking and preparing part. Especially when there are a million people crammed in the kitchen and we're all joking and telling stories about Thanksgivings past. The best. :)

You can always count on the good ol' carbelicious, high-calorie standbys to be on our menu - turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, sweet potato casserole and homemade rolls - but we like to try different foods for the side dishes and veggies each year.

NatureBox, my favorite monthly snack subscription service, invited me to use some of their healthy and delicious snacks to make a few of our sides dishes. I made a kale salad with their Baked Sweet Potato fries and a roasted asparagus side dish with their Cheddar and Onion Sunflower Kernels. Both were super delicious and passed the Thanksgiving menu test! :)

I tweaked this recipe for the salad and this recipe for the asparagus. The NatureBox snacks added a little extra crunch to both! Those sweet potato fries were already on my NatureBox favorites list though, so I knew they'd be great in the salad. I seriously could have eaten this whole giant bowl-full myself. YUM.

Something that I really love about NatureBox is they have more than 100 snacks, so every month I can pick a few tried-and-true favorites and a couple new ones too. Having healthy snacks in new flavors at the ready has practically saved my life this pregnancy. For six months, just the idea of a hot meal made me queasy. I've been keeping a few bags in my car's center console, which has been a game-changer for both me and my kids. No more hangry Komendas!

Something new and exciting: If you are a US-based first time subscriber, NatureBox will send you a FREE trial box of their most popular snacks by signing up here!

ALSO, NatureBox is giving away TWO six-month subscriptions today! You can enter to win by clicking here, browsing the NatureBox snack list, and then commenting on this post with the snacks you'd love to try. 

Open to US readers only. Contest ends Monday, Dec 1. Good luck! And thank you to NatureBox for sponsoring this post and LGN!  :)

One Big and One (literally) Tiny Announcement!!

First of all, the fall Domino is out every where now! (Here's an online peek!) Linus is featured, like, three times at least, so it's worth picking up the issue solely for a triple slice of that big, fluffy guy.

I'm so thankful to the wonderful Domino team, especially to Robert Leleux, Domino's Editor-in-Chief, and to Brittany Ambridge, photographer extraordinaire. These two are an epic duo. They work together with such grace and ease. And they are downright hilarious. I love any chance I get to work with them on the magazine as one of the contributing editors, and this two-day shoot of my own house was the tippy of tops. Thanks, Robert and Brittany!

And in even better, more exciting to me news, WE ARE HAVING A BABY! And it's another girl! :)

We could not be a single ounce more happy about her. We've felt for years that we've wanted another (and likely final) child in our family, and after a long road of hardship there, she's finally on her way. I tear up every time I think of how sweet my older girls are being about the idea of having a little sister this January. Nearly every morning they crawl into bed with us and whisper sister secrets and sing little songs to my belly. This is the good stuff, friends. Thanks for being here to share in my joy. xo

New Favorite Nail Polish

Claire's birthday is today - it sort of landed on a crazy week. Lots of other events and commitments, and it's the beginning of spring break, so a lot of her friends are out of town. She had a really fun birthday party last year, and this year she was cool with getting to do a little outing with her best friend and her best cousin in lieu of a party.

Claire's girlie to the bone and begs (BEGS!) to go to the nail salon all the time. She went once with me in New York (the cheapest and greatest mani-pedi is at Candy Nails in the Fi Di for about $20 total and that includes tip! And it's cheaper for kids, obviously). And then I took her with me again recently when I went to get a shellac mani (my favorite) before Alt Summit. She was so excited and had so much nervous energy, the poor nail tech kept asking her to hold still :)

Anyway, so we're going to the nail salon with a couple of cute girls tomorrow (wish me luck). I'll probably get shellac for my nails because a regular mani will get trashed in 24 hours with all my projects. When I don't have shellac on my nails though, I am the HUGEST fan of this drugstore nail polish made by cover girl. It's cheap and so good! They claim it lasts a full seven days and I would say they come really close to delivering on that promise.

I stumbled on the product as a splurge-purchase (I got the red called Lasting Love, I think) once in Brooklyn, solely because I liked the square packaging (don't judge). I was shocked at how much I like the actual polish! It is really hard-wearing, which is saying something coming from me (I'm a record-breaking mani-ruiner). And the colors are gorgeous.

