I don’t know if there is a more magical time in NY than Fall (cue Ella Fitzgerald singing “Autumn in New York”). Seriously folks, if you’re ever planning on a visit here, do it in the Fall. It’s magical! And I can’t think of a more charming place to be during the weeks ramping up to Halloween than our neighborhood in Brooklyn. People really love to dress up their brownstones and homes, and just today I passed a house-transformation in progress a few blocks away from us that is famous for turning their brownstone into a haunted house. We even have a Halloween House Tour map that plots all the decorated houses in the hood and our very own Halloween Parade that is a ruckus of marching bands and costumes. But aside from all the festivities held at the Botanic Gardens, Prospect Park and other local venues, it’s just a whole lot of fun kicking through the leaves and walking around. You might just see a giant purple spider scaling the exterior of a limestone building or blinking eyeballs nestled in the bushes. I’ve been desperately trying to find time to walk around with my camera to capture my favorite season but haven’t been able to thus far. I see some of the trees in the playground across the street from me starting to look bare. I’m trying to hold onto Fall as long as I can.

…but I missed you today. OK, I did have half a cup at 10:30am, but since I had been up since 6am for an 11 hour meeting, it was rather late considering I was awake for 4 and a half uncaffeinated hours. Horrors! I think I’ve mentioned on here that I wasn’t a coffee drinker until 2001 when I started working in this one particular office. I didn’t even drink coffee the whole 5 years I was living in the Northwest, nor any of the years that I went to college or grad school. Say wha?? How did I…what the… I know. Unthinkable, right? Especially living in Washington and Oregon, hello!

But here’s a funny thing. Coffee machines have gotten really fancy since the last office I worked at had their little Mr. Coffee maker in the kitchen which started my addiction to coffee in the first place. I remember when I started a month long on-site freelance gig at Oxygen Media, I waddled over to the kitchen with my mug on the first day (I was 7 months pregnant with Claudine) only to stop in my tracks when I was faced with a choice of 3 massively huge coffee makers. No no, these were machines. Huge. With lots and lots of buttons. Like what was I supposed to do with these things? I stood there for about a minute, staring, then turned around and walked back to my desk, coffee-less. I think I went coffee-less for a few days before asking someone to show me how to use the big scary machines. Why so long, you ask? I don’t know. Maybe because people would then know I was a freelancer and the new person around the office, or they’d judge me because I was about to drink a cup of coffee, but was clearly hugely pregnant. You know, stupid stuff that was just compounded by pregnancy brain.

When I left the house this morning without any coffee, I figured that the facilities I was headed to would be catered with breakfast. I was right, but resting on the kitchenette counter was a coffee maker…but where was the pot with freshly brewed coffee? *@%#& I don’t freaking know how to use this single serve coffee maker!

As you know, I keep a very late bedtime of around 2am and then wake up around 7:30 or 8 each morning. Having to leave the house so early this morning required some major adjusting of my schedule and it was disorienting to walk to the subway in the dark. When I got off the train at Bryant Park 35 minutes later the sun was just starting to rise. I had 10 minutes to spare, so I sat in the park for little while (oh, by the way guys, they are already starting to set up all the booths for the Bryant Park Holiday Market, gah! It’s not even Halloween yet!). I had my camera with me but I didn’t take pictures. I just liked sitting there in that dusty light watching the city emerge from darkness. Even at that hour, the streets and sidewalks were buzzing with people on their way to work. It’s not that I particularly love midtown, but that right there, at that moment in the middle of all that morning activity, made me feel alive. I rather enjoyed the whole ritual of “going to work”. As long as it’s only once in a while.

It’s been raining a lot and once again, we’re coming to an end of another month. I don’t know what it is about Fall, which is my favorite season, but it’s also the season that seems to fly by the fastest. Why is that? There’s so much anticipation once September rolls around, but before you can catch your breath, the trees start looking a little more bare and you’re wrapping that scarf more snugly around your neck.

