8/25/2013

Summer 2013

It has been a very happy INSANE intense summer in our home!  It started with Zoey turning 1, shortly followed by my husband's car exploding, and then surprisingly our business took off!  We have spent the entire summer running a skirt factory out of our house.  There have been endless thrifting trips, equally endless late nights, serger lessons to my sweet hubby who is now in charge of sewing up the waistbands, trip after trip to the post office... I have seriously lost count of how many skirts we have sold, but I'm estimating around 200.  Give or take a dozen.  I wish I could hug every single person who bought one from us.  We are incredibly thankful.

Hard work pays off, and sometimes it takes years.  I had almost given up on the hope that my business would be profitable.  I've believed in it all along, I just didn't know how to show my stuff to the people who would want to buy it.  I'm super passionate about what I make, and I feel like the luckiest girl to be able to have this as my job!!!  I have been working hard to make my customers happy and Instagram is so fun because all of the mamas who buy from me send me pictures of their daughters wearing the skirts we worked so hard to make.  It is FUN!!!  My entire family enjoys it.  It's the best!  There is no shortcut to success, and if you're about to give up, don't.  Keep working, and keep working happy and hard.  I want to make a post soon and tell you guys a little bit about my story, and why this skirt shop was so important to us.  It was a huge moral victory.

So back to this summer.  It's almost over!  and this past week we decided we needed to seize the rest of it, and quick!... so we packed up and took off to the beach for a couple of days!  I always wish that we could have more time, but with the girls, and the heat, and naptimes, and meals, and all the packing, and logistics... a couple days is about all we can handle right now!  We live only a few hours away, but the last time we went was 3 years ago when Emma was 6 months old.  It was a new experience for both of our girls and they LOVED it.


Emma was a sand baby, Zoey was a water baby, and Thomas and I spent our time trading them off and letting them explore what they wished.  Zoey ate sand twice and threw it up four times.  Emma collected seaweed.  We ate ice cream for breakfast the very last day before we left for home.  We drove half an hour away to eat at Joe's Crab Shack for dinner our second night there.  We don't have one in Richmond, and we ate at one in Jacksonville on our honeymoon.  Thomas dropped his ring through the cracks on the pier and thankfully we found it!  It was a sweet place to go to again with our girls.  It's nothing super fancy, but it's meaningful to us.  Life is beautiful that way.  I love to make memories out of the ordinary.

As we prepare for a change of seasons, I am looking forward to slowing down a little.  Emma is turning 4 in November.  She is learning addition now (something she wanted to do all on her own, and the girl is GOOD!) and I'm excited to dive into another year of "homeschool preschool" with her.  There are only a couple of years before she's off to school and it's starting to sink in.  I always wanted to homeschool my babies, but her personality is big, and she needs to be in a classroom, I think.  It's best for her.  I want to soak up every day I have her home with me.  Zoey is picking up a ton of new words.  "cup!  please!  shoes!"  She is actually sleeping through the night in her crib and looking more and more grown every passing day.  We are looking forward to continuing our skirt shop on Instagram, but working at a better pace.  Tonight I worked on cleaning out the dining room and reorganizing my studio so we can actually eat the table again!

I'm sure we will sneak a few more trips in to Kings Dominion, maybe one last run through the sprinklers in the backyard, a couple more Sweet Frog dates and probably a few other summer surprises before it's all said and done with.  We can't work at this pace every summer, but this year it was a happy sacrifice to make.  I will tell you about it next time :)