Good to be Home

We got home late Monday night after spending the weekend in San Francisco for Pride with Mister B&B. As soon as we walked through the door and saw Alyster and our two little girls (the big girls are at PJ’s mom’s house until we pick them up tomorrow), we got the biggest feeling of comfort and relief. We were home! Finally.

We had the time of our lives in SF, though! We met some amazing people who we feel blessed to call new friends! It wouldn’t have been as much fun without Kyle, Titus, and Raymond, who were so kind and ended up showing us so much of the city, we guess you could call them our tour guides (even though none of them currently live there, they new their way around the entire city!). We also finally met Brock & Chris from Yummertime after being friends on a Instagram for what feels like forever. They were beyond sweet and just as charming in person as they are online. We plan on making a blog & a vlog of the whole trip so stay tuned for that to see how we spent our time in SF!

Before we went to SF, PJ was working in Ohio for 5 days, and before that we were on the cruise for a week, so you can imagine how good it felt to come home and just be HOME. Relaxing on our couch, cuddling in our bed, watching Netflix and playing with the girls and Alyster. It’s also fun to drive around town and see small, subtle changes that occurred while you’re gone, you know? Maybe a house that’s being fixed up is further along or maybe a road has been newly paved. There’s always something that’s slightly different when we get back from being gone and that can make coming home to the same town you’ve lived in forever all the more exciting.

We have 3 house guests (from two different cities!) coming to stay with us for the next couple of days and they’ll be here in just a few hours! We are so excited! You may recognize their faces from Instagram ;) so keep an eye out to see who it is. One of the main things we love about Instagram is how many people we are able to meet from all over the U.S. and become friends with. All from an app. How cool is that?

We hope you had a wonderful pride weekend and are getting back into the swing of things this week. Take care, friend. xx

 PS- we leave on another trip ONE WEEK from today with more Instagram friends!!!! We CANNOT WAIT!!  

Where in the World Are We Going?

(Alyster keeping us company as we write)

We have been traveling SO MUCH this year, more so than any other year. It's crazy to think about, though, because that was one of our new year's resolutions. We were going to make this ~The Year of Travel~ and we feel confident in saying that it officially is!

This coming Friday we are heading to San Francisco to celebrate Pride! We are slightly embarrassed to say that this will be our first major Pride event we've been to. We've been so busy the last couple of years fixing up houses (seriously, we've had a house to work on every summer for the past 3 years) and then last year promoting the show, which happened to air on this same Pride weekend 1 year ago (!!!), that we haven't made time to go to one. We did go to Knoxville's Pride last year which was fun because we got to meet some of y'all there and experience what goes on at an event like that, but we think San Fran's will be on a whole other level. Have you ever been?

We are staying with a fun, surprise house guest that we can't wait to tell you who it is. We've never met them in person, only through Instagram, so we're looking forward to getting the chance to say hi IRL. 

We will only be in SF for a couple of days, so it's a really short trip. We've been getting some messages from y'all on where to go and what to do so thank you! Keep them coming! We've never been to California together before (PJ went with his aunt to L.A. years ago) and it's something we've always wanted to experience together, so we are beyond excited to get to go!

Our friend Lindsey is the best house sitter in the world, and she will be watching our place and our dogs while we're gone. We don't know what we would do without that girl! You may have seen her pop up in our Instastories from time to time. #loveher

So that's all for now. We'll update you more as it gets closer! Hope you're having a great week!!! xx

Good Intentions

(How cute does Alyster look here?! It’s the new background picture on my phone, don’t mind me)

Why aren’t there enough hours in the day?

Do you ask yourself that from time to time? Doesn’t it seem like there’s always SO much to do and never enough time to do it? We just asked you a lot of questions in a row so we hope you don’t feel pressured 😂, but it’s been on our minds a lot lately.

May, June, and July are shaping up to be our busiest months in a while, with traveling out of state, even out of the country, not to mention lots of work to be done at home. We also just added a new member to the family (above) so trying to balance work, relationships, friends, etc, has us asking again, where are all the hours in the day going?! And why can’t we get more!