A few things: thanks for all the encouragement about our plans to open a store. Nothing’s concrete yet, of course, but we’ll spend the next year mulling it over before we have to start making any serious moves in a year if we really want to make it happen. A few of you have mentioned a cookbook. Why yes, that would be wonderful and even before any idea of the business existed, Mark and I thought it made a lot of sense to make a cookbook together. But whoa whoawhoa, let’s slow down a little. Writing a Cookbook is a lot of work! We need to focus right now on business. Speaking of…we were in DailyCandy again today. If you were with us on this ride from the very beginning, then you might recall that our DailyCandy feature, which ran a mere 5 weeks after we opened shop back in April, helped propel the business along in those early days (lord, am I talking about “the old days” already??). Nice to be back on DailyCandy again, even if it did give me a brief heart attack when I saw just how many people were on the site as soon as I got that email in my inbox. It’s already a crazy busy week for Mark. Sometimes timing can play cruel tricks and every wholesale account will come knocking on our door. It’s one of those weeks and Mark’s doing it all himself as I have my own deadline crunch. We’re drinking lots of coffee.

As for trying to live by the “one day at a time” rule, I’m trying. It’s very strange, though, this feeling that I have today. I feel like there’s some kind of change in the air. I don’t know how to explain it really, but I have this weird sense that the freelance life as I’ve known it for the last 10 years is about to change next year, like I’m closing in on an end of an era. Something just feels…different.

I’ve learned a lot about myself during my month off. I know that I need to work for my own sanity and self esteem. I can easily rise to the challenge of juggling multiple projects at once with gusto and tireless energy, however when I’m not working, I can be just plain lazy and unmotivated. I’m finally working again on a few projects and coupled with the upcoming holiday season I should be crazy busy until Christmas. Remember how stressful and sleep deprived last year’s Holiday!Cookie!Madness! was? Looks like we’re headed down that road again. This, however, hasn’t provided any relief to my anxiety as it normally does and I’m wondering if, for the first time I would be better served with a stable staff job somewhere that would bring in a steady paycheck with benefits. With both kids able to go to school full time next September, it seems like it could be financially possible to work on staff even though it wouldn’t be my first choice. The cost of full time childcare negated it before. There are other questions though…will I still be able to run W&S if I did work a staff job? Sure, there are many months where I work full time freelancing, but I don’t have a commute (which cannot be underestimated!), I can switch gears during the course of a day when I need to and I can do most of my work at night.

For the first time, Mark and I pretty much decided a few days ago that we need to have our own kitchen and open up a store. I’ve been really ambivalent about it and the thought of being married to a store with expensive overhead, debt and a huge initial investment makes my stomach churn. But where else is there to go from here? We certainly can’t continue like this for much longer. It’s sort of remarkable that we’ve been able to do every aspect of the business ourselves to date without any outside help at all. This includes volumes of cookies and orders, manning tables at fleas and festivals, designing, packaging, marketing, customer service, waiting at the post office with packages and delivering orders all over the city – all while holding other freelance jobs and taking care of 2 kids. It can get crazy. Why not get help, why do you do this, you say? Simply because we have to. They say that it often takes a business a few years to turn profit. We’ve been turning a profit practically from day 1 because of financial necessity. We’ve been resourceful and lucky in keeping our overhead low and we’ve worked hard. But even I can see that this can’t continue forever.

So the timeline for the store is 2 years when Claudine enters Kindergarten. 2 years is a long time. But it’s also not. Anything can happen, really. It can go both ways. Maybe Mark will throw his hands up in the air and want to quit. Maybe I’ll really warm up to the idea of a store and I’ll charge ahead with enthusiasm enticed by visions of the children hanging out behind the bakery counter after school. I don’t know. The food industry is not easy. Having a store will not necessarily make our life easier or make us more money, but at least we have some sort of plan, however vague it may be at this point.

Until then? I need a swift crash course on taking things one day at a time. It’s a harsh reality when you need to ask yourself “are you happy?” and you can’t really answer the question honestly to yourself because you are afraid of the truth. There are joyful moments as you can see from posts here, but lately I feel like we are largely moving on autopilot. Clearly we have some things to work on.

