2 posts in the same week?

I know...I know... I don't blog in like fo-evah and then I post twice in the same week? It's not a slow week or anything. Just felt like staying in touch.

Actually, I wanted to share our 12 Weeks of Christmas sale with you. Check out our HomeStudio blog. We are having some really great sales from now until Christmas.

Need Christmas present ideas? ;)

Here's our best special... blog about our pendants and we'll send you a free pendant and ball chain. Your choice of pendant! Just send us the link & the pendant you want. Then we'll send it out to you.

Also check out our Facebook fan page at facebook.com/homestudiofans. When we get to 200 fans, we'll have a contest for a free pedant.

Hi!

Just a little blog post to say hi and that we're still alive and kickin! What's there to say but life is busy as always. Keeping up with the Homestudio sales with 3 great high school kids helping us package. Working the Jus biz, which is doing amazing out here.

Mark's the seminary principal...with 100 kids who meet in our building! I'm the CTR5 teacher (again) with 10 cuties and Kim, the amazing girl I team teach with.

Sienna loves preschool. Haven loves 1st grade. She's in a music class every Wed and a sculpture class every Monday.
Life is beautiful (but a little cooler here). Hope to post again before the holidays...but can't promise that with the Scrabble orders that keep coming in.

Love you all! Miss all our desert friends.

We're still here...really

I know...it's been so long since I've blogged. Life is good, busy, fun, and always exciting. I've been putting off blogging because I have so many photos to sort through and organize. Then I realized that doesn't matter. So here I am. Blogging.

We love our new neighborhood. There are many kids for our girls to play with. It's a quiet and safe area. We're right next to a little tiny park appropriately named "Bunny Park" with many little bunnies visiting in the evening. The neighbors like to walk their dogs to this park and sometimes the kids come there to play. It's just grass and a couple benches, but it's a nice little park.

This summer has had many fun adventures. First was our first trade show. Mark & I went to Las Vegas in June to show our pendant line. It was for wholesale accounts only, to the trade. The other vendors were also showing their hand crafted items. I was really impressed with the integrity and beauty of the other products being shown. We were blessed with many new wholesale accounts around the country. The week we returned, we moved.


Moving is always an adventure. The last move seemed so much easier than this one. Probably since we had to get everything in one trip...made it seem harder. (But we really made it in two trips.) Now we are settling in nicely. Things are unpacked and we've been rearranging until it feels more like home. It's getting there. The nice part is that there's a loft for the studio so we aren't set up in the living room like before. The girls had their own rooms, but missed each other at night, so are back to sharing a room. This made space for a play room across the hall from their room. The guest room downstairs is great for extra storage from the studio. My favorite part of the house is the view from the back yard. In stead of looking at a tan brick wall, we have a view of the hills of Carlsbad and San Marcos. It was great on the 4th of July. We sat on the deck off the master to watch the fireworks. My second favorite part of the house is opening the windows for a nice afternoon breeze. I LOVE that! ♥


Haven's school is very close. I believe it takes about 3 minutes to get there. Her class is small with about 20 kids. She's so excited to start first grade on Monday. Next to her school is the community swimming pool. We had swimming lessons this summer from a great new friend. The girls learned a lot and had tons of fun. Next to the pool and the school is the Peacock Park (officially called Leo Carrillo Ranch). Leo Carrillo is an old movie star (side kick of the Cisco Kid) who lived here in the early 1900's. We've gone there many times to see all the peacocks that live there - must be about 80 of them.

Sienna is excited to start preschool next week. There is a lady in the ward who has taught preschool in her home for 15 years, taught K & 1st grade for about 10 years as well. She'll go there 3 days a week in the morning.

Mark & I have been busy with HomeStudio. We are so amazed at how this business keeps growing. We've sold over 30,000 pendants in the past year. One of our newest accounts is in Downtown Disney! Gotta love that! This summer we have been just swamped with orders. Thankfully we have had some of the girls in the ward come help us package so we could get caught up. Two have gone off to school for the year. We have one sweet girl who will stay on with us this year for an internship.

We have had some fun summer trips. For Haven's birthday we went to Sea World. It had been years since either Mark or I had been. Boy that was fun. We've explored different beaches and driven through lots of different areas around here to learn more about the area. We've found many of the great shopping areas and some good restaurants. Last week we celebrated the end of summer at Disneyland. We took my mom who hadn't been since the 80's.

It's nice living closer to some of our family. We've been able to visit with cousins we haven't seen in years. It was nice having Grandma & Grandpa come visit from Oregon. Two of Mark's sisters were able to visit with us as well as some of the cousins.

Our new ward is great. We are meeting a lot of new, super nice people. This is the place we are meant to be right now. We're looking forward to starting a new phase of our life here.

It's official!

For the past couple years we have had a goal to move to San Diego. There are many reasons for this - the hot desert summers, beach, closer to the city, beach, more options for the girls, beach...

