FROM: STELLA

TO: LAURA

1.  I was in Columbus last week for my cousin’s wedding and we had a blast. It is such a fun city and we loved getting to explore and enjoy the small city life for a few days. My favorite meal (by far!) was breakfast at Fox in the Snow. Their breakfast sandwiches are made with perfectly fluffy eggs and are huge – easily big enough for us to split. I also loved the biscuit and jam. I can’t wait to go back to Columbus just to return to this spot.
2. During our trip, we stayed with one of my cousins and I was blown away by the amenity kit that he and his wife included in our room. They left us with a welcome card, local treat (buckeyes!), a jug of water with glasses and slew of “whoops, I forgot” toiletries (loofahs, razors, toothpaste, etc), several of which we used. It certainly inspired me to up my game next time we have guests. I’d love to stay with them again, but also have my eye on this Brewery hotel right outside of Columbus. I guess we’ll have to do a night at each spot!
3. I am finally caught up with all the episodes of To Live and Die in LA and am on the edge of my seat trying to figure out what happened.
4. Our new apartment has big beautiful windows in the living room but does not have blinds or curtains, so my husband and I have been on a mission this week to create a little privacy and also light-control for ourselves. I loved this in-depth article about how to pick the right curtain size for your space. And sticking with our tree house theme, I just ordered these matchstick blinds for our front door window to give us a little privacy.

FROM: LAURA

TO: STELLA

1. When deciding on Baby Ernie‘s name, I utilized the Social Security baby names site a lot! They have some interesting tools that allow you to see the popularity of a name over the last 20 years and how its ranking has moved up or down and lists of the most popular names by decade. My husband and I wanted to choose a name that fulfilled a variety of criteria, one of which was that we hope it isn’t the most popular where he’ll end up in a class of a dozen Matts, etc. The SSA’s site really helped with some of this research! (Relatedly: getting a social security number for a child not born in a hospital is another to do list item I’m not super looking forward to tackling.)
2. I read Taylor Jenkin Read’s latest book, Daisy Jones and the Six, in a day. I could not put it down and thought the story-telling techniques she utilized were brilliant. I’ve heard from a few different people that they didn’t know it was fiction, which I think is very telling (and impressive!). I binged another book by her, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, similarly quickly, and have since added the rest of her books to my to-read list!
3. I’ve been very interested in reading about the many problem areas Facebook is facing at the moment. Two long-form articles in particular that have grabbed my attention in the last few weeks: It’s Time to Break Up Facebook, an opinion piece in the New York Times by Chris Hughes, a co-founder of the Facebook team; and 15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook, a chronicling of the last year and a half of Facebook’s scandals.
4. One thing that did not get done on the “before Beep is born” to do list was to frame and hang a bunch of art for his room. We did a blue/orange/yellow/gray theme based on this curtain material and this rug, then picked a bunch of art pieces from Society6 to complement them [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. TBD on when that particular project will actually get done, though!