…we didn’t need to. Old Navy sponsored an “urban” pumpkin patch and brought it to us. We didn’t end up going pumpkin picking this year due to various work things and inclement weather, so I was happy and curious to go to this event held in the cobblestoned streets of the Meat Packing District, right across the street from Pastis (and yes, I was jealous of every brunch goer there that morning). Held under huge tents because of the drizzle, the pumpkin patch was quirky and cheeky in an Old Navy way (lots of creepy store mannequins in the patch and a “petting zoo” of costumed mannequin dogs). With a $5 per family entrance fee with proceeds donated to the Food Bank of New York City, you could eat as much candy, chocolate, popcorn, cotton candy (the kids’ first taste of the stuff), apples, pears and drinks as you wanted (I totally fueled my craving for Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and shoved some in my bag for later too). And the pumpkins? Free. The girls painted theirs up in thick layers of paint which would have taken forever to dry so we left ours there and took 2 new ones to decorate back home. See those all red ones? Claudine had a Richard Dreyfuss moment and got into a red groove when she painted 2 all red, monochromatic pumpkins. All in all, a really fun event in a charming downtown location, waaay too much sugar, and all for a good cause.

I haven’t talked business in a while, but we still make cookies, remember? Here are some recent party and wedding favors we did. We still have a few more Fall and Winter favor orders to go but all in all it was an excellent first official wedding season for us.

So we’re flipping dates on the Flea this weekend, not necessarily because of the crappy forecast tomorrow, but because there is a certain guest as the Brownstoner guys are calling her – “She Who Must Not Be Named” – who will be visiting the Flea this Sunday in Dumbo instead of Saturday to shoot some footage for her show. Can you guess who it is?

Thanks to all who shared cherished memories of moments with their grandparents. I enjoyed reading them particularly since I didn’t have a grandfather growing up. He was still alive when I was a kid, but aside from geographic distances, he was not involved in my mom’s family since the time they were kids. The memories the girls are building with my dad seem especially poignant because I can’t seem to extract too many of my own childhood memories with him, so when I’m older and my parents have passed, these moments of him and the girls are the memories that I will choose to hold on to.

Okay, that was a little morbid. Moving on to superficial things…I was trying to grow out Claudine’s bangs because she has such fine hair and could probably get away with not having bangs (and see how cute she is with slicked back hair in those photos from the post a few days ago)? But she won’t keep a clip in her hair to keep it out of her face as it’s growing out. It’s almost reached her eyes. Should I just cut her bangs again?

And Mia…has been coming home with bruises on her legs and scratches on her face*. She’s a physically tough kid, a bit of a tomboy (though she sure is getting to know her girly side this year), and can play rough with the boys, but I have to admit that I’ve been at a loss on how to handle the roughness. School is going great this year, but it has been a bit of a social transition coming from a 7 student preschool (with 2-3 teachers) to a 22 student classroom with 1 teacher. Cliques are naturally forming and with that comes a bit of rejection, confusion and disappointment. Mia is not one to let things get to her, however. If she gets rejected by a group of girls at the playground she’ll either move on or be persistent and annoying until they play with her (sometimes intervention is necessary). She let’s things roll off her back and doesn’t get emotional in these situations. I guess a thick skin bodes well for later in life because up until Kindergarten started, I sort of forgot how much it can suck being a kid dealing with all these social pressures, discrimination or being outcast based on what you’re wearing or because you are different. Man, I forgot how much that sucks. I really wasn’t prepared to deal with that so soon, but yesterday reminded me that there are going to be many many years of comforting rejected egos, intermediating awkward social situations, dishing out pep talks and consoling broken hearts, and secretly cursing all the mean girls and boys to yourself.

(*note: I want to add, that yes, this is being addressed at school and no, it wasn’t malicious. No need to worry )

Long before BiterGate a reader left a comment on an old post criticizing the brightly painted red toenails on the girls. I don’t mind (constructive) criticism, but when someone questions the values that I’m teaching the girls about beauty and self esteem and snarks that I probably let them wear makeup too, well, I’d rather you ask about why I let the girls have painted toes than assume the worst. You see, aside from the fact that I don’t think it’s a big deal, there is a story behind it (isn’t there always?). It’s true that the girls have had more pedicures in nail salons than I have in my lifetime (I’ve only ever had 4), but it started with my dad, of all people.

