Anyways, we just got back from Vegas last week – it was our annual ABC Kids Expo show! They moved it this year from September to October, and although I loved having the extra break from our crazy summer market schedule – I don’t think the date move was very successful! It was a holiday weekend! Grrrrrr. Regardless, we still had a GREAT market and got to catch up with all our friends – both the designers & our lovely stores!

I took some pics with my iphone. I thought the new iphone was supposed to take better pics? I’m not impressed. But still, here they are… in all their glory!

Set up was a little crazy! We have a 20×20′ booth, and in our crate packing frenzy, somehow we managed to leave HALF our squishy-wood floors back in our storage unit in San Antonio, along with the airpump for our air mattresses! You should have seen Ellyse’s face trying to blow that thing up herself! I had a slight heart-attack with the missing necessities, but thank God for overnight shipping – UPS delivered all our missing goodies the next day, and our booth rocked!

We couldn’t have been happier with the response from our stores on the new Boutique Collection! And they LOVED the NEW PRICE! $389 retail for a 3 piece crib set, baby! More money to buy some BEAUTIFUL wall art to match! Like these amazing banners from Dish & Spoon… (which we also ordered for our store!)

The banner on the far right is my favorite! I ordered one with “Ashlyn Sophia” on it for my daughters new room! The colors were perfect! And I got to meet up with my sweet friend Sherri Blum who is the ARTIST behind some of the most beautiful canvas pieces!

Are you drooling yet? AND, you can check out all of her work HERE, or check out her design firm Jack & Jill Interiors!

More pics to come, so keep checking back!

Ugh, no matter how hard I try, it STILL takes two days to make up for every one day I miss. But I’m back, and we don’t leave for our next market until October – that one is my favorite, vegas… baby. But next week I’ll be back to my daily blogging – I cross my blogger-heart.

I found so many cool new products in New York, here’s a few I think my kiddos would go ga-ga over!

For the creative-kiddos, they can decorate their own playhouse, castle, or pirate ship with these super cool cardboard clubhouses! If you want or NEED one for yourself! Give Nursery Couture a shout – they’d love to order one for you! 210-494-2627

I’m absolutely ordering this for my son’s new room. I’ve been daydreaming about him quietly reading books in it, softly swinging side to side… course, the reality is that it will probably result in a few holes in my wall from him pushing off to see how high he can swing!

And if my daughter gets too jealous… well, they make one for her too!

Now, if I could just find the room in the house to put them….

16 floors of furniture, home decor, rugs, floral, bedding… all at prices well below what you can find online (even though there was minimum orders, but I’m not raining on my parade just yet). It was better than red wine. Better than guacamole & queso. Better than HBO Sunday nights when Sex and the City was no re-runs. It was the shopper’s heaven. I could almost hear the heaven gates open as I walked through the door. Ahhhhhh…… (that’s the angels singing).

Okay, so I’m building a house right now. My dream house. The house that I’ve promised my husband that I’ll live in for more than 3 years. (That’s about how often we’ve moved over the last 8 years.) The entire house is a hacienda-style, minus the saltillo tiles, plus the dark hard wood floors, white walls, and old world feel.

I’m obessing over lines like Aidan Gray, and  Vagabond Vintage. The white washed reclaimed wood. The old world feel, in NEW-unused products. Cracked furniture, grey finishes… LINEN. I really thought I had found a diamond in the rough. A style yet to be discovered. Up until Restoration Hardware took the best selling products from companies like the ones I mentioned above, and either knocked them off, or had them produced under their label (YES, large brands do that sometimes.) And today – my suspicions were confirmed. To my surprise, there was an entire FLOOR of this old-new look. I’d like to say it was upsetting, but honestly, it was AMAZING! I found old suitcases (for $18-$45), white linen upholstered furniture with white wash wood trim (for less than $300), old wine bottles in really cool rusty iron barrels, and lighting fixtures that held wine bottles! Turns out I’m not so original in my new style afterall. Oh well, i guess good taste is contagious.

Speaking of those wine bottles… I know this iphone picture doesn’t do it justice, but the rep for the line (The French Market Collection) had the best idea! She said she had one of these in her home, and every time they finished a bottle for a special occasion – they had the guests (for a wedding, graduation, birthday, etc) sign the bottle, and she hung it on the chandelier. It literally became a permanent scrapbook that served as decor and memories. How awesome is that? Too bad I’d fill it up in 2 weeks. But it’s still a great idea! Lol.

Our final stop of the day was at Golden Stella. The cheap-jewelry haven. There’s no better way to describe this place than rows and rows of beaded craziness. They have every trend setting, color coded, bracelet, necklace, earring, or ring you could ever want. And I swear everything is under $10. Check out my little collection below. (I see a pattern in my buying – turquoise and orange, my wallet in the bottom right corner even matches, hmmm, be a little more daring next time Katy…)

Tomorrow morning is the first day the temps open at market! We have to be there at 9am, ready to sell sell sell! Tomorrow I promise to whip out the iflip and take some video! For those of you who haven’t been to market before, it’s pretty exciting!

Oh! And I found some great new products for the store today. They aren’t on the website yet, but should be arriving at the store in the next few weeks and we will get them online ASAP! We ordered the coolest drying rack, feeding spoons, and bath toys from Boon, and for you super-parents, the coolest little snack organizer from Packin Smart. Plus lots of new Longhorn, Aggie, Baylor Bear, and Texas Tech baby goodies!

So, as promised – and for those of you who have never been to market – here’s a few pics from today’s set up. Amy and I had a record breaking ONE DAY set up! Which means, tomorrow is reserved for a day full of shopping – including a visit to my favorite cheap-y Golden Stella which has all the cute trendy jewelry at DIRT CHEAP MARKET prices! Come to mama!

