Who Our Hall Passes Are and 20 Other Questions About Life, Love, and Careers

Including what our jobs were before social media, how we maintain our individuality, and tips for bottoming.

Dearest reader,

Hi from the beach! We’re on our last trip of the summer as school starts back in just a few weeks. Our little beach shack, which once felt cramped and crowded for the five of us, is now the coziest little cottage and somehow feels just right for our family as we spend time at the beach. A big reason for the change of heart is because we’ve been making little adjustments here and there to make it more comfortable for all of us.

For example: On this trip, we brought two bunk beds (so four beds total) down with us that PJ found on Facebook Marketplace for a steal of a deal (they are Pottery Barn that he got for more than 1/2 the original price) for the kids room, so they will have actual beds to sleep on instead of just mattresses.

We’re also going to be finishing up painting the kitchen and hopefully installing the open shelving in there. Also! We brought the dogs with us on this trip!! We normally leave them at home with our cat and Dixie, our friend, watches all of them, but we decided to bring them with us this time so they can see the beach again. It’s been years since they’ve seen the water and they’re getting older, so we don’t know when the next time they’ll get the chance to see it will be. It feels good to have them here with us and makes this place feel a little more like home.

Speaking of making this place feel more like home, PJ’s mom, sister, and grandma are also here with us staying three minutes down the road! We’ve been spending all day with them at their house (which has a pool!) and it feels so nice to have them here. The kids adore spending time with them and vice versa, and I think this also means we will have an official babysitter at the beach for the first time in case we want to sneak away for a date night. So excited for the next week!

In today’s letter, you asked a bunch of questions and we’re sitting down to answer them! I love these Q&A’s so much because you always ask the most thoughtful, interesting questions, and in a lot of ways, writing out the answers helps us analyze and process things in real time, and sometimes they’re things we would have never thought about otherwise (like who our hall passes are!).

You can read the last Q&A we did here.

Without further ado, here is our summer Q&A:

21 QUESTIONS

Do you have recipes that you go back to time and time again?

We do! We’re a family of big pasta eaters, so we like to make chicken Alfredo a bunch or some form of a creamy red wine pasta, and always serve both with French bread and a homemade salad of some kind. We also love grilled salmon with rice and salad at least once a week. Other than that, we like to switch things up in the kitchen as much as we can. Some of our favorite dishes to rotate are casseroles, tacos, grilled chicken with mashed potatoes and roasted broccoli, and yummy soups.

If y’all have any, who are y’all’s hall passes? Celebrities, athletes, whoever lol.

Juicy! I think mine would have to be my lifelong favorite, Jake Gyllenhaal. I have had a crush on that man since high school and I will be damned if PJ stops me! Haha. For PJ, it would normally also be Jake (I know, we’re basic), but since I already chose him, he would go with Chris Hemsworth. Swoon! As for athletes, rugby players come to mind, but we’re not into sports enough to know names of anyone, so I’ll have to do some Googling and get back to you.

What were your guys’ careers before social media? Do you have degrees?

We do have degrees, yes: Mine is in communications with a minor in speech, and PJ’s is in psychology with a minor in construction management. A communications degree was so much fun to get, because I spent my days writing copy and editing videos, but I didn’t think I would ever actually use my major in the real world. And for many years, I didn’t. Now, I use it every single day since I write and edit videos for a living. As for our jobs before social media, mine was in insurance for a huge national company (not sales, but the behind the scenes of it), and PJ was a realtor. I went part time in 2018 as social media began to take off for us and we could actually make a living, and officially quit in 2019. PJ retired his real estate license in 2020.

My bf is really big. Do y’all have any bottoming tips?

Here are a few that we’ve found helpful, including the exact toy we use…