Mia, Mark’s mom and I took a break from cookies on Sunday to go see the Nutcracker (an abbreviated, 1 hour kid’s version, staged by the NY Theater Ballet). It was Mia’s first trip to the theater of any kind, and she was excited to say the least. In preparation to going to the ballet, we’ve been listening to the music and reading the book so that she would be familiar with the story that would unfold onstage. She was mesmerized. “Are those people real?”, she asked. And at one point in the middle of the production, a huge grin spread on her face and she said very sheepishly, “I like this!”. Afterwards, she chatted with some of the child dancers in the lobby and deliberated very carefully on her choice of purchase for a Clara tree ornament.

On the way home, we stopped by an Italian cafe for lunch, just the 3 of us ladies, dining on panini, drinks, and an ambrosia cake to share. Lani’s been here for almost 2 weeks, watching the girls and giving them attention while we work. We honestly would not have been able to get through this time without her and she’s diligently put in her time labeling bags, packing cookies, and participating in the general day-to-day craziness that is our lives at the moment. As crazy as it was, the time went by fast. I could tell Mia was a little stressed over Lani’s departure date almost as soon as she arrived. So they hung a calendar up on her wall next to the bed and marked the days as they passed. She leaves tonight, right before dinnertime and it will be quite a few more months before they see her again since she lives across the country in Washington state. Kids are resilient, but we’ll see how the girls do. I am not fond of good byes either.

We had a great showing at our holiday trunk show on Saturday. It was a really cold day (it’ll be almost 60 today, however), but the show had a steady stream of visitors all day long, despite it being at a location that is a bit desolate and at least 3-4 blocks away from anything else of interest. The show, held at a new concert venue called the Bell House, was cozy with drinks served and some mellow, live music in the afternoon.

I picked up a few things at the show myself, raiding the $5-15 dollar bins at Ouef where I scored 5 pieces of clothing for the girls for $40. I also picked up some fabric scraps from Hable Construction to make…I don’t know…throw pillows? (although when I got home with my green and yellow patterned canvas and linen scraps, I realized that green just doesn’t really match anything in the house, argh).

And the corporate holiday gift boxes? It just never seems to end. Seriously. I assembled about 70 small, medium, deluxe and multiple gift boxes for 50 and 100 people this weekend and I pretty much have to assemble the same amount of boxes tonight and tomorrow. Mark’s making the first batch of deliveries and heading to the kitchen this afternoon. We’re both fighting colds (or maybe it’s fatigue. Or both.). It’s good to get some of these packages out of the house and we keep telling ourselves that it’s just another week left (we think!) of Holiday! Cookie! Madness!

Both girls are done with classes and school this week (C takes 1 class a week at Mia’s school) and starting next week they’ll be on holiday break. While attending the last class with Claudine, I noticed these great handmade library cards sitting on the fireplace mantel that the kids in Mia’s created created. She’s been bringing home books from school every now and then and while I understood that they were on loan, it all made sense when I spotted these in the class space. Such a cute and clever idea to start a little library system for the kids! Much of what Mia does in school remains somewhat of a mystery since she never really talks about it at home so it was pretty nice to see this glimpse into her world, even if it was just a library card on a mantle – it still showed so much. Mia will start her last semester in January at her current school before being shuttled off to Kindergarten at our neighborhood public school in September. It will be a huge change (7 kids to 2-3 teachers right now, compared to the 20+ kids in Kindergarten; classes held in an old mansion built in the 1800s vs a pretty standard institutional space), but she is ready to go to a “big kids” school and talks about it everyday. Yes, the kid is most certainly growing up.

We’re excited to be a part of this event this coming Saturday, December 13th with the likes of Lotta Jansdotter, Perch!, Mast Brothers Chocolates, Hable Construction and many more talented designers. There will be live music and some food, all in a new venue called the Bell House at 149 7th Street between 2nd and 3rd ave in Brooklyn NY. Hours are between 11am-5pm. If you’re in NY, please stop by!

I think yesterday was one of the longest days of my life as I was up for a total of 20 hours, with much of those hours in meetings. When your body is accustomed to going to sleep at 2am, it’s pretty much near damn impossible to make yourself sleep at 10:30 so you can wake up early to catch the 5:30am train. And even worse was the fact that as soon as we boarded the train at 5:30am, we launched right away into meetings, which continued when we got to DC (we also sat in on the Supreme Court for this case), and then continued still when we caught the train back at 6:10pm 9 hours later. We didn’t stop meeting until the last hour of the train ride and finally celebrated the day with a round of beers.

Shifting your whole sleep schedule is sort of like experiencing jetlag. Even though I got the same amount of sleep as usual, I felt completely tired until about 6:45am and then suddenly like a switch, I was “fine”. The rest of the day went on with peaks and valleys of being alert and groggy, but strangely, on the train ride back, I had more energy. In any case, it is good to be home.