We have made several trips down there to check out different areas and different neighborhoods. With a lot of research and a ton of prayer, we decided to focus on Carlsbad. Last weekend, we left the girls with Grandma and went house hunting. With prayers asking to help us find the perfect house, in a great neighborhood, with a great school, we discovered Rancho Carrillo.

Several things I wanted with this move; a great school for the girls, nice community, close to shopping, near the beach - within 10-20 minutes. The girls wanted a house with stairs...

We were lead to this beautiful house right next to a tiny park. It felt right. So we called the number on the sign and made an appointment to see it the next day. We continued to drive around the neighborhood, found a couple other homes and made appointments to view them. We also called on some homes we found on craigslist. That night we went to the hotel exhausted but excited about the appointments for the next day.

(See the tiny park?)

We ended up looking at 3 homes. One was too small but had a great yard. (This started to feel like House Hunters on HGTV!) The second was a beautiful new home with a great yard but the neighborhood was a little rowdy for us. The third was the one in Rancho Carrillo. I'm glad that was the last one because it was the perfect house for us.

This is the view from the back yard. It's even better from the deck off the master. I just love the green.

This is the back of the house from the street below.

About a mile from the house is this great park, Leo Carrillo Park with all these peacocks. It's beautiful. It's near the community pool as well. The elementary school is awesome (from what I've read). The stores are very close (Taco Bell and a new Target are super close too!). And it's only 10 minutes from the beach! We welcome visitors too! :)



Now, we have a house to pack up and move out by June 13. We'll be moving most of our stuff down there the week before, on June 6 and then come back to finish up the last week of school.

Exciting but sad. After living here in the desert for almost 10 years, we have made some really great friends. Thank goodness for facebook! We can still keep in touch. Grandma lives in Palm Desert, so we'll come up to visit her often. Plus, my hair stylist is here!

My dream of living by the beach again is coming true. I am so grateful for the way the Lord blesses us.

It's a Busy Life

Life has been really busy this last month. Places to go, people to see, balancing family life with work. We've had our 3rd busiest month with the pendant business since we started one year ago (May 5th). We've made & shipped over 2,400 pendants this month of April and it's not over yet! November was our biggest month, followed by December. November and December we had help. Now, we are doing this alone. However, we've figured out ways to improve our pendant quality while working quicker and smarter. Also, right now, we have more wholesale business than ever. That's the great thing because they reorder!

My challenge has been to balance my work time with the family, as I mentioned in an earlier post.

Here's what we've been up to. The girls love to dress up. One day they came out of their room dressed up for ice skating.

The funniest thing was watching the little one do exactly what her older sister was doing. So very cute!

We went on a mini vacation to Carlsbad. Here are the girls being silly in the hotel while having a snack.

We stayed at the lovely Lake San Marcos Resort. What a beautiful view we had. Just wish there weren't so many mosquitos.

On Easter Sunday, we went to Orange County. We had a great visit. However, our oldest one had a little stomach bug and had to stay home from church. We got to decorate eggs in the back yard, which was fun.

The little one was "catching bugs" with the fish net.

One of the shops who carries our pendants is in Encinitas. This was the basis of our trip - to visit her and see how the pendants were doing for her. The shop is filled with all kinds of stuff. We realized how tough it is to find a necklace the size of a postage stamp in a shop filled with goodies. But we found them - right on the front counter.

The weekend we went to Carlsbad was the weekend of General Conference. It was great to listen to the messages on the iphone in the car. I just love technology! We enjoyed listening to confrence & I am looking forward to taking President Monson's advice and to study the talks when the new Ensign comes out next month.

We went to the pier at Oceanside. This pelican was resting there too.

The girls had a great time in the sand and water.

After all the traveling and fun, it's nice to snuggle on the sofa while watching a little TV.

One weekend, two of my sisters-in-law and our niece came down to visit. The girls had a lot of fun playing with their cousin's makeup. She's such a great sport, isn't she?

Another way I try to have quality family time is to have fun meals once in a while. So I purchased this great heart shaped waffle maker. I've only used it a few times. Just yesterday even. The little one was asking daddy if he wanted some "marfles" and then she called them "momfuls"! Isn't that cute?

It was my birthday last month. We celebrated by taking the family to dinner at Babe's at the River in Rancho Mirage.

Check out the cheese on that quesadilla!

Once you take out the cookies (delicious chocolate chip cookies!) - out of the little pig, it oinks at you! There's a little motion sensor in it that goes off everytime you reach in to get a cookie. The girls just LOVED that!

We've had a great couple months. Busy but filled with some good memories.

Weekends with Grandma

It's nice to live near Grandma. She will take the girls for the weekend once in a while. Here's what the girls do when they visit:

Sky Valley Ranch to jump on the trampoline & ride horses.



Only the oldest wanted to ride the horse.





Loving each other...


Reading together...


Going to the Living Desert to see the animals...

...and the butterflies.

They love spending time at Grandma's house!