New Times Article

The New Times did a article on our store and ran it on their blog page. 1st article...so fun!

http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/jackalope/2014/01/phoenix_twigs_twine_melrose.php

Randoms from January

 Forgot to post some pictures of our store sign on the outside of our building. We are apart of the Melrose District which is a strip of vintage and resale stores all along 7th Ave between Indian School and Camelback. Our address is 626 W Indian School Road.

 Mark is loving that Isabelle is wanting more time with him...and is smiling for the camera now. :)

 I'm not sure what was so funny on the phone they were looking at, but they were having a great time!

 Yikes! look at the size of that hole where the tooth came out of Dylan's mouth!

 Most Wednesdays we have been walking home from school, and they love it.

I have such strong memories of doing that as a kid.

 Fancy dress up time. :)

Cadence came home from school, reached in her pocket and said "look mom, I found all of these special things on the playground today". I took a photo because this so much is who Cadence is. She sees something and loves it because of the color, texture, size or shape. She thinks about what she can do to be creative with it. I so love this about her personality.

Birthdays!

 In January we celebrated Janae's birthday. She had a bunch of friends over and they just hung out and played games at her house, opened gifts and ate donuts for birthday cake!

 And even though Maggie's actual birthday is in December, Mom and Dad give her a little time after the holidays and celebrated her birthday in January. She also had all her school friends over, they had so much fun playing games, opening gifts, eating all kinds of goodies and ended the evening with watching a movie. :)

Family Fun Day

 Every Wednesday the kids get out of school at 1:00 and the afternoon has now been named Family Fun Day. Mark and I always reserve Wednesday afternoons to just doing something fun together as a family. Sometimes its simple and just renting a movie, crawling in our bed and watching it on the laptop and sometimes it's going out and doing something bigger like going to Crackerjax's for rides and golf!

The nice thing is that usually when we go out and do something there isn't lines or crowds. :) The girls drove the little cars while Dylan and Dad drove the Indy Car's. 

 It was a chaos of balls being hit all over, but super fun!

I hope the kids remember us doing these special things together and hope we will be able to continue to do it throughout their childhood.

 

 

New Pets

 In November right after Thanksgiving we bought 4 new Barred Rock baby Chicks. They are soooo cute and Dylan of course loves everything about them. It is our first time with chicks so we are getting the hang of how to take care of them. In about 4 months we will hopefully be getting some eggs!

 And we also got 2 lionhead bunnies...and oh are they so precious. They are 11 weeks old and are so furry cute! The picture above is the drive home, we bought them from a family who had babies and didn't want to keep that many rabbits. Their names are Rose (gray), Cadence picked her name and Cotton which Dylan picked. They are both suppose to be girls, lets hope the family was correct. :)

 They are so sweet and just sit on your lap. 

But if they get on the ground they are fast and tough to catch!

We opened our own store!!

 The month of December was crazy for us. We decided to open our own store!! Crazy that it all came together the way it did. This building had been empty for about 6 months, I actually was a vendor at the store before they closed down. I drive past it every time I take things into our vendor space at Zinnias and one day I decide to call and just find out how much they are asking for it. And we realize that it might just make sense for us to venture out and do something on our own! The only hold back was the actually working of the store hours and hiring a employee wouldn't make sense financially for us. So we called the landlord to tell him that it wouldn't work for us and he told us about another couple that had also looked at the space and had told him the same thing and said "maybe you should talk to each other". I thought to myself that no way would we hit it off. It was about 2 weeks later and I finally called the number and we found ourselves out to breakfast with Roy and Sarah Short and really liking one another :)! And the rest is a journey of us deciding to run our own separate business' but sharing the actual store space and the man hours to run the store. We are so thankful for their friendship and the opportunity to do this together!

 The building was in ok shape but we wanted to make it our own. So a lot of painting was done and new light fixtures. Thankfully we have wonderful dad's who came and helped out! It was a crazy month of trying to get things done at the building, buying enough inventory, doing all the paperwork and celebrating all the holidays.

 Here is how it looked when we were done!

 And this is how it looked the 1st day opened!!

I love everything about us owning our own store. Sure, there are times of stress but I wouldn't give it up for anything. Who knew that this is what we would be doing. What a wonderful crazy journey!

Hiking

 The whole family except for Mark was able to go on a hike together for Grandma Day. 

It was fun for us to all be together.

And this picture is when just our family went on a hike together. We still can't get very far...but I'm thankful that we are able to go all together without having to hold Isabelle. :)