The whole “unit calculation” thing is really working for me. I feel comforted that each “project” has its own designated units and I’m sticking to it (although I am a little behind today). Because packaging cookies is so tedious, you do whatever you can to keep yourself entertained and in my case, it’s figuring out how fast I can do a certain task and then trying to beat that time (yes, I may have officially gone crazy). I now know that I can wrap a single brownie in 12 seconds – my best time was 9 – which theoretically means that I can wrap 300 brownies in an hour. I can put together 12 classic sampler boxes or 9 deluxe boxes in an hour, which means that it will take me about 6.5 hours to fulfill one corporate order of 22 classic and 37 deluxe boxes (this doesn’t include packaging the individual components, but we are doing that ahead of assembling boxes). Mark is doing the same on his side with the baking. 2000 cookies in 5 hours, etc. When we look at the big picture in this manner, it seems manageable. Of course there are things along the way that throw our schedule off, but well, that is life isn’t it? Believe it or not, I’m going on a business trip tomorrow for the day down to DC which means that I am boarding a 5:30am train. Seems crazy that this of all things is thrown into the mix, but at this point? Just bring it on.

The Brooklyn Flea holiday fair today was a success – healthy crowds abounded and our sampler boxes and seasonal cookies sold out in 3 hours. It’s always a nice feeling when Mark gets home with an almost empty container of products. We mail out the first of our big corporate orders tomorrow and with meticulous day to day planning, we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, even if the coming week will be atrociously busy. Miraculously, neither of us are feeling really tired yet, as we’ve made 1:30 am our nightly bedtime to make sure we get in 5 1/2 – 6 hours of sleep. We may need to knock off an hour or two of sleep this week, but we’ll survive. You know, I recall reading a blog from a bakery not unlike our current business, a few months before we even considered setting up shop. The blogger wrote of working 18 hours days, every day in the month of December around the holidays and I remember thinking that was crazy. Well, here we are.

Our chocolate gingersnaps were the cookies that got Martha all excited. We’ll have full packages of them tomorrow at the Brooklyn Flea/Time out NY holiday fair, “Gifted”. We almost forgot that we had holiday events lined up for the next three weekends and it’s putting us over the edge to have to make even more packages of cookies, but ironically will be the first chance Mark will get to sit down and have a moment that’s not spent baking or packing. So it’s all good. I planned on helping the table out tomorrow, but we’ve decided that a better use of my time would be to work. Our mode of operation is to tackle and focus on a few tasks a day, so today, for example, I trimmed 175 strips of 3 inch decorative paper that wraps around our boxes. Whatever it takes…

Instead of sleeping (sleep = 6 units, remember?) I am here. It’s 1:30am. I feel like I’ve been calculating tasks all day, and my great fear is that I will discover that there really isn’t enough hours in the day to accomplish all, but I will just shove those thoughts aside. We have a little bit of help now. Mark is hiring the pastry assistant at the restaurant he bakes at to help cut and scoop cookies a few hours in the morning. His mom is also here for 2 weeks to watch the girls which is a huge help, and a neighbor will stop by a few evenings for the marathon packing madness that will begin sometime at the end of next week.

Some of you may know that for the duration of “Marathon! Cookie! Madness!” we had to shut our etsy shop down. There was just no way we could keep up, but it almost felt like defeat, and to do so around the holidays seemed like absolute insanity. But I have to say, I am finding that I spent so much time managing the etsy shop (emailing people who had questions, relisting orders, sending confirmation emails, obsessing about views) and with that gone, I am rocking my freelance projects and getting things done.

On my way to my meeting today, I got caught in the crosshairs of the epicenter of Christmas – Rockefeller Center. Tourists were milling about with shopping bags, the tree was lighted, people were ice-skating, the windows at Saks were dressed with their traditional holiday displays and Salvation Army bell ringers were singing carols (since when do they sing?). I almost had forgotten that all things Christmas could be fun.

First of all, thank you to everyone who left such nice comments and emails of encouragement. You are the best. It’s like this saying, when it rains, it pours, and I had one of those days today. For some reason, every client that I freelance with have emailed with work this week, which is sort of rare, and it’s making me feel like there’s this cosmic force at work. The events of this week have just been so strange. While I usually have this policy to never turn down work, this week I have, which is unsettling as a freelancer. I also think I may be losing it since I left for an early meeting this morning without my wallet AND my keys, and of course had just emptied the metrocard getting there so I had no way to buy another ride home. In rummaging through my bag in hopes that I would find some change or a stray dollar, I found our new business bank card at the bottom of the bag which I must have thrown in there before the weekend because I distinctly remember it sitting on the shelf in my room for weeks. A few guesses at my pin number and I was saved.

So to get through the next few weeks I broke my day down into units (remember when Hugh Grant did this in About A Boy?) So my days will go as follows: freelance project 1: 8 units, freelance project 2: 4 units, help packaging cookies: 4 units, sleep: 6 units, eat and spend time with kids: 2 units. Ok, I can do this. See you on the other side.