This week has been busy once again. Renovations are still underway as my husband has been repainting any wall that doesn’t look completely perfect. He’s been patching up any and all holes he can find! If our home wasn’t on the market for sale, I would consider these to be ‘make work projects’ but since we want the very best possible chance of selling this year, everything he does, he does to perfection to the best of his ability, which is about as close to perfect as one can get.

At this very moment he has unplugged the main computer to change out the outlets and outlet covers! I’m typing in word on my netbook and shall copy and paste into the blog once he’s done. Our entire upstairs has been in complete upheaval for the week and I can only thank God that we haven’t had a call for a showing in the midst of it all. LOL It’s not often you hope NOT to get any calls for showings. I believe by the end of the weekend our home may just possibly be back in order, dare I say it? Next, hubby is moving onto the outside work once he’s finished touching things up here. He’ll be rebuilding the back steps next!

And, sure enough before I even had a chance to finish this post (it’s taken me 24 hours lol), we did indeed get asked to not show the house once, but twice! We’ve been able to put the one showing on hold until next week, hopefully we can do the same with the other. They want to see it tomorrow afternoon but we just got in from taking the kids to the city to get the eldest kids their passports and we are SO not ready to have a showing by tomorrow afternoon! lol We DO want to sell this house, but we’re not miracle workers either so hopefully they don’t mind waiting another day or two. Dh will be away at local schools all day tomorrow speaking on behalf of the RCMP (he’s an auxiliary police officer) which means he’ll be leaving here by 7 am and there will be NO time for finishing the last bit of work he has to do before then. We just have to trust that it will all work out.

Speaking of our trip to the city, here’s a few photos from today I thought I’d share. While dh was in getting the passports with the eldest two kids, I took the younger three for a walk around the city & harbour. It’s truly beautiful.

I will miss our Pacific coast when we do finally move so I take LOTS of photos.

Julia, making lots of her own memories with her little camera:

Shaylah on a bench, we were listening to a street performer:

Elsa on the same bench, and yes, she has crazy hair. It was ‘extra’ crazy due to the ocean wind/breeze but it seems no matter what we do with it, this is her hair’s favorite ‘look’. lol If she’s ok with it, I’m ok with it. 😉
One day I will share more about Elsa but I first I need to be confident that “she” is ok with my sharing.

Along our walk, we saw a duck. A very handsome duck. I didn’t realize they care to be in the ocean water! You really do learn something new every day.

In business news, this week we’ve got a couple of new-’er’ pad designs.

We were asked to consider doing other EnduraPad sizes so we‘ve been playing around a bit.. At LilyPadLanding tonight our first few made their debut, the EnduraPad Teeny Ultimate.

We’ve stocked LOTS of  “short” (just 8 inches!) Regular Comfort Contour Pads this week. We’ve widened the backing on these to give more coverage then before, more like our 9.5 inch regular comfort contour pads while keeping the ‘body’ size of the “short” regular comfort contour just 8 inches. When snapped around these are still quite a bit narrower then our regular comfort contour pads.
We’ve stocked singles and doubles to give you the opportunity to try them out! We’ve also stocked some with an EXTRA layer, a layer of zorb! The zorb pads all have the extra part lines of stitching through the center of the pads so that you know which pads are which in your stash.

This week Julia is determined to have you try our facial mitts. As I share in her listings, she is now making the facial mitts and Elsa and Shaylah are doing the cotton balls. Normally the facial mitts stock in sets of two, but Julia felt maybe some would like to just try out ONE first and see how they like it so this time we’ve stocked some single facial mitts. Below is a photo of a ‘natural beauty’ modeled by my 18 year old. She has much nicer hands then I. 😉

Speaking of my eldest daughter…
As one who sews I always dreamed my kids would love to sew as well, especially my eldest. Well, she did buy a sewing machine quite a few years ago, I believe she was about 12 at the time and I had high hopes. That was short lived though as she realized fabric wasn’t really her thing (*insert MAJOR shock from this sewing mama here*) and once I got over my initial sadness, I knew it was ok. I don’t want to force my kids to love my passions but I did hope that somehow she’d decide that she did want to at least be a part of the business, in her own way.

For the last while, she has been doing a large majority of the cutting of our inner and backing fabrics. This has helped a lot as the business has grown but this still isn’t truly “her” thing. As things have gotten even busier, and I find myself spending as much time doing all the other business things as I do sewing, I’ve been finding myself being pulled much too thin. Some days I spend 11 hours at this between sewing, listing items for sale, packaging etc. and it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to fit the other important things in, mainly our homeschooling. We seem to fit in the reading, writing and arithmetic but there is SO much more to learning then just the 3r’s. I found I was getting quite frustrated. I love my business, but I also love my children and they deserve more then ‘quicky’ schooling. lol

So I began looking for other ways that Alesia could become more involved in the business. She began doing emails to customers quite a while ago and that has been going well. Once I finished packaging orders, she would then take all the order forms and email each customer letting them know their order has been shipped. She said she really liked the ‘web’ type work and I already knew that web work is not my ‘forte’, so I wondered what else she could take over. The next step was to print off all the orders, and their address labels. So now that has been going very well too! Yay! Well she had been bugging me for some time, after watching me spend hours upon hours packaging orders each week that she was SURE she could do this job too BUT, for me it’s simply too risky so far to just hand it right over. If an order mistake is made in the packaging, the wrong order is shipped out. I was not ready to hand this over. However, I realized she COULD put the orders together and then once they were all sorted, I could then package them. So that’s been her next step in the biz. This is what I sit down to now when I package orders:

All the orders placed into our neat zip bags with their order pages, AND the business cards! What a HUGE  help! It was so nice the other night to be in the cabin sewing late into the evening, knowing that while I sewed, orders were being all organized and put together! What a blessings! PLUS, the best part is that Alesia says she LOVES this work! Yay! My hope is to keep moving her into more ‘admin/web’ type of work. One of her little sisters REALLY wants to do the cutting but I’m not equipping a 10 year old with a rotary cutter no matter how much she tries to convince me that she won’t hurt herself. LOL

I’m glad we’ve been able to make the business work for our family. My goal has always been to keep this as a true family business but I really was beginning to wonder how long I’d be able to keep up the pace as things continue to grow. To be able to move family members into positions that they excel at, is a great thing!

Last but not least, I thought I’d share our custom orders from this week.

5 UltiMini Pads

A “kaleidoscope” of pads

A postpartum package

Heavy wrap wing pads

Ultimate’s, Ultimate II’s and UltiMini’s

Well I do believe I’ve typed enough for one night! I seriously need to become more regular about posting so I don’t have so much to share all at once! Thank you if you’ve made it through! lol

All our newest stock goes “live” in the shop at 11 am PST, 2 pm EST Friday- http://hyenacart.com/HomesteadEmporium

We hope to see you then!