It’s not like we don’t enjoy our Fake!CountryHouse in the burbs, but there really is nothing like sleeping in your own bed with your own sheets and your own pillow. The girls are figuring this out too. They keep complaining that the other keeps hogging the blankets during the night in the queen bed they share when they’re over at my parents’ house. I can hear them at night, “Claudine!! Stop taking all the blankets away! Erghhh!”. Bwahaha. Siblings.

Now that we’re finally home, we can take a few steps towards getting ready for the new year and take a step back to reflect all that was 2010 (and a lot has happened this year). Usually I have this intense need to clean and organize the house before the new year hits, like some sort of superstitious ritual. I feel unsettled for the new year until I do, but this year I’m looking at that ridiculous pile of receipts and paperwork, closing my eyes and running far away. Who wants to spend the last few days of the year dealing with that mess? Truth is, I’m burnt out. The aftermath of holiday madness hasn’t turned out to be relaxing after all, but rather stressful and back to 10 hour work days. This is how the freelance work falls.

But look, I’m not going to complain because one thing that I’ve been thinking about changing in our future that has lead to other big important decisions that I’ll tell you about later is that I want to take more vacations in the new year. The fact that in a few days I’ll be writing my very last preschool tuition check in like, EVER, has also enabled this decision. Do you know what this means? It means that we will be free of shelling out private college-like tuition every year for preschool. Hooray for public education and yay for more vacations! So yes yes! Work hard means play later! Now, where’s more coffee??

Mark, on the other hand, has been taking this break from baking like it’s serious business. Dude’s been sleeping 8-10 hours a night. I don’t know if it’s actually possible to catch up on sleep, but he’s trying.

Ya’ll ever wonder what your children will look like when they get older? Well, I don’t have to anymore because I know. She’s going to look like this. No wig this time, but a mere pair of fake eyelashes combined with this mature smile make her look like she’s a shrunken down mini middle aged person. Never mind that this is sort of creepy in that “Toddlers & Tiaras” sort of way (and please keep any disapproving comments to yourself. We’re just having fun here, bored out of our minds from being snowed in and besides, this was my dad’s idea, so is okay). She really reminds me of Marisa Berenson’s character in I Am Love in this photo. Something about her expression and those lashes. (Oh, and the future also calls for braces. All her new teeth are coming in crooked. Oh, man.)

So the latest snow report is this: not much has changed in the way of (un)plowed streets in the outer boroughs. It’s still a big mess over there and the snow response is quickly becoming one big fail for the city so we haven’t attempted to drive in yet because we can’t. 40 some hours later and much of Brooklyn is undriveable. And here’s the tricky dilemma – even when the streets get plowed, there will be nowhere to park the car because the snow is piled up by the curb which will only get worse when the plows push more snow up there. The cars that are parked aren’t moving because they’re buried and the few parking garages in our neighborhood are full. See where this is going? Huh. WHERE IN THE HELL ARE WE GOING TO PUT OUR CAR??

And so this is how we end Day 3 of the Great Christmas Blizzard of 2010. With little hope of getting back soon. I hope our cat doesn’t think that we abandoned him. I hope the Christmas tree is still standing upright. But good thing I gave the girls some clothes for Christmas so that they don’t have to wear the same clothes over and over again. Oh, and good thing I, uh, went to the mall right before the snowstorm on Sunday to take advantage of the after Christmas sales. Have you been to the sales, people? Insane bargains. I bought 9 articles of clothing for me and the girls from J Crew, Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters and dropped a “mere” $200 (it’s relative, isn’t it?) for all 9 articles of clothing (do I need another striped shirt? Apparently, yes!). So…we have clothes. Entertainment to chase cabin fever away? Not so much.

