It's been awhile since I've updated you on the whole, juggling being a SAHM (stay at home mom) and WFHM (work from home mom).  Both of these roles present challenges yet so much gratification.  And it is ALWAYS a work in progress. 

Tallulah is now 17 months old! Nearly two years old and she is constantly on the loose, she absolutely LOVES being outside and getting dirty.   Thus we have taken to being outside as much as possible, she loves digging in the dirt, pulling up weeds with me and in general being a flower girl.  But all our play outside gets me exhausted - I now understand why having kids when you're younger is sensible.  My nearly 40 year old body gets just a bit more tired than it used to!

What I really want to address though in this post is how I've balanced working from home and caring for my daughter.  I truly had to be transparent with you and my customers on the process of getting orders and custom pieces made because the timeline now is much longer.  There are days, such as today, when I put my daughter down for a nap that I just want to lay around and do NOTHING - but my inner bossbabe brains yells at me to get up off the couch and go work.  Or there are nights when I just want to watch the Real Housewives series when I know I should be on my laptop marketing or working in my studio. 

So what ends up happening? A little bit of both.  Some mornings I will race around, handling all the household chores and then scramble to post a photo on social media then sit down and drink my coffee.  Then we go for a long walk around our neighborhood and I'll listen to podcasts while Tallulah points at the trees or birds.  We stop at the playground and she runs around and climbs.  By the time we get home she is ready for her nap and I'm tired from our walk.  That's when I have to ask myself, what needs to get done in my business today.  More importantly, what is the most pressing thing I need to do?  It can be a mix of everything.  I'm trying so hard to pre-emptively work at scheduling all my marketing and social media posts so that I don't have to think about them however this requires setting aside a very large chunk of time to do so.  But where does that time come from???? Dangit if I didn't wish there was a time jar that I could stow away chunks of time!

On the same token I do try to set aside time for self care.  Some nights I'll go up to my meditation room, light sage and maybe do a lil tarot reading or crack open my favorite herbal book and read for an hour.  I've found that this time to myself is critical for my own sanity.  I need time to rest my body and brain.  And not just that I crave time to be inspired, to dream and journal my thoughts. 

I'm fortunate in that I have such a supportive family and husband.  On the weekends my husband will take our daughter to his parents house in the country which gives me time to either work in my studio or do things around the house.  I love that time to zone out and get creative.  I typically get two full days of work in my studio and what I produce in those two days are critical to the rest of the week.  And I'll be real - sometimes I set lunch appointments, massage or just a shopping trip on my 'days off'.  Once I got a massage and it was AMAZING! I felt revived!

You may be wondering, why doesn't she just hire a nanny or babysitter.  when it comes down to it - we probably could afford some part time help but we're both so worried about saving money and paying our bills that we don't want to spend it on a nanny when I could watch her.  This is the conundrum I often think about, that what if I did hire someone and worked those extra hours to produce more one of a kind pieces or work on the business side of things?  I'm hoping that I'll soon be in that space to do so but not just yet. 

Thus I continue to juggle a million things at once and hope that somehow our lives will go smoothly - HAHA! wishful thinking but in the end, I do feel so incredibly blessed to spend these critical months with my daughter. 

thank you so much for reading, following and supporting my small business, it means putting food on our table and that is immense!