We have a couple of letters sitting on our desk from you guys that we planned on responding to this past weekend, but PJ just got home from being gone all week, and we had some out of town friends come to stay with us (which was so much fun!!!) and before you know it, it was Sunday night and we were pooped.  We plan to get them in the mail this week, though!

So, we always have many, many good intentions to get everything done that we have on our plates, but sometimes there are just not enough minutes in the day. And after writing this post, we think that’s okay from time to time. We can only do what we can do, right? It’s important to strive to be better, but it’s just as important to remember that we need to cut ourselves some slack and know we are all just doing the best that we can, don’t you think?

That last one was a rhetorical question ;). 

(Above photo by Cameron Hinkle) 

Currently

(Alyster playing on the desk in our bedroom while we were responding to comments on our latest YouTube video)

The last couple of days have been for getting back to normal after being out of town and for adjusting to life with a new kitten. We pretty much haven’t left the house except to go to the store :). We’ve been enjoying being home and cooking and cleaning and playing with Alyster a ton, which is just fine by us.

If you can’t tell, we’re pretty much obsessed with him!! He likes to climb on us and play with our feet (though many of you have told us to break him of that habit early otherwise he’ll be attacking us all the time!) and he cries a lot until we hold him, and then he starts purring, and then our hearts melt. It’s so crazy because we aren’t cat people, if there is such a thing. But this little guy has us wrapped around his tiny baby paws. He peed on the couch and rug last night but other than that he’s learning to use his litter box pretty well.

We kind of slipped off the wagon of eating healthy while we were on vacation (because duh) but we’ve been making smarter choices since we’ve been back. Last night we cooked lemon garlic zucchini noodles with white wine and mushrooms and it was a nice, light summery dish. We’ll be posting the recipe later on!

 (We moved an old desk that used to live in our upstairs bathroom into our bedroom as a bedside table/writing desk and we’re loving the warmth & function it brings to the room)

We just found out some crazy fun news yesterday morning that we will tell you about in a few days once we make sure everything is all set. It’s extremely last minute and we’re kind of nervous but are staying optimistic and think it will be a lot of fun. It’s one of those opportunities that doesn’t come up very often and it’s hard to say no to, no matter how much anxiety it might bring you. Can’t wait!!!!

We hope you’re having a great week so far, friend. Talk to you soon!

We Have a New Member in Our Family

If you've been following our stories on Instagram, then you may have already heard the news BUT in case you haven't, then we have some exciting news (well, to us anyway!!). We have a tiny new member in the McKay household!! Y'all, meet Alyster!!!

We plan on telling you all about how we found him in a YouTube video, but basically PJ spotted him as we were walking down a street in Alys Beach. He was with his mom in a construction site surrounded by concrete and nails. We tried to get his mom and take her home with us too but she sadly wouldn't come, no matter how hard we tried.

We tried to give him back to his mom but she wouldn't have him. We debated on if we should take him from her and separate them and in the end we knew that she was about to wean herself off of him in a week or two, since he is around 4-5 weeks old, so in the end we decided to take him home with us.

At first we weren't sure if he was a boy or girl, so we named him Alys (pronounced "Alice") since we found him in Alys Beach. Then, we looked and saw that he was a boy, so Thomas named him Alyster instead, and now we can't picture him as anyone else!

We were worried the girls would absolutely hate him and try to eat him. Luckily, Jolie has taken to him and has even begun to treat him like he's her baby. It's probably the cutest thing we've ever seen. She's been licking him and fleaing him and looking out for him and it's giving us all the feels. She is acting like a mom to him and we think she's loving it since she never got the chance to be a mom herself.

Meryl on the other hand has not been so welcoming. She's snapped at him a couple of times and seems to fee uncomfortable around him which is weird because we thought she would be the most accepting of him. Jolie is usually the standoffish one, especially when it comes to things that are smaller than her (like babies and kittens, apparently).

By the end of tonight they've all made progress with each other. And not just with each other!! Alyster has warmed up to us and has been purring a lot in the last few hours. He likes to play with PJ's fingers, bite on Meryl's ears, and pretend to pounce on the ground. He's being really playful right now and we're soaking it in since he will start to get a lot bigger pretty fast in the next couple of weeks.

