A day in the life…

When I was pregnant with our second baby, we bought a bigger bed.

Dependent on your point of view and your own experience, this could be a hymn to attachment parenting or the biggest ‘I-told-you-so’ from Gina Ford, everyone’s favourite baby disciplinarian.

My day can start either at 4am, when younger son calls out from his room to be allowed back into the big bed, or at 6.30am, when younger son ends up in the big bed anyway and we are treated to a couple of verses of Bob the builder before being joined by big sister who wants to get her share of cuddles before school.

We are so lucky, we are realising our dream of shared parenting as my partner and I both work for ourselves and set our own timetables while trying to balance this with time spent as a family. Just now I have two full days without the children which I am focusing on setting up a new approach for small and medium businesses to optimise their use of the internet. On other days I juggle sleeping son and working on the dining table and once forgot to take daughter to ballet lesson being so wrapped up in something online; at least I never forgot to pick one of them up.

So we fit in the nursery and school, singing and ballet runs around the businesses that we run, sometime with more success than others. I love the look on my son’s face when he sees the local farmer in his ‘John Deere’ or the telehandler that lives in the next village. My little girl finished school today at 1.30, and by 2pm we were both covered in glitter and having a holiday ‘making’ wind down.

The biggest challenge is giving the right things the right priority at the right time, as I seem to start each day with about 17 different things to do, from checking on a client, monitoring google and linked in ad performance to laundry and the dreaded daily packed lunch.

By the end of the day maybe half the things are done, I like to think the important ones, and I am definitely on the domestic not-goddess side of the fence when it comes to housework versus Tractor Ted or versus reading up on the best ways to be effective on Twitter.

The house may not be sparkling (apart from the glitter) but we are a modern family finding a way to live our lives together with as little compromise to our beliefs as we can; and after such an early start it’s early to bed too, to catch up on a little sleep before tomorrow.