APW Happy Hour

Dear APW,

Maddie here! This was unexpectedly a really good week. I say unexpectedly because I started it by falling off a sidewalk and spraining my ankle (a photographer’s nightmare), which overall sucked. But the result of this klutzy catastrophe was that I then spent the rest of the week being forced to slow down, take better care of myself, and appreciate my support group in a way I haven’t done in a while (insert a hat tip to Meg here, who yelled at me for driving my stick-shift to a staff meeting with my bum foot and then took me to the doctor herself to get it checked out). And since I was really stuck at my desk all week (icing, elevating, and compressing) I got to spend a bunch of extra time editing photos, which gave me an excuse to finally watch (read: obsess over) Orange Is The New Black. (Can we play guess the APW staff’s favorite characters? Mine is… Taystee. Meg’s is… Niki. You can probably read a lot into that, actually.) So while the earlier parts of this week may have been a wee bit stressful, the tradeoff has been, altogether, not so bad. And now I look forward to a weekend of excusable laziness. Uh, I mean R&R.

So tell me, how was your week? (Injury-free, I hope.) It’s your Friday open thread, so hop on it!

Cheers,
Maddie

Highlights from APW

Going viral this week: Rachel’s IDGAF attitude on wedding planning.

Making your own dress does not have to break you.

All of my favorite things came together on Tuesday when we got to talk about women entrepreneurs and the diverse awesomeness of APW reader career paths. One of my favorite conversations to pop up in these posts was about the importance of second bananas (entrepreneurial henchmen, if you will). It reminded me of this great video on starting a movement and why the role of “first follower” is as just important in creating a movement as the person who started it. Though I may be biased. As APW’s #1 henchlady. So to speak.

We finally answered the call for hip ceremony music, APW style. A little Prince, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash. NBD.

Liz knocked Ask Team Practical so far out of the park this week that it landed on Friday.

Highlights from Around the Web

On the crushing costs of daycare, and what the “motherhood penalty” is doing to middle-class families. You can see Meg’s own thoughts on daycare here. (Meg’s Note: My favorite part of my favorite line of the piece was weirdly cut from the online edition, “Professor Gerson and other sociologists saw something I had seen as well among my middle class acquaintances: a discomfort with center-based day care and even the term “day care,” preferring terms like “educational enrichment” and, yes, preschool. (I try to buck this trend by referring to my daughter’s excellent day care as “day care” every chance I get.”)

This Al Jazeera story (Meg’s note: have you guys been watching Al Jazeera America? It’s the kind of TV news I’ve otherwise only seen overseas. Intense.) Mothers are not ‘Opting Out’—They are Out of Options is the important conversation that we really need to be having. Motherhood, not framed by trend stories about the wealthy.

When he returned home he called her for their first telephone conversation. “I say to her, ‘I’m falling in love with you,’ ” he said. “And I say, ‘Well, I’ve loved you my whole life,’ ” she said. This New York Times love story 35-years in the making is heart wrenching and romantic and makes me yearn hard for the beach.

I’m curious what you guys think about this article in the Huffington Post about a couple that decided to have sex every day for a year.

A sisterhood of the traveling dress story that wasn’t born on APW.

This post on living in New York by Michelle Edgemont simply nails it.

And in painfully obvious news, high heels are really bad for your feet. Wedding flats anyone? (You’ll pry platforms from my cold dead feet.)

These guys are totally pulling off fancy lady hair. Actually, some of these updos are really cute.

From reader Shiri: The New Mexico Supreme Court has held that a photographer who refused to photograph a lesbian wedding violated the N.M. Human Rights Act, and enforcing the N.M. Human Rights Act against the photographer in this way does not violate the photographer’s First Amendment rights.

Kelly Clarkson is so over wedding planning, y’all. Can you blame her? I find it sort of charming. (Side note: Kelly Clarkson is one of my guilty pleasures. I have two Kelly Clarkson Pandora stations. I have also seen her in concert. She was awesome.)

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