He likes to eat a lot and sleep a lot, and play just as much. We've received so many tips from you guys about how to acclimate him to the girls (elevate him when introducing him to the girls so that they feel inferior to him), get him used to our house (put olive oil on his nose to reset his sense of smell), and how to feed him (with a bottle for now). 

PJ has actually been talking about wanting a cat recently so it sort of feels like fate that we found Alyster. We weren't sure if we were going to keep him forever or just for a while until we found him a new home, but now that he's here we can't imagine him being anywhere else. If you remember, we found Meryl in a parking lot at PJ's old real estate company he was at, so we sort of have a soft spot for animals that need a good home. 

Stay tuned for the full story! In the meantime, you can most likely expect lots of cat videos on our Instagram stories. Okay tbh we never thought we would write a sentence like that. Who are we!?!?

Feeling Thankful

With the weather being so amazing lately, we've been spending a lot of time outside any way that we can. We went on a long walk around the neighborhood the other night and soaked up the warm air and birds chirping all around us. 

It feels good to finally be settled in our home and neighborhood after being here a year. With our last house, we were only in it for a year and a half, and almost half of that time was spent working on our current home, so we sometimes feel we didn't get to enjoy our last house as much. There were a lot of rooms we didn't get to finish decorating to really make them "our own", which is part of the reason we're feeling so thankful now to get the chance to do that in our current home.

Of course, there's still so much we want to do to our home now (even though we renovated it head to toe for a TV pilot, there were still some things that didn't get completed that we may shwo you in a future post) that we just haven't made time for. We talked a little bit about it in our Instagram post the other day and how we are just thankful for what we have, not for what we want, and it's true. It's something we constantly have to work at but if we remind ourselves as often as we can, maybe it will become our normal state of mind? 

We all have a lot to be thankful for if we take the time to really evaluate our lives and do our best to look past all of the things we don't like about our lives and focus on the things that we love. Mayve we don't have the perfect body or house or our dogs are terrors and we hate our jobs. Maybe we fight too much with our family or wish we made more money or wish we ate better or whatever. There are a million things we all wish were different about our lives, but what if we only talked about the things that we love about our lives? Wouldn't that be so much more rewarding? 

Not sure how or why we got on this rant or where this whole thing even came from, but it's been eye opening for us the past couple of days. In any event, we're thankful you're here with us, friend. We hope you enjoy your Friday and have a wonderful weekend :).

Rain, Finally

We've been going on almost a week with no rain, and our front yard was suffering because of it. It's been really hot here lately so our grass has almost started to burn, and we're pretty bad about not watering it. So, while the day started out beautifully, and the weather was perfect for sitting on the front porch and drinking coffee, around 6pm the sky turned dark. Very, very dark.

But, if you know us, then you know our feelings regarding rain and thunder storms. We worked for the majority of the day on an upcoming collaboration we're doing with a really fun company, but while we were finishing up, the clouds formed and the sun disappeared. It was windy and a warm breeze was blowing. Then, as if it couldn't hold it any longer, ginormous rain drops began to fall from the sky and within minutes you could barely see outside. 

Thomas has been meditating recently, so while the rain came down, he went on our back porch and relaxed for a few minutes. He downloaded the app Simple Habit. Have you heard of it? It's a fun, easy to use app that's been helpful in starting to meditate daily. 

As the rain came down outside, we felt safe inside and just enjoyed the gloomy, cozy weather as much as we could. The rain always brings us comfort in a way, and there’s no place else we would rather be than home. Do you feel this way about rain storms, too? 

xx

Mother’s Day

(Our moms last year filming a scene for our pilot. PJ’s mom is on the left, Thomas’ on the right)

We hope you had a wonderful Mother’s Day yesterday!!! We were able to spend it with both of our moms throughout the day and we felt so grateful to get the chance to see each of them. 

We went to lunch with PJ's mom and then hung out at Thomas' mom's place for a bit. What would we do without these women who showed us how to love, how to work hard, how to never give up even when it would be the easiest thing in the world to do? We owe our moms everything and wouldn't be where we are today without them (literally). 

Here's to moms on Mother's Day and every day. xx