July 2023 Newsletter

Hello friends,

It is HOT out, summer is in full swing, but in our neck of the woods (or desert I mean), summer break is winding down, and we are getting ready for 1st grade in the Barron household. This summer has flown by, and I am feeling sad about it. I work a regular day job and ran out of PTO (Paid Time Off) so my kid has been sitting at home bored every day while I work. But on a positive note, boredom leads to creativity, and Nev has announced his career aspirations - he wants to be an ARTIST! 🎉🥹We did start the summer off on a good note, getting visits from family and celebrating his 6th birthday, but a couple days after my mom went back home to California, we lost our 13-year-old Sheltie dog Bandit. We just came up on the one-month mark since we lost him.

Bandit, in his prime and at his floofiest, age nearly 2 years - March 2012 - We will love and miss him forever!

Grief is strange. You have highs and lows, and some days you feel like you will be okay, then others you feel the complete opposite. You’re flooded with memories that you thought were long-gone, and sometimes you’re impulsive, doing or saying things you normally wouldn’t.

So this summer, my son experienced loss, and learned how to process that loss, and also some joy. We coincidentally got a new puppy named Gus Gus a week after losing our Bandit. This month has been dedicated mostly to grieving, cooking comfort meals, trying to be present in the moment, cleaning and organizing, and just trying to find a new “normal”. Our cats are out of their element, and even our daily visitor “Egg” did not join the dogs for breakfast or dinner for a whole month. Birds grieve too.

So to clear our heads and the energy in our home, we started off with my son’s bedroom since I do NOT want to wait until he is in school for that. If I learned anything about kindergarten last year, it’s that once the school year starts, it is hectic, and ain’t nobody got time for, well, anything. Time is our most precious resource, and no one wants to spend it organizing, but it is a MUST, especially for those of us who are neurodivergent in any way. Scroll on for some pictures, and more in-depth info to come (once I get my blog up and running again).

Which brings me to another important topic! You may have noticed that my website and online shop are down. I sadly made the decision to pull the plug on it last week. So for the time being, this newsletter is the most effective way to stay in touch. For those reaching out to me and saying to never give up on my dreams, thank you for your kind words and support. It means the world to me. But just to be clear, I never said I was giving up :)

I mentioned in a recent IG post that my inner dialogue was one of “I have failed”, but I meant that to say I am very aware of what my inner critic tells me after years of subtle conditioning- being told since kindergarten, that I cannot have a career in art. Taking my site down is simply just a pivot, it’s a business decision to allow time and space for a rebrand before I come back even stronger. Think along the lines of Barbie. Mattel saw years of declines in Barbie sales, the whole brand was basically in the toilet, and thanks to the movie and a $100million marketing budget, the whole world is drinking the Barbie kool-aid. Now I don’t have that kind of marketing budget. In fact I have a marketing budget of zero lol, so mine will mostly be organic. All this to say…I’m not going anywhere, I am simply in the process of rebranding and relaunching and working on my pattern collections. To continue to keep my website running as is would have been a bad business decision, and I run this mofo like the CEO and boss that I am! I hope you will stay in touch - we got lots of new stuff brewing!