Daaayum. It’s like the city has never dealt with snow before. Like we’re on the West Coast or something and not capable of handling a blizzard. Like we’re living out some scenes from a Will Smith/Dennis Quaid/Morgan Freeman world is ending sort of Hollywood movie. See that sunrise in the first photo? They say that’s a snow day sunrise. Sure, 20 something inches came down, but c’mon New York, I know you’re better than this. What the hell happened? We’re not even in the city to revel in the collective snowpocalypse atmosphere, but still at my parents’ house in the burbs. It’s just quiet here. With nothing to do. Really. Actually, the roads around here are all plowed and we’ve shoveled the car out, but it’s the city that’s the problem. Heard Brooklyn is still a mess – 8pm and the roads are still unsalted and unplowed. Cars are abandoned in the middle of the streets, everything is closed, a garage roof a block away from our house has caved in creating closed roads and more havoc. Craziness. I don’t remember the last time the city was crippled by snow, but as with any natural and unnatural calamities, the internets is going crazy with photos, tweets, “eyewitness” news reports and general oversaturation of information. Oh, technology. But how else would I know staying out in the burbs is probably a smart idea? This storm is going down in history with the Great Double Tornado of 2010, the Blizzard of 2006, the Blackout of 2004, the Hurricane of 1985, etc. etc.

So what do you do when you’re snowed in?
You make pie. Apple pie with caramelized apple cider. YUM.

You give the kids some leftover dough to play with, but your mom has more fun sculpting things than the kids.

You let the kids discover vintage cartoons on TV. You know, the ones that we grew up watching: Scooby Doo, The Flintstones, Tom & Jerry.

The kids play with their new American Girl dolls that they got for Christmas while you somehow feel defeated by succumbing to American capitalism at its worst. But then you can’t help but be a little too enthusiastic about the gray wool coat that you bought for the dolls and you realize that it’s a lot like your new gray winter coat that you’re wearing these days (oh snap). Oh btw, meet Ivy (Mia’s doll) and Angie (Claudine’s doll).

And when all else fails, your dad pulls out his stash of wigs and eyelashes leftover from his wig store including the ones that are custom for Diana Ross, and much to the delight of the kids, proceeds to dress them up like drag queens. Not your idea, his.

And when Claudine casts the eyelashes away, your mom picks them up from the floor and uses them as hair for her leftover pie dough sculptures.

True story.

It’s become sort of a tradition. To go to Ippudo after the end of our holiday season and celebrate with a bowl of ramen and pork buns. Place gets packed though and there was a line out the door when they opened right at 11. There are lots of other ramen places in the city and now 2 near our house too, but we prefer this place and it’s large and kid-friendly. They gave the girls princess bowls to eat noodles out of. This is one classy joint.

So hey, listen up. It appears that some people thought we had a booth at the Union Square Holiday Market this year because our friend Re Jin from Bailey Doesn’t Bark ordered our shortbread cookies to include in one of her holiday gift sets. Her booth is well branded. There’s a huge sign with the company name over the booth. We do not sell porcelain tableware. And yet 3 very small packages of cookies scattered throughout the booth display was enough to make some people think it was our booth. It didn’t happen just one time. It happened a lot and some people even told Re Jin that they loved “the blog”. Really? I mean, RJ is also Korean…but…really? It became an inside joke. She’d text me nearly every time it happened. She even overheard someone say, “wow, Whimsy & Spice really expanded”. We are both just completely confused by this. 3 little packages of cookies, people, amid a sea of Bailey Doesn’t Bark wares. If it was, indeed our booth, wouldn’t we have more cookies to sell than 3 sample display packages? At some point, Re Jin didn’t even bother correcting people anymore. She just smiled and said “thanks” when people came up to her to let her know how much they loved the blog.

Sorry RJ, that people mistook your booth for ours. And uh, thanks to anybody who thought that RJ, who is younger (and prettier!) than I am, was me.

Well, it’s not exactly the end, but it’s the end of 12 hours kitchen shifts, packaging and shipping so it’s the end for us as far as we’re concerned. I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S OVER and that we survived. I may or may not have been close to tears the first day we set up at the Flea and Mark may or may not have been close to tears a few times when orders just got too out of control. There were a few moments where we seriously questioned whether it was physically possible or if we had enough hours in the day to get everything done. We need a shirt to commemorate the fact that we survived the 2010 holiday season. All the small Brooklyn food producers do. As crazy as our schedule was, we weren’t alone. It’s kind of nice that way and I guess that’s what’s so cool about the whole scene. People are pretty supportive of one another. Two people we want to thank in particular are Annie Gallo, who was first a blog reader/neighbor and now a friend. Annie jumped in when Mark needed help the last minute at the kitchen and with her help, baked 4000 cookies in an 11 hour shift to fulfill all our wholesale orders and to restock the Flea the next day. The next person we need to thank is Mark’s mom. We haven’t been around to see the kids at all this last week and Lani helped make sure they had plenty of attention, food and quality Grandma time.

