Suburbia Theme – 2 Questions about Homepage Layout

Hi all,

I’m a novice with WP, so please excuse my ignorance in advance. (I did do a lot of research before posting here to make sure these questions weren’t already answered somewhere.)

I’m using the Suburbia theme, and I have a two questions regarding my homepage:

1) I would like my home page to have the two larger sticky posts at the top (check) and all rows below that to have the five smaller entries, just like it looks on the Suburbia demo: https://wpshower.com/demo/?theme=suburbia But for some reason, I’m getting 1 bigger post at the start of my second row as well, even though that post is NOT stickied. (Link to my page: https://www.allwrite-already.com/) I’ve read posts from other suburbia users who say they’ve customized their homepage to set it at a specific number of large entries (some do 2 large entries, others as many as 5), but I can’t seem to find the setting anywhere. Maybe there’s something I can do in the CSS?

2) I know how to set featured images for my posts so they show up on the homepage. However, my blog is writing-related, so I don’t think that ALL my blog posts will have pictures. The problem is, when I post a blog without any featured image, it makes this big ugly X on the homepage where the featured image should be. Is there any way to get rid of that? Again, a link to my homepage: https://www.allwrite-already.com/

I greatly appreciate your help and time.

EDIT – sorry for the messed up links, should work now.