Hi, there!

How has your summer been?  In Tennessee, it’s almost over if you have school kids, and it won’t end until late October if you don’t.  It’s weird like that here.  Kids go back to school in early August while the rest of us are wearing flip flops and blasting the a/c until time to decorate for Thanksgiving.  This will be our 6th fall here, and I am going in prepared to enjoy fall through the changing angle of the sun rather than crisp breezes like in the Pacific Northwest.  That’s okay, though.  Tennessee makes up for it by allowing us to enjoy our screened-in porch and cozy yard from November through May until the heat is oppressive again.  Then it’s time for daytime movies and evenings at the pool.

Maybe I’ll just tell you the highlights of the summer, in no particular order, to avoid this being really long.

1. We are suffering from a fruit-fly invasion at the moment.  It started yesterday with a moldy peach at the bottom of the fruit bowl and blossomed into a full-fledged invasion.  This has happened two other times in the past five years, both times when we were expecting company.  My normal remedy of drowning them in apple-cider vinegar is not working this time, because they keep escaping from my paper funnels.  The other option is putting a moldy peach in the bottom of a jar and using the funnel or saran-wrap lid, but since the moldy fruit already went down the garbage disposal, I don’t have time to re-moldify more fruit before I start losing my mind from these little hovering little gnat-sized demons.
2. This is a before picture of a kitchen we’re remodeling.

This kitchen is going to be so cool!  Instead of the open soffits for displaying ivy, there is going to be a second layer of cabinets with seeded-glass fronts.  And, the homeowner is getting vintage factory lights for her breakfast nook.  We love to make our kitchens different from everyone else’s by using authentic vintage pieces, so we buy vintage pieces whenever possible and save them for the right kitchen.  In this case, she happened to like the ones in our kitchen the best, so we agreed to switch them out for her.  And, their claim to fame is that they’ll be featured in our kitchen in American Farmhouse Style magazine this fall!

3.  I am cutting way back on design work and instead probably just designing the kitchens/laundry rooms/etc that Dave is working on, and maybe other rooms for the people we are already doing kitchens for.  Now that my kids are starting 1st, 3rd, and 5th grades, school is going to be a little longer each day than before (though I’m trying to teach them as much at the same time as possible), so I’ll be busy doing that.  We already ordered some really fun stuff for school this year and are excited about it.  If you happen to be interested in what homeschool curriculum we’re using, leave a comment and I’ll tell you.  We always piece a mix of it together and this year we are trying a lot of new things.

4.  Our house is featured in American Farmhouse Style magazine coming out THIS MONTH!!!  I think it’s August 22, and I don’t know if that means it hits newsstands that day or what.  We found out we were going to be in it in January, worked like crazy-people to finish renovations for our May 1 photo shoot, survived that, and have been trying to move back into our house ever since.  That’s because magazines are actually pretend.  We had to stash a lot of our regular stuff (mail, homeschool materials, laundry, food, random crap) in order to make our house lovely and perfect for the magazine, and now we’re still looking for those things.  Anyway, please buy the magazine when it comes out!  It’s a little piece of Holly Thompson Homes history and we are hoping it’ll be a really popular issue.  They sell it at grocery stores, Target, Lowe’s, Barnes and Noble, etc.  Extra points to anyone who emails the editor and tells her our feature is da bomb.

5. I just figured out how to stream music from Amazon Prime and it has solved all my problems.  “Problems” meaning how to adapt to this post-CD music world where my music has been stored digitally in dozens of places and all lost, leaving me with a few scratched CDs.  Now I just have to figure out how to get it playing on speakers in the house rather than just on my laptop.  If you want to know about my other problems, see below.

6. My teeny tots are all growed up!  Here they are:

All three of them have birthdays in the fall, so they’re about to be 11, 9, and 7.  They look all cute and innocent but they’re actually hoarders and piglets.  We are working on them not trashing our house.  Working hard.  Who knew that it was that hard not to take off your socks and leave them in the living room or leave a trail of crumbs and wrappers and shoes wherever you walk?

They also recently started eating more food and now our fridge is bare a day or two after getting groceries.  Personally, I enjoy having a bare fridge because it’s so clean and beautiful in there (my fridge growing up was absolutely crammed with questionable stuff). Plus it’s the only place in the house I have complete control of when it comes to tidiness.  But my husband doesn’t enjoy a bare fridge.  This has been an ongoing issue in our marriage.  As soon as the fridge is bare and beautiful, I start getting complaints from the peanut gallery about having no food.  So I go to the store and clutter it up.  But now the bare fridge isn’t my fault.  I go grocery shopping and then it is bare soon after anyway because of our pet piglets (pictured above).

7.  We had our 13th wedding anniversary and Hubs just turned 37!  I never thought we would be this old. It’s a little confusing, though, because people just a few years older than us always think we’re their “kids’ age”.  I know we should appreciate this, but there is a good kind of looking young and a bad kind.  The good kind of “you look young” means the same as “you look good.” We don’t get that kind.  We get the “you look young” that means they think we qualify for free kids’ meals at Chick-fil-A Family Night.

I think that’s all for now!  My kids are now hovering and asking for snacks and if they can watch the Dick Van Dyke show.  Plus laundry is waiting to be washed and fruit flies are waiting to be drowned.  Bye, guys!