Morning folks 🙂 It's Sunday, and I tend to muse about more personal things at the weekend, and this weekend is no exception, except that is to say perhaps, that I've not blogged anything quite this personal before.
If you're wondering why on earth I'm sharing anything personal at all on a wedding blog, it is purely for this reason: I want to connect on a more personal level with my readers. My readers mean the world to me. I want them to trust me and see that I'm a real person, who puts this blog and her family first. Every time. I want my beloved readers to feel they know me a little, and get a sense of how very important this blog is to me. OK? Good. Less yadder yadder. More to the point.
I love my job. No doubt about it. I get to do amazing things and meet amazing, creative people. I am contacted by some of the best Photographers in the UK and asked to feature their work. I am asked to get involved in all sorts of exciting projects, several of which I have up my sleeve at this moment, and that if I was told only one year ago would be happening right now, I absolutely would not have believed it.
Yes, I love my job. I love being my own boss, and love that my daily commute to work involves nothing but a few steps along the landing to the office. I have a wonderful Husband, two beautiful little girls, the youngest of which turns one year old on Wednesday and we have two adorable rescue dogs, Tarka and Izzie.
We've a house, two cars, a family who love us and supportive friends.
Life couldn't be better.
Life is perfect.
Life is…….exactly what I want you to see it is through my blog, photoshoots, Facebook persona and chirpy Twitter messages. The reality is sometimes very, very different.
Photography Copyright (c) 2011, Katy Lunsford, {left}, Polly Alexandre {middle}, Lisa Devlin {right}
Love My Dress is associated with glamorous content; beautiful brides, vintage inspired loveliness, chic and elegant wedddings. A strong community is developing over here too – slowly but very surely, as I foray in to the 'discussion post' arena {encouraged by lovely friends like Rebecca and Cara}. This is the biggest reward a blogger could ever wish for – feedback and regular interaction from readers. It means what I'm doing is making a difference. Having an influence. Inspiring.
I love my job. I get to do fun things like play the party host {above left} have photographs taken by Photographers at the top of their game {top middle} and sometimes, I even get to play the model {above right, yikes!!}
But most days of course, I am a 'work from home Mum'.
I'm going to be honest with you. Sometimes {actually, almost all of the time}, I feel a fraud. I sit here writing up glamorous pieces of blog pretty, whilst looking like a tramp in my grotty grey baby dribble stained tracky bottoms pyjamas and battered old Ugg boots, because we all know how 'uncool' it is to step outside the house in a pair of ugg boots these days {heaven forbid!}, mine have been relegated to 'foot warmers'. Slippers that warm your calves 🙂
The photos above are of the person I want you to see. 'Lady Love My Dress', the glamorous blogger and Summer Soiree host extraordinaire. The photo below is of the real, every day, regular ol' me. No airbrush and absolutely no botox. The me my kids and Husband see, day in, day out. Makeup free, messy hair and tired. I don't wear makeup because I genuinely don't have time to put any one when I'm working from home. I rarely have time to wash my hair and when I do, it will always be left to dry naturally and endup up fluffy and lifeless. It takes too long to blow-dry it if I'm honest, and my GHDs haven't seen the light of day in months.
Photography Copyright (c) 2011, Annabel Beeforth, Love My Dress
I should have gone to the hairdressers two weeks ago and I'm overdue an appointment at the Dentist, and Opticians. Personal grooming comes last these days in my list of priorities.
So, working from home. Should mean I can have a bit of a lie in, be more in control of my time, take things in my own stride. Ha! My average day starts around 5.30am when my little baby Leanora Rose wakes. I feed her some milk and then set about my working day, which usually involves frantically trying to finish up a blog post, unless I was lucky enough to have got it done the night before. Monday to Wednesday, I leave the house around 7.40am to drop Leanora off for her 8am nursery session. I am usually always late. I've actually stopped apologising now, it started to get embarrassing!
I return home around 8.30am and whilst my Husband sees my Daughter get's to School OK, I set about an intense 4 hours of work before it's back to nursery to collect Leanora at 1pm. During those 4 hours, I share all sorts of glamour, chic and elegant inspiration on Love My Dress. All the while, this is what I'm actually looking at:-
Not that I'm complaining, you understand. Like I said, I love my job.
If {I said *if*} Leanora naps in the afternoon, I maybe get to squeeze between another 60 – 90 minutes work in. If not, it's emails with 1 finger whilst I bounce the baby on my knee. It's lunch stood up and eaten with one hand whilst I hold the baby with my other. If Leanora doesn't nap, it's another frustrating afternoon thinking about what work I could be catching up on. I've tried the whole 'may as well forget about work and just engage with/enjoy your baby' thing but that is just so much easier said than done when you have 250 odd unread emails awaiting your attention and invoices to send out.
