Past Week Outfits

Wow, what a week! We "woke up" from the holiday sleep on Tuesday morning with our last school interview and then we had a-school-a-day event for the rest of the week that felt a little like the last burst at the end of a firework. We are now DONE and in exactly a month from today we will know if our daughter is going to be accepted in one of the schools that we toured (possibly our favorite). Fingers crossed!

The weather has been absolutely crazy here, we had a change of season at least three times. At the beginning of the week we have been hit by a cold front that made the temperatures drop into the low 20s, then it warmed up again until Saturday that felt almost like spring with temperatures in the 60s, and yesterday it was cold again. Now, not that I want the temperatures to stay in the 20s but could we have some sort of stability, please? It gets really complicated to get dressed in the morning.

Anyway, on the coldest day of the week (of the season, actually) I had to attend a panel at one of the schools and I needed to dress up a bit. I had a hard time not only because I was afraid that I would freeze on my way but also because the skirt that I had decided would be perfect for the event gave me some challanges.
The skirt is the No. 2 pencil skirt in glen plaid that is currently sold-out on the website but should popback. Even if I bought this skirt in store and I had tried it on, I am afraid I should have bought a 2 instead of a 0. It just fit with a silk skirt tucked in (the shirt is Madewell from last year):

but the problem is when you want to tuck in something heavier that a silk shirt, like that night. In case you haven't thought about it, the bow (which is the cute detail of this skirt) makes it almost impossible to wear anything untucked with this skirt (even a cardigan left open doesn't look good). Tuck in or die!
So when I tried to tuck in my cashmere turtleneck in caramel from a few season ago, it looked very bulky (or like I was about to explode). In the end I added my Ralph Lauren blazer (that is exactly the same shade of caramel than the sweater) that covered up a little bit what was going on in the middle area, so I felt comfortable neverthless but keep this in mind if you are interested in the skirt. This is without the jacket (about to explode, as I said):

On another day, I wore the outfit below to another school event. It was much warmer but I had a cardigan on that I didn't take pics of. In any case I love this part of the outfit and the silk polka-dots tee is probably one of my favorite purchases this year (I had missed on it but found it on the JCA weekly exchange for cheap). I am wearing a size 0 in the tee and a size 2 in the flair skirt:

By the way, I have the perfect necklace to wear with the tee, once come spring:

Let's move forward to spring! As I said Saturday was a very warm day and a lot of people were out and about without a jacket. I wore my Lolli pants from last year (I wore them a LOT this year) with the boardwalk-striped zipper tee. The colors go really well together and I received a lot of compliments both on the pants and the necklace, which is "vintage" JCrew, aka from 2008 (see second picture):

So as you can imagine I had very little time to shop last week, but I did take advantage of the Lilly Pulitzer two-day sale and ordered something for my daughter and one item for me (that should be here today). I also (quite surprisingly) caved on a couple of items from the Boden spring collection. Stay tuned!

Dressing Down For Thanksgiving

As every year we are spending Thanksgiving with friends at their parents' in the Upper West Side. While they usually contact us just after Labor Day to ask us what we are doing for Thanksgiving and if we want to be their guests, this year I kind of "forced" the invitation (they had more family members coming down for the holidays than usual so I think that if I hadn't asked they wouldn't have invited us for lack of "available seats"). In the invitation email, the mom of my friend said that everybody will be wearing jeans so no need to dress up. Uhm... I don't know if I have to take this as an indication that I usually overdress (but honestly, last year I was wearing the tartan perfect shirt and my navy tootpick cords without any jewelry and I don't think that it was an extravagant outfit), but I am really going to try to dress down to the minimum.

Initially I had planned to wear the Talbots merino cardigan that I had bought a while ago during a 50% off one item promo. I still don't see it on the website, so it might be that this is store only (this is a P. I have to say that in general Talbots knits fit me well in P):

But now I think that even this might be too "festive". So instead I am going to go with an "unfestive striped tee". At least it is something new that I am excited to wear. It is the Boardwalk-stripe zipper tee. I had tried this tee as soon as it came out and I liked so much that I almost bought it FP. But that day I probably hadn't drunk my daily dose of Crewlade and could resist (the voice of the reason said "wait, it will go on sale"). So I bought it last week during the 30% off promo (Crewlade is more powerful when there is a sale). The first time around I had tried the XXS and it fit great except for the sleeves that were too short/tight at the zippers, so I went with a XS even if it is slouchier in the body:

I bought it mostly to wear in the spring (I love this color combination and I think that it has a lot of potential for spring) but with the weather being so mild I already wore it last Sunday to a kid's party and if tomorrow is too cold to wear it like this, I can wear a tissue turtleneck under it.

In other news, I started my Black Friday shopping in an unusual way: my grocery store is having a $0.99 sale on De Cecco pasta (which is the best Italian pasta and usually is very expensive at $2.69-2.99 a box). I especially love the Fusilli and my daughter loves the Racchette (that are shaped like tennis raquets), so I stocked up! Otherwise our "family tradition" on Black Friday is to hit Best Buy, where my husband, who is normally very retained, usually loses it (that's how we got a Wee, a Playstation 3 and an additional flat screen for our family room). But we just bought an iPad (even if we knew that they are going to have an iPad promo on Black Friday, but they are going to be sold-out in a nanosecond), so I don't know if this year we will spend more money on technology (I will go anyway for the deals on DVDs).

Are you dressing up or down for Thanksgiving? Happy Thanksgiving to you all!