One summer when we were living with my parents while renovations were being done to our apartment, my dad would often take Mia, who was then 18 months old, to the property of stores that my parents own. There was a playground around back and in the next little strip adjacent to my parents’ was a nail salon. The women who worked there would often let Mia play in the salon while my dad took care of business around the property. The following summer, Mia started getting little pedicures with flowers whenever she would come by. She’d toddle over to the rows of bottles and pick out a color, bring it over to the table, get her nails done and then sit with the other women at the drying station, chatting and striking up conversations. When Claudine was old enough last summer, my dad would take both the girls out and she too would get her nails painted. It was their little ritual whenever we went over to my parents’ for the weekend – to go out to the stores, play in the playground, get pedicures and then get treated to huge cups of frozen yogurt at the new yogurt place on their strip. Who am I to argue with this? But more significant to me is the fact that my dad initiated this bonding ritual. This is a man who didn’t allow my mom and I to wear colored nail polish when I was growing up. We could only wear clear. I don’t know when he decided that pink nails were ok on a 2 year old, much less on us, but this seemingly innocent and fairly insignificant act for me symbolized a little triumph – for feminism, for being able to make your own choices on what to wear without being dictated by a man, for the fact that sometimes, people can change in little ways.

I think you know what the moral of this story is. Speaking of mean, seems like there’s a lot of chatter recently about mean comments being posted in blog land. Which is why I love this.

See these shoes? Could be kinda tacky with the wrong outfit, right? (or maybe you think they’re just tacky, lol). I forgot I had these funny leopard ballet flats I bought years ago, so I wore them one day last week with slim gray cords, a hoodie and a blazer. Shopping in your own closet…cheap fixes when you’re trying not to spend money. These black boots I did purchase recently, but they were cheap(ish) and so not the kind of shoes I normally wear (and quite honestly I still don’t really know what I’m supposed to wear with them other than really skinny jeans and that would sort of makes me feel like I was trying too hard, but at what I don’t know). I had every intention of returning them, but I kept them and have worn them out a few times and they are surprisingly comfortable. Goes to show you, you never know. This total impulse buy was a reminder that it’s a good thing to step out of your comfort zone once in awhile. We all get into ruts. I’m in another one now, but sometimes something as simple as putting on something different to wear shakes things up. Makes you walk differently. I think I am just bored these days. Life is generally fine, things are fine, but nothing is really exciting, you know? So I’ve taken to getting out and walking around the city by myself when I have the opportunity to get away, which is a little more often these days given my current schedule. This may just be a distraction, but it reminds me of the days when I used to walk all over the city, pre-kids, pre-busines, pre-everything-my-life-is-now.

(* Oh, and for those waiting for an email from me, I lost my emails at this address one day and I know a few of you wrote with questions. I don’t have your address anymore. I am sorry. )

Guys, it’s cold. I’m not talking “here I am and I’m gonna wimp out ’cause it’s not summer anymore”. No. It’s cold for real. I know that it’s just a temporary cold snap, but the past 4 days really jolted everyone into premature winter reality with coats, boots, scarves and mittens. Like, we’re not ready for this quite just yet. Plus there is something weird going on with our furnace, so we have no heat (trying to remain calm and hoping that it won’t cost an arm and a leg to fix). But despite the gloomy skies and wet cold rain, we had a pretty fun weekend. We had intended on going pumpkin picking on saturday, but after seeing the forecast we bagged on that idea and asked the girls what they wanted to do instead. Mia picked the Met Museum. We said Ok. We bundled up and headed to the Upper East Side but we never made it to the museum because we came across a new (to us, or maybe it is new as it seemed sparkling clean, bathrooms and all) playground right next to the museum. The rain seemed to hold off so we spent the day at the playground and then took a leisurely stroll through Central Park. The leaves are only just starting to turn, so it was a bit of a disconnect to be so cold and still see green lawns and trees.

The drizzle and wind returned today which put a bit of a damper on the annual Harvest Fair in our neighborhood held nearby us, but the girls actually got a chance to go on a pony ride this time since there was no ridiculous line to wait on. Faces were painted, and we all crowded into the Old Stone House for crafts and music. I can tell that Mia has a new musical crush, from the likes not seen since the days of Randy Kaplan, a former neighborhood singer/songwriter who Mia used to have a huge crush on when she was 2 and whose music and stage show was the only kid act I actually enjoyed (Randy’s CD, Five Cent Piece is Miss C’s current favorite). Now that Randy has moved on from the East Coast, she seems to have found her next local obsession in Jon Samson and his band. Like Randy, he’s very musically talented, highly entertaining, funny, and improv-skilled. If you’re in NYC, check out their upcoming shows. I predict this new CD will be on heavy rotation (along with Michael Jackson – still!) around the house.