I find myself often wandering over to the nail polish aisle at CVS just to see if they have any new shades. And when I ran out of my go-to winter color recently (Essie's Wicked), I bought this one, called Wine Stain, from the CG line as a stand in.

The peach color is a recent favorite though. I love wearing grays and nudes on my hands and fun colors on my toes, but this peach-pink (called Peek-A-Boo Pink) feels perfect for spring without being too crazy.

Any nail product favorites for you lately? I also recently discovered the complete genius of the nail polish remover tubs, where you just dip and twist your nails in the spongy-thing. It's amazing and they last forever, surprisingly. I like this one a lot.

Happy Holidays!

Christmas snuck up on me in the most major way. Do you feel the same? The girls took on most of the holiday decorating themselves this year (hence the sparse tree with the crooked star), but looking around, I love it all more than anything I could have done if I had had the time. These kids are so, so excited for Evie's birthday tomorrow and then of course for Christmas. It's seriously just magical to watch them scurry around the house making preparations. :)

We are doing some last minute shopping this afternoon (wish me luck), a little service project this evening and then tonight I have a whole lot of gingerbread house pieces to make for a little family party we're having over here tomorrow for Evelyn. We've been hosting a lot of visitors the past couple days and truly, there's nothing like house guests to push me to get projects done. Am I right? I started hanging art in our house this week (some of these are thrift store pieces I just bought for the frame!) and while there's still a long way to go with decorating projects, suddenly it feels like our house. Perfect timing!

I hope you and yours have a really lovely week. See you in a few days. Merry Christmas!!

Our Holiday Cards

Holidays are made for you at Zazzle. Find cards you'll covet at http://www.zazzle.com/holiday+cards.

Years ago, I used to really go all-out with our holiday cards. I'd spend hours and hours on the things, hand-crafting every part. But that was before my life became virtually one giant creative outlet, and in recent years, when I have actually managed to get cards out, they've been pretty generic. I had made it a goal to do something manageable AND special this year.

So when Zazzle invited me to use their site to make my holiday cards, I was happy for the chance to get them done early and done right.

For the front of our 5x7 card, I wanted a family photo that had a little something to do with Arizona and that told the story of our recent move. I made a tiny tissue paper pom-pom garland and strung it on a cactus patch sort of near our house to make things look a little more festive. While we were taking photos, a huge flock of about twenty peacocks came wandering by! It was awesome (and a little terrifying, to be honest). The girls have been talking about it non-stop since!

On the inside of the card, I wanted to do a photo booth strip insert. I drew some words on black foam board using this google search as a reference and I painted in the lettering with white acrylic paint. Looking back, it would have looked a million times better to use a white paint pen, but you know, whatever. Thank goodness for grainy photo booth photos.

We found a photo booth at a shopping center and took one strip of photos each while holding one of the signs. This photo booth made things super easy on me and automatically uploaded all the images online, which I was able to access later with a code. I picked one photo from each of our photo strips and photoshopped them into one new strip. I had the strips printed out three to a page to save money and I cut them to size for the inside of the cards.

I used a little washi tape to attach the strip to the inside of the card. I think I'll go back to the store to find some different colors of tape for when I finish assembling the cards over the next month.

I kept the printed message pretty short on the inside of the card to leave room for a place to write a personalized message.  I love getting (and sending) hand-written notes, especially during the holidays when we're all so busy. The extra care and thought feels really special to me.

Another one of my favorite things to do is to buy vintage stamps for the envelopes. You can get full sheets on eBay for just a few dollars and then just mix and match.

Zazzle also offers a custom stamp option that I was so tempted by! I had thought about printing out a photo of Linus with a big Christmas bow around his neck! :) They also sell some really cute vintage-looking stamps if you're not wanting to deal with the eBay route.

I'm so happy with the quality of the Zazzle cards and my large order came so quickly. I can't tell you what a relief it is to have these done this early! I'm feeling majorly on top of my game here. :) And now I'm wondering what are my chances for getting all my Christmas shopping done before Thanksgiving? Can you imagine?!

Goodbye, New York

Greetings from a cave of moving boxes! We are slowly but surely packing up the brownstone. The truck arrives bright and early tomorrow morning and our flight leaves in the evening. The count down has begun. I'm feeling good.

