Man, did this summer fly by for everybody else as fast as it did for us? It sure feels like we just turned around and BAM - summer is over and September is here! So... where the heck have we been, and what have we been up to?
To start, Janene is nearing the final hours of her pregnancy with our second child - literally. She's officially due on September 10, but we're anticipating an earlier arrival than that (as in, we spent the whole day running errands so that she could walk and maybe stumble over that edge...). This has certainly made for an interesting summer, between getting the tent sale up, opening pallets and pallets of freight (thanks to our fantastic employees, spearheaded by one of our newest, Donna - GREAT job guys!), converting the back room to Christmas preview (which really hasn't been finished yet...), to converting the entire store over to Fall and Halloween - all while she has been sick!
That said, the store looks FANTASTIC - I don't honestly remember a time when we've had as much Fall and Halloween as we have this year, and that doesn't even touch the Thanksgiving that hasn't made it to the floor yet. And it doesn't touch all the stuff that's still on its way in to the store! Check out tomorrow's post for some pics of the store!
At home, we've been working to get the house ready for our newest addition; we painted Ben's room, painted our room, and still have more to do than we can before baby arrives - but she won't know the difference anyway, so I think we're good. The garden has literally exploded - another post will touch on all of that - and it has been seriously awesome to be planting and harvesting and eating our harvest.
We hired two fantastic new gals to work the store - Lynn and Donna, and they are absolutely wonderful. If you haven't met them yet, come on in and say hello!
We were listed as a resource in Country Living Magazine, and as a result our online sales really took off - thanks to all you fantastic new customers! It was a fun experience that we (of course) hope to replicate. The new website didn't make it up in time, in part because Chris' computer died and we had to get that back up and running - that's also one of the (many) reasons that we were a little quiet here on the blog front.
We were also able to bring Janene's childhood piano up from Esther's house, and it's sitting beautifully in our living room - now we get to find someone to tune and repair it - but it's here, and that's a major first step that has given Janene much joy. Additionally, she's been able to tinker in some art - the first in a very long time - and we're all hoping she can do more of that.
All in all, it has been a busy but wonderful summer, even if parts were a bit stressful. And now we're going in to Fall - Ben starts preschool on the 7th of September, we'll have a new child in the mix, the store is looking better than it has in a long time, there's tons of great events going on at Country Village, and life just feels good!
How has YOUR summer been?
