I have to admit. When the blog was down for a week, there was a tiny part of me that was relieved, only because we were having the most busiest week and I was dreading dealing with the feeling of “neglect-a-blog”. I haven’t even been taking any photos lately.

Mark and I have been working like crazy. Mother’s Day season is upon us and we’ve been getting orders through the site like crazy due to coverage in this month’s issue of Real Simple magazine. It feels like Christmas all over again.

I’m continuing with ad agency freelance work and I don’t hate it which still continues to surprise me despite the crazy deadlines and the fact that I moved over to the “dark side”. I go into the office a few times a week for meetings and I guess it’s still sort of novel because I start humming the theme to The Office whenever I enter the building, walk past security and ride the elevator up to the 8th floor. In a month, however, I’m going back to more art world and educational institution work to balance out my part in helping hawk consumer products to the public.

We’re having a day of rest here in the suburbs before another busy week ahead of us. And guess what you guys? We may no longer be the last family we know with a mammoth, old school tube TV. We rented out our apartment for a photoshoot for a day and a half after being approached by a publishing company to use our place as a backdrop for a book and we took that money to buy a new flat screen 40 inch TV. Hooray! We’re not really TV junkies, but we’ve never bought a TV before and I’m irrationally excited about having a new TV in the house. Just in time for the series finale of LOST!

(ps. some of you have been having issues viewing the site and with rss. You might want to clear your cache and then try again. Thanks for letting me know.)

In the middle of that snow storm, right when it started looking like a blizzard out there, Mark trekked out to Manhattan to Martha Stewart to deliver some rose vanilla marshmallow hearts after an “urgent” phone call the day before (stuff for press is always “urgent”). The next day, they were on TV. The episode isn’t online yet, but you can see a photo of them as they were shown on the air (photo 23).

Yeah, those marshmallow hearts (or again, baby butts as Mia calls them)…getting national exposure. They also appeared at a Martha Stewart party thrown by the same editor sometime last year (can’t remember if that was before or after they made their magazine appearance). They’re getting around.

Update: We’ll have a bunch of these little heart packages at the Brooklyn Flea tomorrow. I think we need a sign. Preferably inside a starburst. You know, like “As Seen On TV!”

Do you remember the photoshoot that we did waaaaaaay back in January for a Japanese magazine on decorating for the holidays, American-style? I kind of forgot about it too until Asako, our contact and writer, emailed me not too long ago saying that it was finally out in Japan and in Japanese bookstores here in the states. She came by Gifted on Tuesday to deliver a few copies. We nearly fell off our chairs in amusement when we saw Mia on the cover! Mind you, this photoshoot was taken almost exactly a year ago so this was pre-2009 house improvements (like the wall in the kitchen looks so bare without the wallpaper…and is that a dirty blue sponge that I see on the edge of the kitchen sink? ha!).

We have a 2 page spread that you can see below (and for some reason because of the way I am sitting, I look puffy and pregnant in the photo. No, it’s not just my imagination, my friend Re Jin agreed too when she saw it, gah!). There are a few other American families and their homes featured in the magazine, although I am totally speculating because I can’t read Japanese. I don’t know what they are saying about us here, so if anyone can roughly translate, please do!

Ahhhhh, today is the last day of Gifted. It’s a short 4 hour day too so it sort of feels like a half day at school. I’m leaving shortly to go set up and Mark will join me after he mails 14 more packages out today. After he does a bit of work for the restaurant where he bakes, he’s done for a few days. It’s over (I, on the other hand, will be working Christmas weekend on a last minute design assignment that just came in from a client, hmm). We’ll be spending Christmas morning here with a nice breakfast and present opening and then we’ll drive out to my parents for a retreat to the burbs till Monday. Although we still have a queue of orders that still need to go out next week, we hope to do all the fun Christmas stuff that we haven’t been able to do in the city like see the Rockefeller Center tree and the fancy shop windows.

Oh, one more thing: Some nice blog readers nominated us for the Apartment Therapy 2009 Homies. Sometimes these things feel like popularity contests and I don’t like that aspect of it, but if you so feel inspired, please vote for us.

Hope you guys have a great holiday. Thank you to all for checking in every day, for buying our cookies, for your nice words. See you in a bit.

Soooo….if you tried to get on our W&S site late in the day today you would have noticed that the site was (and still is) down. It’s because of this (it’s now linked to our Foodzie store). It completely crashed our site and our ISP provider just shut us down. We’re on a shared server because frankly, we don’t usually get a huge amount of traffic but they told me that the site was using 5% of the total bandwidth on that particular server – yikes! I heard just how crazy an Urban Daddy feature can be from our friend Nina of BonBonBar who also crashed the Foodzie site when her candy bars were featured, but we didn’t know what to expect. What we didn’t expect was to have our site shot down and get nothing from this coverage, particularly since the article strangely doesn’t mention our name, just the name of the cookie (seems like this is their style). We’re being told that the site won’t go back up until the traffic backs off (what?!?).