A couple weeks ago though I was having major, major second thoughts about our move. I thought about all the growing I have done over the past almost decade while we've lived away from all our family. These years have been so good, hard and important to me. Michael, who has always been my rock, reminded me that there are lots of good, hard and important times ahead too. The next day he sent me this quote by Richard Wright. It's one of those good pieces of writing that can be about something very different, but can also speak straight to my heart and feel so very personal. I felt like this when we left Arizona, and I feel like this again as we prepare to return home:

I was leaving the South
To fling myself into the unknown...
I was taking a part of the South
To transplant in alien soil,
To see if it could grow differently,
If it could drink of new and cool rains,
Bend in strange winds,
Respond to the warmth of other suns
And, perhaps, to bloom.

Here's to another season for Jenny Komenda. Thanks, as always, for coming along for the ride. xo

Inspiration at Colonial Williamsburg

This post was brought to you by Colonial Williamsburg. Book your stay at colonialwilliamsburg.com.

I've been really into classical architecture books lately (this one is completely fascinating). We're going to be knocking out and rebuilding a few interior walls of the new house that will need some special moulding. I've been doing as much research as I can before we have to make final decisions there. So when I was invited to come down to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia with my sister Heather and sister-in-law Kenzi, I jumped at the chance to have a girls weekends and to tour the beautiful, historically restored town and soak up all the classical and colonial architecture (and I'll be honest - the spa and the amazing food were a draw, too) :)

The past couple of weeks have been SO intense with work and the upcoming move, it was really amazing to hop in the car, get out of the city and have some kid-free time with these ladies I love so much.

Also, I was excited to go straight to the source to see the new collection of historically accurate paint colors Colonial Williamsburg recently launched with Benjamin Moore.

The colors are more vibrant than you might have guessed, which makes complete sense after touring some of the homes in Colonial Williamsburg. Those early Americans were not afraid of color!

I fell in love with one of the greens especially. Wouldn't this dark jade make the perfect front door color for the new house, with gray for the body of the house, white for the trim and charcoal on some of the accents? I'm feeling good about this combo:

The weekend really was magical. The Williamsburg Inn was amazing, the grounds were stunning, the museums and historical sites were fascinating and inspiring. I practically never put down my camera - there was so much beauty everywhere.

It was so nice to be staying in the hotel right in the middle of the town. We could pop home in the middle of the day if we wanted a little mid-day nap :)

And then we could head right back out to the fun!

Here are about 500 more photos of what caught my eye on the streets of CW. :) I was so inspired by woodwork! The fences, birdhouses, porch railings, radiator covers - everything had such a lovely attention to detail! Check it out...

We had dinner on Saturday night at the Regency Dining Hall. Delicious food in a beautiful room! The Rockefellers helped to restore Colonial Williamsburg nearly 100 years ago, and this dining room felt so classic and inspired by that period. It is really lovely with chinoiserie panels, crystal chandeliers and frilly curtains. The jazz band was my favorite though. The singer's voice was a spot-on Ella Fitzgerald. Such a treat.

A few more favorite things we did at Colonial Williamsburg this weekend:

1) Renting cruiser bikes to ride all around town was such a treat! The extra breeze from the speed of the bikes was so refreshing.

2) The Cheese Shop was a hit with us! I recommend picking up the Prosciutto and Provolone sandwich, a jar of their House dressing, and a selection from their great gluten-free wall and other assorted condiments.

3) The wallpaper at the Wythe House. Every room is a different color and pattern!

4) The grounds and special decorative touches at the Governer's Palace are so beautiful. The inlay on the stairs is especially can't-miss.

3) Williamsburg at Home is full of really gorgeous, unique home goods, fabrics and paints that are designed to give homes a punch of colonial style, but that are surprisingly clean-lined and modern at the same time. The shop was really pretty - and I'm still dreaming of the inlay dresser below!

4) Don't miss stopping in to all the great tradespeople shops around town. I really enjoyed the weaver's shop, the apothecaries, the cobbler and the general store.

Wow! That might be my record for most photos in a post! And I edited out SO many! ha! I guess I didn't realize just how inspired I would be by Colonial Williamsburg, but I came home last night rested, full, happy and bursting with new design ideas. Kenzi got a welcome break from studying for her nursing board exams and Heather's added the Williamsburg Inn to her someday-wedding-reception potential site list. :) So I'd say it was a successful girls weekend!

Have you ever visited Williamsburg? What was your favorite thing to do or see?