Livin' the Dream in Lima

Hello?? Hello? Anyone still out there? My hubby & I recently got back from a trip away, and spent some time talking about what we wanted to focus on for the year 2018. (Better 3 weeks late, than never, eh?) [This is what we look like, in case you forgot.] I came up with 3 personal goals (unrelated to my business). Yes these are sort of random, but here they are: Play the piano at least 30 minutes a week.  Eliminate ALL bottled salad dressings from our fridge. Just another step in my journey to cook higher quality food. [Only exception: MONICAL'S Sweet & Tart. You know it.] Revive this lil ole' blog of mine.  I'm realizing as I grow older (almost 30, yikes!!) that I really enjoy going back and reading about my life in the years prior. If I am not recording anything, how am I going to re-visit these days 5, 10, 20 years from now?? My memory is not the best and I'm sure it will only go downhill from here. So here we are... over a year si

My, oh my, what a year. I've been feeling all sorts of nostalgic lately as we come up on the one year anniversary of opening the bakery. When I moved to Ohio six short years ago, I never imagined my life would look anything like it does now. I've gone from full-time teacher to "runs a business from home" on the side for fun to "runs a business full-time from home while caring for an infant" to opening a brick-and-mortar bakery (and the toddler now attends daycare).  The progression has been steady and natural, and it is so fascinating to see how God has worked it all out. There were things and situations I didn't understand why  or how  in the moment... but as years have passed I can see what He was doing in those moments. I opened the Sara's Sweets storefront almost one year ago, December 15 to be exact. I had previously been running the business from home, and selling cupcakes at a retail location 2 days a week along with regular orde

Well, we have survived! The first two weeks of bakery life, that is. A lot of people told me I was NUTS to try to open a bakery right before Christmas. (They might have been right... but I'm stubborn, and I do what I want. Ha.) I'd been waiting all year to get this bakery open, so when I received our official license to do business on Monday 12/14, I scrambled to get the doors open Tuesday! Fortunately, we had pretty much moved everything in over the weekend (with the help of my WONDERFUL mom & dad). Just a portion of the boxes we unpacked. My house is EMPTY now! Yummy ingredients, all organized in tubs. First of MANY MANY takeout dinners at the bakery. He thinks he's so helpful. Let me just say... I thought  I knew what I was getting myself into. I had all these plans in place, I knew exactly  how things would function! Bahahaha. I have learned SO much just in the last two weeks. That first week was such a hot mess! You wouldn

It's been a hot minute since I've blogged... life's just a bit chaotic. But life is always chaotic, no? I've coem to learn that in my 27 fine years here on this Earth. I'm learning to embrace the chaos. I'll try to somewhat break this post up into categories, to at least help me organize myself. New Orleans:  My Business Man & I went to New Orleans for a work conference at the beginning of June. (To clarify, it was a work conference for my Business Man. Sadly there are no giant cupcake conferences. That I've discovered. Yet.)  Did you catch that?! We went WITHOUT the James-ter! We LEFT HIM! OVERNIGHT! And he survived. (We did, too.) It was actually so strange to be without our little nugget. And after that first night of sleeping 8 glorious hours, it was pretty fantastic. ;) We had a fun little getaway, but definitely missed our little guy. Highlights of the trip included eating ALL THE FOOD, seeing a random movie in the middle of the