We’re strangely zen about this whole fiasco despite all the money that we lost in potential sales today. We didn’t know when we’d be featured so it wasn’t like we could really do anything about it to prepare. But remember, we’re like probably the only people who celebrate and then actually cringe when we get press. For a small company like ours where the work is done primarily by 1, sometimes 2 (me) people, good effective press coverage is really overwhelming and scary. Yeah yeah, you’re thinking “well, that’s a good problem to have blah blah, you really shouldn’t be complaining”, and you’re right, it is. But with the constraints on production due to our particular set up and kitchen situation, good press is also really stressful.

So what now? I don’t know. Instead of freaking out about how to fulfill these orders, we’re sitting on the couch watching Top Chef and twiddling our thumbs. Our site is still down. I guess it is just wait and see.

Oh yeah, one more thing. Lucky Magazine December issue? Haven’t seen it yet…but page 244 (NY shopping edition).

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.

You can find the recipe to this over here. Have a great Labor Day weekend, everybody! Mark will be at the Brooklyn Flea tomorrow and then we’re going to try and recover from our painting week and have some family fun days Sunday and Monday before the first official day of Kindergarten for Mia!

It’s already September 3rd…and it feels like it, weather wise and business wise. Something about that first touch of cool air and the promise of crisp weather compels people to turn to cookies and marshmallows and the business cranks up another notch. Thanks to the feature in Martha Stewart Weddings this summer, we’ve been busy doing favors and have quite a bit more weddings to do in the Fall. For some reason we’ve had a bunch of press interest for the holidays and will appear in a few magazines come October and November. Due to the incompetence of the Post Office and how they failed to deliver a package overnight express when they guaranteed it would be delivered on time, we won’t be appearing in a major food magazine as planned (major bummer), but we did have a photo shoot yesterday with Time Out NY Kids. The girls dressed up in past Halloween costumes and pretended to go trick or treating, which drew quite a few curious stares since we were all dressed like it was supposed to be Fall and Halloween in 80 degree weather. And of course since we needed the kids to be cooperative, Claudine decided to have a major tantrum that morning (of course!) so the shoot involved rewarding the kids with leftover, probably stale candy from last Halloween every ten minutes so that they’d stay happy. Ridiculous. I think most of the photos that were taken had their mouths all puckered up with candy. Nice.

Even though we just entered September, Mark and I have an eye on October already because it’s shaping up to be a killer for us. We’ve got 3 major weekends events that we’re attending (the annual Atlantic Antic Festival, the Chili Festival at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens the next day (!) and Gourmet Magazine’s Marketplace 2 weeks later), as well as some Flea dates thrown in there and wedding favors and blah blah other stuff. I get kinda sick thinking about it, actually. I think I will just mediate on those peaceful North Fork photos when the crazy times get here.

Remember this photo? I took it during our field trip to MoMA with Mia’s class earlier this year. It’s now on the back page of the current issue of Cookie magazine, but I confess I haven’t seen it yet – a few of you actually alerted me about it. The same photo also caught the eye of the MoMA publications department and will be included in a book about the visitor experience at the museum. I admit I’m jaded about a lot of things at this point, but this made me happy.

Page 139 in this issue of Martha Stewart Weddings (sorry for the rather crappy photo which makes the hearts look totally weird – it’s dark outside and raining again. Gee, imagine that).

After months of rescheduling due to illness and other life stuff, I finally got together with Amber of Hey Brooklyn this week to record a podcast interview, the latest in a series of interviews with seriously cool Brooklyn peeps, some of whom are our friends (I mean c’mon…look at that lineup, how great is Brooklyn?). I’d never done an audio interview before and I think I said a lot of “ums” and “you knows”, but overall I think it went well and you can listen to it here. I confess I haven’t listened to all of it because IT IS REALLY WEIRD TO HEAR YOURSELF TALK if you’re not used to it. Amber also laughed at me because I didn’t want my picture taken. What can I say, I am not a camera loving ham like the girls.

Which brings me to these photos – how do they relate to the podcast? Mark wasn’t able to be part of the interview because he was going to be at the kitchen all day, but I really wanted a photo of the both of us posted since I’m trying to make more of an effort to make sure that people know we are a 2-person company and not just a 1 person company. We’ve been getting more requests of photos with the both of us, but if you may recall from our anniversary post, we don’t have any recent shots. But you know what I remembered? Camera self timers, hello!! So I snapped these while Mia was at school, except Claudine kept sneaking herself into the frame. We’d think we’d be safe because she was over on the other side of the room playing with her toys, but then the self timer clock would start ticking down and right before the camera snapped the picture she would suddenly be standing there, right next to us. Every single time. It was both hilarious and creepy, like “what the…how’d she…huh? How’d she get here so fast!”. So if you look at the photo that is posted on HeyBrooklyn.com, you can see Mark’s arm extended out of the frame, and at the other side of his arm is Claudine trying to push herself back in the shot.