Then before I know it, it's 3.30pm and my eldest is back from School. We have an agreement I won't work from then until 7pm. But again, this is MUCH easier said than done. I find myself itching like a mad woman wanting to check email. FInally, it's bath books and bed for the children. We aim to have them lights out and fast asleep by 8pm at the VERY latest. And after that, when I'm just about done in, my working day actually starts and I slog it out for as long as I can, before I literally fall apart with tired. I may finish at 11pm, I may finish at 3am. It depends how energetic I'm feeling. This is not an ideal time for me to be working, as my productivity is lower given I'm feeling tired, but I do my best.
Leanora stays at her Grandparents every Wednesday night – sometimes Thursday too! And that helps too. A WHOOOOLE lot! I miss her incredibly, of course, but the God's honest truth is that more often than not, I am relieved beyond words to have my load lightened a little, to have an evening where I can cut my level of responsibilities by half, where I can maybe, just maybe, get in bed before midnight. I'm just human afterall, I'm not going to feel guilty about this – it's a whole lotta hard slog, this owning your own business, working from home and being a Mummy thing.
Honestly? Sometimes I don't. In the past 6 months, I've experienced regular tears, stress, exhaustion and even a bit of a mini-melt-down. You see a perfectly quaffed party host, a blogger styled up to the nines for a photoshoot, a PR photo of me at my best. The reality is most days I'm sat here feeling rather bedraggled and wishing I had gotten up a bit earlier to take a shower and get ready before I started my day. Honestly, when I read my own 'top tips' back in this post, I laugh! 😉 Who was I kidding?!?
The crunch came during the last half term back in April this year, when I had a 7 month baby and 5 year old child to entertain/care for. On top of that, I was trying to run my own business {I am currently personally responsible for every single aspect of running my business, from trying to find time to nurture my sponsor relationships, to press and PR, to invoicing, researching, general admin, to writing freelance magazine features and working on the various projects I'm involved in, to designing my own graphics and getting my head around bespoke blog templates {HTML and CSS are like my second language}, and that's before I even begin to draft a blog post! I found myself one Wednesday during that half term literally tearing my hair out as my baby cried, my 5 year old demanded lunch and I fell behind on just about everything I needed to do.
And I caved. Big time caved.
I'm not embarrassed to tell you this because I want other working Mum's out there who are trying to run their own business from home to know that you are not alone in your stresses. That we, all the rest of us, go through it too – the daily grind.
A big family meeting ensued after said mini melt-down {as did many tears, hugs, words of support and understanding from my frankly amazing family}. We sat for hours discussing priorities, wants, needs, demands – everything. And we came up with a big plan. A big Blue Peter job of a plan, several A4 bits of paper crudely stuck together with sellotape and a weekly schedule scribbled all over the joins of paper. A Monday to Saturday hour by hour schedule covering what needed doing, and when, allocating me time to work on the blog, go to the gym, be Mum and have a bit of time for me. It was a pretty strict schedule, but it was do-able.
Perfik. I could look forward to order returning to my life. I even wrote a list for myself, something to stick on my wall and help keep me remain focused on a daily basis…
That, as I say, was back in April. Five months ago. And what have I learned in this time? I have learned that no matter how many schedules you write or good intentions you have, being a work from home Mum is one hell of a big VARIABLE, and actually, you're probably better off just trying to do what you can do, and bugger the schedule!
I do intend on getting more of a routine going but for now, I'd rather not set myself too many unreasonable goals that leave me feeling like a failure at the first hurdle. I admire those of you who are more organised than me, who give out advice and top tips via your blogs on how to manage your time and prioritise when working from home but my real world comprises of two human beings dependent on me for their survival, happiness and welfare. And that takes a whooooole lotta energy that eats right out of your personal and work time.
As a result, some things in my life get neglected. They simply have to take a back burner. My house is mostly always a tip and I dread anyone coming round. If I get to tidy the kitchen and load the dishwasher before I crawl into bed at night, I'm doing really well. If I get both children in bed by 8pm and am able to half draft the next morning's blog post before my eyes give up on staying open, I'm doing even better. I am struggling to shift my baby weight because I never seem to find time to get to the gym. I'll often eat really unhealthy food for meals if my Husband is away because I am too busy to cook something healthy and I can't remember the last time I read a book for pleasure. I try to watch films to help me relax but I rarely get to watch one in one session, it's usually over 2-3 evenings, and usually viewed in the background, you've guessed it, whilst I'm also kind of working.
I also become forgetful, family birthdays creep up on me out of the blue and I forget to reply to that important email that I really needed to reply to.
When you are a self employed Parent working from home, barely any day runs to any kind of strict routine. In fact most days feel like they are running in to one. And it only takes a baby to be a little bit poorly sick for part of the day and the routine flys right out the window. And I mean, right out the window. Everything has a knock on effect, like a line of dominoes, it only takes the first one to wobble and the whole pile comes falling down eventually.