It’s quiet now. I’m home with Claudine while Mia’s at school. It’s just me and her, puttering around the house getting the house back in order, cleaning, putting things away, wrapping gifts and placing them under the tree. I’m also getting some freelance work done. It feels pretty mellow and Claudine makes an excellent companion. She’s good for hugs and bursts of silliness. Plus I like to rub her head.

I have to be honest with you. I don’t *really* enjoy being behind the table at Fleas and Markets. Because of the way things have gone for us, however, I’ve been at the Flea a lot more than originally planned – 5 of the first 6 days – so that Mark can be at the kitchen to bake. It’s been stressful trying to juggle schedules because of my own client work, so on the slower weekdays I’ve been bringing my computer in and working while manning the table. I’m getting used to the whole selling thing by now, but I’m a terrible sales person, I think. This is related to that whole “I feel pushy promoting cookies” sort of thing that I wrote a few posts back. I feel uncomfortable accepting money from friends who come visit and buy from us. I tend to give discounts and round down if people are buying multiple items because I feel “bad” that they’re spending so much money (I know I know, but if you bought from us while I’m at the table, lucky you). Here was one particularly ridiculous transaction yesterday: a woman who I am acquainted with online, but who I have never met before bought a whole bunch of cookies. She’s bought from us in the past and is familiar with our brand so she isn’t a stranger. Her total came out to $49. She handed me $60. I handed her $20 back (Sorry Mark, I know you would never do that, which is why you’re better at this than I am). She shoved $5 back into my hand. Ridiculous!

Since I hardly ever sell at the Flea, it’s been interesting to see all the different types of customers pass throughout the day, and although selling isn’t really something I’m super comfortable doing, it’s been sort of fun (sometimes). There are a few awkward moments, however, when you can tell a customer thinks the prices are too expensive. Sometimes they’ll put the package down and leave right away, but other times they’ll linger around. I like to imagine that without saying any words, there’s this whole silent dialogue that goes on between us and it goes something like this.

Customer: “How much for these package of cookies”.
Me: “Those are $8″.

Silence.

Customer (thinking to themselves): $8? For one package of cookies? That is really expensive.
Me (thinking to myself): They’re handmade. By us. With love. And hard work. And this week, with blood, sweat and tears.

Customer (thinking): I can get 2 packages of cookies for the price of 1 at the grocery store.
Me (thinking to myself): Hmm…would I spend $8 on a package of cookies? Probably not. Maybe I should take a buck off. No no, stay firm. They’re competitively priced with other artisanal food brands. We don’t make a huge profit from a package of cookies especially since our prices haven’t changed in 3 years. We’re not the Keebler elves here. Ok, stay firm.

Customer (fidgets with package. Puts it down. Picks it back up, thinks to herself): Well, this could be a unique New York gift. I don’t want to show up at the in-laws with a package of cookies from Pepperidge Farms.

Me (thinking): Have you even read that NY times article about Brooklyn, the brand?? Brooklyn is hot! And it even says Brooklyn on the label. Sure it’s in really small type, but you won’t find those cookies in your bodega in Houston.

Customer (out loud): “How much are they again?”
Me: “$8. Um, but I’ll give you 2 for $15.”

I’m actually sitting here typing this at the Flea now, my last stint for the season. The weekend was crazy hectic, but the weekdays have been much more quiet. The food vendors have been stuck in the back room of the main ground floor. See that lovely, golden, majestic room in that photo? Yeah, that’s not us. We’re in a concrete, drafty room with bad overhead lighting that we’ve nicknamed “The Meat Locker” the first day because it was so ungodly cold in there due to the door being open from vendors loading in. Do you want to know how cold it was? It was so cold, the battery on my laptop wouldn’t charge. It froze my battery, people, it froze it! Later in the week, the room became known as the “Fallout Shelter”. No windows, no light, no wifi, spotty cell service. Day 6 and all the vendors are starting to look like tired zombies.

