Tiny candles, a sneaker hunt, and the best crackers

plus, a really good environmental newsletter and the beauty of winter trees

✨Many of you found your way here via our house tour on Cup of Jo! A huge thank you, Joanna and Jannelle, for such a thoughtful interview and feature, and I'm full of so much gratitude to the COJ readers for their kind and insightful comments. I'm in awe of photographer Lyndsay Hannah, who really captured the soul of the house.✨

I'm writing to you in the aftermath of hosting my youngest's 7th birthday party - a joyful chaos of kids moving between art stations at a local art space. They drew treasure maps, made detailed renderings of a carrot with a bow tie, made paper airplanes, cut paper sculptures and put them back together with lots and lots of tape. There was even a drawing of a dancing pickle! I love watching kids make art; they are so unafraid of making mistakes (gah!), and the scale of their creativity is vast (why NOT a carrot with a bow tie?). It's also so exhausting to be a child; time moves so much slower, and small dramas, therefore, feel like they last for so much longer. I…