Easter Weekend

New York, 2013

I was joking with a colleague the other day that all the Easter craftiness I'm seeing on Pinterest and "the blogs" is giving me a complex. Whatever happened to Paas?

I am usually the first person to get a bit overwrought with my plans for the holidays, but sometimes it's a bit much, what with the explosion of mood boards and genuinely lovely cool "Oh, this, I just decoupaged it..." mom blogs online and all the Etsy-ness around us in Brooklyn.

The thing that's slightly disingenuous about all of this is that so many of the blogs and pinboards you see are actually created by prop stylists, graphic designers, lifestyle photographers, or people who work in similarly creative fields. There's nothing wrong with dreamy images, but it kind of creates a notion that the rest of us should have a day job, take care of our kids, and then hand calligraphy eggs all weekend.

Pretty pictures are fantastic, but there's such a proliferation of aspirational sites out there that sometimes it seems to feel a little artificial. Like, oh, I guess I should be taking hipster-ish photos of Axel in soft-focus holding organic carrots and his very first heritage breed baby chick?

Wait, should I?

But it's kind of funny isn't it, how we're always taking the plastic out of photos we post on Facebook, or cropping out anything "ordinary" in an image? It's becoming a pennant-flag filled jungle out there (my search for "baby and pennant flags" yielded 1,390,000 results.) And in the process, it all starts to feel a little staged and over-styled, no?

I mean, it used to be that Martha Stewart kind of had a monopoly on all of this, but at least we all acknowledged that she was creating these scenes with a team of professional lifestyle experts. Now that lifestyle content has migrated to blogs, it seems more attainable and yet I think people often forget that many of these blogs are essentially online magazines and really professional endeavors as well.

Yes, file this among first world problems! But seriously, Ack!!!!! I'm thinking of leading a backlash. Perhaps that's why this site made me laugh so hard. Even if I am guilty of a frame cluster or two myself.