9 days of markets is really long for us. We weren’t sure how we were going to pull it off when we signed on and now we know that stocking and restocking the market everyday is challenging, while juggling wholesale orders and getting packages out the door. It’s been a long string of late nights and running back and forth around Brooklyn, from kitchen to Flea, from store to store. 3 days left. Mark is taking the last 2 shifts. Compared to everything that’s been going on the last 3 weeks, it’ll be a breeze sitting down for 8 hours the last 2 days. It’s almost over.

We’re still here, just really busy. If we can get through the next few days with the last big push on Monday or Tuesday, we’re golden. We really can’t reflect on anything quite yet, but this year’s Holiday!Cookie!Madness! was worse than the previous 2. We’ve had to adjust our schedules nearly every day to get things done. I’m not exactly sure how things got so out of control, but we already know of a few things that we’re going to do differently next year. There’s that chance that I’ll have a total mental relapse and forget how hellish things were and commit to stuff that I wanted to eliminate next year, but we’ll deal with that then.

We’re so accustomed to this non-stop crazy pace that it’s going to feel strange to go back to a more “normal” schedule. At this point we don’t even remember what normal is! But sometimes the human body is amazing and it pulls through when you really need it. We’ve managed to stay awake and alert on 4 hours of sleep a night and miraculously, we haven’t gotten sick even though there are a few different nasty bugs going around the neighborhood.

But truer words couldn’t be said when I say, “we’re so over this”.

Hope you’re having a great weekend.

Many of you have commented on how detailed Claudine’s drawings are for a 3 (now 4) year old. Can you tell which of my girls drew these pictures? Sometimes I can’t. Sometimes Mia can’t either. She actually picked up Claudine’s drawing of the cat and asked out loud “is this my drawing?”

Claudine has an unbelievable knack for copying drawings for someone her age. This is how she learned how to draw people by the time she was 2 – by copying Mia’s drawings almost exactly (sometimes to the annoyance of Mia). She also has this weird ability to write her letters in flip mirror image. I’ve seen her write whole words this way, without hesitation and without thinking. I don’t know what it means, if anything, but it’s interesting to watch.

By the way…Mia’s drawings are on top, and Claudine’s copies of Mia’s drawings are below.

Our (relatively) mild weather break just ended. It’s really cold out there and there’s even a dusting of snow on the ground right now. I walked the kids to school in the morning without a hat or gloves and by the time I went to pick them up, the temps had dropped. It was a reflection of how the day went. Monday. An unexpected crazy day of getting slammed and now we’re underwater.

I remember the first ever negative comment I received on the blog. It was right around this time of year and it was our first holiday season. Someone posted that they were tired of my “daily” complaining. The thing is, I don’t even think I was complaining (and believe me, I know how to complain), but that was a particularly hard year because we didn’t have things streamlined like we do today and we were dealing with these insane custom hotel gift orders for their corporate clients. Big names like Amazon, NBC, Gucci, Target and IKEA. We were only in business 7 months at that point and we decided to close our store to customers that holiday season. I was also working on 3 separate design projects and going on business trips in the middle of all this madness. We were both going out of our minds. Complain or not, I was writing exactly what I felt and there’s a reason for that. Every year I look back to see how our holiday season fared. It’s so hard to know exactly what you’re going to get slammed with, but it’s been really useful to go back and read what weeks and days were the worst, how much sleep we were getting, how we did at holiday markets and how we were dealing through all of it. We try to learn from this documentation and try to make things better for the next holiday season. It’s also a measure of how our business does from year to year.

From going back and reading last year’s posts, we already know that this year is much more crazy. We’re sort of going out of our minds like the first year. A lot more orders, a lot more stores ordering to stock up for the busy shopping days, a lot more markets and a lot less sleep. I’ll be manning the table at Gifted more days than originally planned and so I plan to bring my computer and work on client work that just came through in the last 2 days during down times at the market. Talk about multitasking. But for the first time in like, ever, we’ll have someone sit behind the table a few times during our 9 day stay. Be nice to her, ok?

