The Bailey Chronicles

This week has been so hectic, but we are in the middle of so many awesome new adventures all at once!! I feel so incredibly blessed these last couple of years with all of the new life changes. Tomorrow we close on our brand new house! We have everything packed and ready to go, so first thing in the morning we will be loading it all into the moving truck and headed off to our new home for final walk and closing. It will be a LONG day, but we are so stoked! We have been talking about buying a house for a couple years now, and have worked super hard to stick to a tight budget to pay off anything and everything on our credit to make this happen. It's nice to close that chapter and open a new one, right in time for Bailey's 10 month birthday! Let me know if you need the address, I'll try to remember to shoot out an e-mail to everyone.

Bree and I have been working like crazy on cakes, cakes and more cakes! I really really love this job. I believe I have found my calling. It's the best creative outlet that I have found for my adult life so far, and makes me feel like I am being true to myself. A nice mixture of sales and art, two things that I am excellent at. We had two really big sculpture projects these last couple of weeks that have added to the chaos of the move, but were really a great learning experience for me. One was a big awesome suitcase for a client's mom's 70th birthday party. She is a wedding coordinator for her church and wants to use us as her exclusive cake vendor! The other was a book cake that I got to do a lot of the art work for and even deliver. Design wise it seemed simple, but it was definitely a challenge and a really big learning experience from start to finish. The cool thing about that cake's delivery is that it was done at a Brazilian Restaurant and both the staff and customers were really excited about it! Several of them quizzed me about doing cakes for some of their upcoming celebrations, so we may have some additional orders just off that delivery! I still have a lot to learn, and I need to practice covering cakes and sculptures because Bree usually handles that part, which is definitely the tricky part, but so far has been wonderful!

Today we did our first bridal show out in Rockwall and it couldn't have gone better! We were intimidated at first at the cake competitions' booths and displays, but it turns out that the brides and vendors couldn't stop talking about how tasty our samples were. In fact the competition kept hearing clients talk about how good ours tasted that they had to come over and try for themselves! That is really cool, because taste is definitely important! We then realized by the comments and peaked interest, that the brides were typically in our age group and seemed naturally drawn to our style cakes vs. the competition so even though we were small we made a big impact. If we can close enough of our brides from the show, then we have a shot of opening up our store by this next wedding season. We walked away feeling like we did an excellent job and that if anything we were way over prepared, which is a great feeling.

Today John also started at his new store. This store is definitely going to be a challenge for him, but I know he can do it! If he can get this store turned around through out the holiday season, then he will definitely be offered a gm position in 2010 so it's a really good opportunity! His first day was exhausting, but he felt really good about his experience. We have a lot of good things in the works, it's all very exciting!