But I simply would not change a single thing. In comparison to being stuck in a mind-numbing day job, or, without any job at all – in comparison to having a silent house as opposed to one where beautiful songs, shouts and occasionally screams emanate from the mouths of two beautiful little girls, filling every room in the house with a cacophony of sound – in comparison to having a job with no dominoe wobbles, that doesn't challenge me and make me a sronger person, more capable and resolute, I would rather have this ANY day.
Through all of this, through the past two years of blogging, and the past six months of being a full time wedding blogger, I have learned so much about me and what I'm capable of – my priorities and what is truly important to me. I have learned for example that if things are super crazy at home, my readers will forgive me for posting a bit late, my visitor stats will not suffer as a result and I needn't mentally beat myself up for it. I have come to realise that rather than kill myself trying to stick to any routine, and make myself feel inadequate by setting too many unachievable/unrealistic targets, rather than almost maim myself trying to run around like a blue arsed fly ticking off my daily to-do list, it makes far more sense to just embrace every day with a 'I will work hard to get done whatever I can get done today', glass half full kind of attitude. Better to get a smaller amount of higher quality work out of me than to spread myself too thin and deliver rubbish.
As for the superficialities, I don't care if I don't get to put my makeup on, or dry my hair, or read a book or even if I get to bed so late I can't be bothered to remove my makeup. As long as my family are happy, cared for and as long as my beloved little blog business remains healthy and continues to thrive and inspire, then I'll be OK.
THIS is what I work so hard for…
These are my children, my darling Daughters. That's Eska Eleanor above. She'll turn 6 in November. That's my lovely little Leanora Rose below, she is 1 on Wednesday. Eska loves to dance and she is a true little performer. I will be amazed if she doesn't end up doing something on stage. Leanora is such a strong little girl, amazing when I consider what a terrible first half of the pregnancy I had with her {we were told we'd probably lost her early on and had many scares – and she arrived a whole month early}.
I want my children to look back in years and remember Mummy had time to play and be silly. Not that I was forever fobbing them off with the usual 'Leave Mummy alone for a bit love, I'm too busy' – something I found myself doing way too often around a year ago.
By the way, I just took those photos on my Husband's Canon 1000C with the standard lens and edited in Photoshop. I'm going to treat myself to a much better camera/lens before this year is out 🙂
When I jacked in the day job to follow my dream, I never had any idea I would need to work so hard. There are some people in my life that will say to me 'we all work hard' and I know that. Indeed, most people do. What I'm trying to convey here is how much energy it takes out of you having to work for yourself, and especially when you're trying to do it from home, with kids! There are some days it seems like a total uphill struggle, but I wouldn't change a single bit of it.
I love my job. But being a working Mummy managing her own business from home – it aint all glamour and photoshoots and soiree's. The reality is late nights, sleep deprived working days, answering the door to the Postman whilst looking like a washed out vagrant and grabbing a bag of crisps to satisy those hunger pangs over lunch time, going to bed and leaving the kitchen looking like the bin exploded and occasionally {not all the time} having to live in a bit of a tip! And you know what? It doesn't matter a jot.
I have shared this because I want to expose a little of the real me and encourage other women in similar situations to me to keep on going when it all get's a bit too much – to remind them how incredibly lucky we are to have our own businesses, to be our own bosses, and to have our beautiful children to keep us going. I don't want anyone in a position where they are about to become a work from home parent running their own business to be afraid – The reality of being a work from home parent with your own business is very hard work, but it also brings an immeasurable sense of reward and achievement – a level of satisfaction that you can't really describe, that no level of personal appraisal/promotion/feedback from an employer could ever equal. It is wonderful in a way you would only know if you are doing it, sweating out to make your dream work for you. It is amazing and definitely, definitely worth all the late nights and sleep deprived days.
I hope whatever you are up to today, you have a lovely one 🙂
I'd love to hear from fellow work-at-home Parents and business owners. How do you cope? What do you love about being your own boss? What do you loathe? How do you manage the work/life balance thing? Anyone with any general advice on how to be an all-round Supermum/woman – I'm all ears 😉
Much love to you all, my wonderful readers! 😉
Annabel xXx
♥
ps – occasionally us working business mum's get the chance to doll up and feel pretty. I am sooooo looking forward to glamming up a bit this Friday as I meet some lovely blog/wedding industry friends and colleagues for an evening of cocktails and chit chat. Let's hope my hair looks a little less lifeless by then, and that those spots have cleared up too 😉
pps – have you seen this post from yesterday? You have until midnight tonight to respond! 😉
ppps – this post makes up part of my 'self employment journals' – read more here.