There is one thing that we already know we’ll do differently for next year. We plan on cooking a lot of dinners during Thanksgiving break and freezing whole meals just like we did before Mia was born. Food and eating has sort of been an issue this time around. There’s just no time to cook or shop and we’ve been barely getting by with what we can scrape together. Most days Mark and I will just forget to eat until dinner. And sleep? Not much you can do about that unless more hours can be magically added to the day. But you know what sucks? When it’s 2:30am and you’re both so very tired and falling into bed and the warm blankets feel so nice and being able to close your eyes is the best feeling in the world. Just as you feel like you are drifting off you hear dry heaving and hacking and then….the gross sounds of the cat throwing up. UGH. And you get out of bed and it’s cold and the sudden bright lights that you have to turn on to find the location of the puke is really harsh and…yeah. Can’t even tell you how many times that’s happened.

Yesterday was the first of our 10 holiday market days and while I don’t usually go with Mark to set up for markets, we left the kids with a babysitter at 7:30am and left together in the torrential, apocalyptic style rain over the Manhattan Bridge and into 18th street. The BUST Magazine Craftacular expanded to 2 floors this year and while I’m not sure that made a positive or negative impact on the fair, we had the same spot as last year right by the entryway so it was hard for us to tell. I wanted to come so that we could figure out the display for posters and tea towels.

First of all the fair is LONG. 10 hours. But it’s the kind of event where people line up early to get in at 10am, even in a torrential downpour (at least it wasn’t cold, but it was windy), and there are still lines down the block to get in as late as noon. Don’t ask me why. My brain can’t comprehend why anyone would want to stand outside in the pouring rain or the frigid cold as was the case last year to get into a craft fair, but this is why the Craftacular is a good one for vendors. It has a pricier booth fee, but this is our best event in terms of sales and we even blew last year out of the water with the addition of tea towels and prints. It makes all those long hours worth it and it was certainly a nice end to a crazy week. Mark turned to me and said, “well, at least I’m not in the kitchen”. It was a nice change for him.

Every fair is a learning experience and you try to make adjustments in inventory or display to make the next ones better. Because of the way our week went, we really only had 1 day to get products baked for the fair. We could have had a few more packages of the cookies that sold out around 4pm, but Mark did the best he could and we had a fully stocked table. We always bring 2 containers of hot beverages – this year was Mark’s hot spiced chai which was perfect for the rainy weather. It sold out in 2 hours. As a business owner, you can’t help but think that you’d have the potential of making lots more money if we had chai to last the whole fair, but it’s a time and money issue: no time to make more chai and those insulated containers are expensive.

It’s sort of amazing that we have still haven’t hired any help through all of this. We are still doing every single thing ourselves -from baking to packing to delivering wholesale orders and pushing 30 packages to the local post office in 2 granny carts. I can’t decide if that makes us stupid or smart. Stupid because we nearly kill ourselves in the process of getting orders out and fairs done. Stupid because we’ve had to turn down a few large corporate gift orders, but smart, perhaps, because our business has been profitable since day 1. But remember how we lost our kitchen space in the summer and how Mark has been bouncing back and forth between a few different kitchens and doing all these crazy overnight baking shifts?

We feel extremely lucky that we found a large industrial kitchen in Sunset Park right in time for holiday madness. The rental fee is really very reasonable and he’s been in the kitchen every single day for a flat weekly fee. Aside from that, the best thing about the kitchen is that it’s very well equipped for bakers and probably the best equipped kitchen he’s ever worked in. We’re talking a large 8 ft cookie sheeter and a cookie scooper. Do you know what this means?? This is huge! It means that Mark doesn’t have to roll endless sheets of dough by hand. It means that he doesn’t have to scoop cookies with a small cookie scooper for hours and hours. A machine – a large $80,000 machine – does it for him now. The other great thing about the kitchen is that the people who run it are really nice. It also means that it’s possible that Mark can take on an intern from a cooking school now that he has the space to do that in. We were never able to bring on another person because of shared kitchen space issues. Sometimes we think it’s too good to be true because it completely saved us this holiday season. There is no way we could have done it otherwise.

So this is how we’re getting it done by ourselves. We have another tough week ahead, but after that, after Sunday, we can breathe a little easier though we won’t be officially done until 7pm on Dec 23rd. Next up is our 9 day stay at the Brooklyn Flea’s Gifted Market which opens Wednesday. And now…back to work.