I could eat these ice-cream filled mochi bites all day. The kids love them too. My favorite is green tea, but too bad they are kinda pricey and precious because I can eat 2 boxes of a dozen each all by myself. All in one sitting (sorry, mom, for eating all your daifuku!).

We had a pretty restful weekend without cookies, but came home one day early on Sunday because my mom’s internet was down (yeah, those first few hours without connection was filled with mild panic, I have to admit, and we ran to the nearest Starbuck’s for WiFi first thing in the morning like geeks). But you know what? I actually got a lot of client design work done for a Monday deadline, and we even got our first full 8 hours of sleep in months. Strangely enough, however, we woke up this morning more tired than when we get 6-7 hours of sleep, so that made we weirdly relieved that perhaps I’m not missing anything by sleeping less (stupid logic, right?). So it just goes to prove how much time I waste and how grossly distracted I am when I’m working with my email and browser open. I can be so much more efficient and sleep an extra hour or 2 each night if I didn’t bounce around online. Oh well…

Claudine seems to be making process on her squeamishness for certain sensory-related things. She still refuses to walk on sand or sit directly on sand, but after being placed on a blanket, she slowly warmed up to the idea of getting sand on her hands and feet as she played with her bucket and shovel. Towards the end of our beach stay, she was even rubbing fistfuls of sand onto her legs (maybe she was exfoliating?) and dumping sand on top of her head. So yeah, I think we’re making some progress here. She didn’t really care for the ocean - the waves frightened her, but I wasn’t surprised. I mean, she gets frightened by the sound of the toilet flushing in public bathrooms (something about the echo I guess, that makes it different from the bathroom at home), so I knew she wouldn’t be too interested in going in the water, which was still pretty cold by the way. Mia, on the other hand, couldn’t get enough of the waves. What is it about the beach that makes you so tired? Even with tons of sunscreen and our new beach umbrella (which I LOVE - how did we ever go to the beach without one??), I feel we still got a bit too much sun. You know the feeling I’m talking about, when your skin feels tight and slightly itchy?

In all the flurry of recent activity, I am very late in giving a big thanks to all those nice folks who have featured us in their blogs recently, some with interviews. Here is a very belated thank you list (and I am sorry if I am missing anyone)!

The Storque (etsy’s blog)
The Peach Tree
Baby Anne Quilts
Birdlette
Odette
Chatty Cha
Andrew Thornton
Rabbit Kinney
PS I Love this
I’m missing someone, aren’t I?

Also a big thanks to everyone who bought from our little company the last 2 months. We’re nearing almost 500 items sold on etsy and the Blue Apron has already sold out of all 36 dozen shortbread cookies we delivered in less than a week. Yay! Nice to be able to bring our cookies to our neighborhood, as oddly enough, most of our sales are out of state. We also had the pleasure of donating a large gift box to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens: Passport to Summer event, as part of a raffle and silent auction to benefit the children’s educational programs at the garden. Sooooo…yeah, we’ve been busy, and I have to admit that I am having a hard time focusing on design work, but we’ve managed to steal some nice moments of summertime lounging on the grass. This weekend we are planning on going to the beach (Claudine seems to have conquered her fear of grass, let’s see about the sand) and trying not to think about cookies for 2 days!

We mixed things up a bit tonight and had a picnic dinner with our friends Melissa, Ro and Dory, while listening to some jazz at Celebrate Brooklyn in Prospect Park: pasta salad with tuna, the most yummy, insane roasted artichokes, beans, carrots, blueberries and melons. And wine, yay wine, something we don’t really have very often anymore. The kiddies all danced, the older 2 doing some crazy funny moves, the babies swaying their hips and clapping, and the weather was the kind of cool summer evening where you needed a little sweater. Bedtimes being bedtimes, we left even before the band we came to see came on stage, but the walk home down the hill allowed the most glorious view of the sunset, making the light and everything it touched, a dusty, rosy glow. It made me realize that I’m not outside very often that time of day as we normally are putting the kids to bed, but what a shame. The light…so amazing.

We took the girls to the Chelsea Market today and bought a bounty of vegetables for real cheap. These beets were just 50 cents a pound. Since we’ve been eating so poorly, we decided to make a simple, healthy vegetable soup for dinner with some Rosemary bread we picked up at the little Farmer’s Market a block from our place. Not sure what we’ll do with the beets, but they were hard to pass up at that price…and look how beautiful they are - the colors!

Claudine and Mia loved running around the place and I hadn’t been back to the Market since I freelanced in-house at a firm in that building when I was 7 months pregnant with C. Some shops seemed to have changed hands, but we stopped by my favorite spot, the fish store and had sushi and lobster bisque. Mark and I can’t seem to catch our breath on all the work and orders that are coming in daily, so we’ve made it a point to take some time each day to spend together, all 4 of us. Can’t say that these moments are relaxing - the pair of them have become a terror together!

Glad this day is almost over. What a blah day, in every way. Baking didn’t seem to go right. Either too chewy, too thick, didn’t fit into the bags, too dry. Didn’t get as much work done as I would have hoped, so now I will be up late catching up. We are tired and Mark and I aren’t really eating much, which is why we haven’t been posting recipes - like tonight, I think we will just skip dinner because it’s too much of a bother (but wait, I didn’t have any lunch either, come to think of it). The only bright spot in the day was an end of the year party at Mia’s school this afternoon (where we did eat, so no need to worry). We watched a slideshow of the kids and got to take it home on dvd, which I know Mia will want to watch over and over again. Speaking of the little rascal, she shoved as many cookies, donuts, cupcakes and juice in her mouth as she could in the 2 hour period since she pretty much ran around the grounds unattended and then, of course, had a sugar meltdown on the way home. No pictures of Mia here, because she was too hyper to photograph. I, on the other hand, just want to sit very still and do nothing.

But you know..this goofy pic of C. is making me smile, hehe.

We were sitting out on our neighbor’s stoop the other day when our neighbor Amy appeared holding a bowl of freshly steamed clams. Such an odd thing to bring out so randomly for a snack, but oh my god, they were so good! Plump and sweet with a hint of brininess. I only got to have 1 since the all the neighbor kids gobbled them up, leaving only empty shells lined up on the stoop stairs. It inspired us to get some more for dinner the next day, but as it turned out, the clams we got turned out sandy. Not much you can do when all the sand is inside the clam meat. It certainly put a damper on the clam euphoria we wanted to experience, which means we’ll have to try again, but they at least made for some pretty pictures.

Mia’s done with school for the year, so we have a long summer of trying to entertain the kids all day. Luckily the 2 of them are playing so well together, even if Mia is starting to really boss Claudine around (Claudine doesn’t know any better, however, and she just follows her around saying “okay!”). We are looking forward to a non-Flea week. We still have steady online orders, but it would be nice not to have to pack cookies every night for a change.