These pictures were taken with my iphone, so excuse the bad lighting!

Picture #1  is the basically how the booth starts out! We lay down a foam hard wood floor tile (that’s super squishy, and helps with the loooong 9 hr day on our feet). Then we put up our 8′ tall white panels… and get ready to decorate. The oh-so-fabulous white curtains and blue carpet are a gracious gift from America’s Mart, and unfortunately, some booths keep just that! Sure would be nice if we got a little more with the small fortune we pay to exhibit at these things… I’m just sayin’.

IDEA: if I can remember, tomorrow I’ll take pics of bad ass booths and their ghetto counterparts! Walking the isles of market is one of my favorite things to do! And it amazes me every year at the creativity and magnitude of some of these booths.

Picture #2 is the half way point! Once we have the floors down, the walls up, paper hung, and the cribs & table assembled… the decorating begins. (All with only ONE broken nail today, thank you very much…) So that’s it! It’s nothing super glamorous, but it’s cute, and inviting, and has our smiling faces inside! How can you NOT want to place a huge order if you were to shop this booth! (See picture #3) Our Vegas booth is the best! We show almost every bedding set, and have a massive 20×20 booth! That is NOT a one day-er.

So, that’s about all I can muster up tonight. It was a long day. My back is killing me, I’ve stuffeed my face with pizza, poured a BIG glass of “hotel” wine, we just watched “It’s Complicated” in our hotel room, and I’m D-O-N-E.

Luckily, Amy did not require me to bathe her, feed her, or remind her to go potty before bed. Funny how a work trip can turn into a semi-vacation.

Funny thing is, today is June 30th. And tomorrow is July 1st. All day I spent mourning the last day of being 30. Around 5:30pm, one of the girls at work finally said, “Katy, I think your birthday is Friday“….”WHAT?!? No, it’s July 2nd,” I said with confidence. She replied, “and today is June 30th.” Well crap.

Always the optimist… BONUS DAY!

Coincidentally, my first born and I share the same birthday – July 2 – not on purpose, in fact, quiet the opposite. I even tried to have him the day before by purposely scheduling induction on July 1st… My original due date was July 6th, and I knew he could not be born that day b/c that was my brother’s birthday, and July 4th was a holiday (see comments on that below), July 3rd was my sisters birthday, and July 2nd was mine, having the baby late was not an option, and since the birthstone for July was better than June (b/c yes, that does matter)… that left me with July 5th and July 1st. Done. **side note – yes, my siblings and I did the math, my parents anniversary was 10 months before the first week of July, surely it is no coincidence that 3 of my 4 birth siblings were born all within days of eachother.**

“Special Birthdays” – I’m just not one of those moms that would love to have her baby on a birthday, anniversary, holidays… you see, those are my daysstill. I hear mom’s all day say “maybe he/she will be born on my anniversary… on valentines day… on Christmas…” Oh, those poor Christmas babies. I know for a fact if it was my kids I’d just hold aside some of Santa’s gifts. They would for sure get screwed. No question. And what fun is in getting all your gifts one day of the entire year? No thank you.

Here’s the deal, my kids get every other freakin’ day from me, 100%. Is it so terrible to want to keep those few days I have every year to myself? Can’t I claim them my own? Where I get to do anything I want? Is it so awful that on Mother’s day every year all I reeeaaally want is a day at the spa AWAY from everything that made me a mother? I love my family dearly, but I appreciate those days that are mine. They are my sanity. My rock.

We all know that our husbands milk their days. We should be able to milk ours. When else do you get to use the excuse, “because it’s my birthday“!?! Days where my husband has to do the bathing of the kids, washing of the dishes, everything…. 

But alas, all the obsessive planning in the world can’t control everything. 24 hours of labor later (which ended in a C-section), there we were… sharing birthdays… forever. I love him just as much as I would have had he been born on July 1st like I planned… but for the rest of my life… I know share the one day that was supposed to be my own. This is so not fair.

Meet Cade Jackson. Birthday boy “officially” on Friday. Cade was born 7lbs, 2oz, and sometime around 7:00ish. Had I written it in my baby book, I could probably be more specific. (Mom of the Year, yes I know.) And  he was absolutely perfect. Even from day 1 Cade was a multi-tasker, Cade was the first scheduled induction our University Hospital had ever done, he traveled to his first market in New York at barely 5 weeks old, and he was a pro at nursing in his mother’s lap while I was on the phone with a store, and emailing orders at the same time. I train them early in this casa.

 Here’s a picture from our first market together at ENK Children’s Club. Turns out a cute little baby is one of the best marketing tactics ever.

And then he went to Vegas at only 7 weeks old for the ABC Kids Expo to help launch the first of our bedding collections – the Classic Collection, and the set that started it all, the Cade 4 piece Bedding Set. DISCLAIMER – I just realized I have the same green shirt on in both pictures. My boobies were so BIG from breastfeeding, I remember it being one of the only shirts that fit! Ha! Pretty sure those skirts had elastic on them too!

Also, I can’t believe how ghetto our booth was back then! It’s so funny to look back at pictures from the beginning… it really tells a story about how it all came together, doesn’t it! Next week I’ll blog about all the markets we’ve done, and learning how to maximize our booth space! Maybe even put pictures of all our booths – so you can see how we’ve progressed too!

Happy Birthday Cade. Five years ago you came into my life, and I have never loved anything more. I am so proud of you, and I look forward to all the adventures to come – and celebrating our birthdays together for many many years!