stay-at-home mum of 2 children, & running 2 businesses

Michele Jones and camera

Previously I’ve just taken my own photos of my products to use on my online shop, but now that my products are going to appear on notonthehighstreet.com I needed some better quality, more professional photographs. So I approached Michele Jones, who was my very lovely wedding photographer and has also done two more photo shoots for us since – one when our daughter was 6 months old, and another when she was 4 years old and our son was about 9 months old. (They’re absolutely gorgeous, modern, natural looking photos – I heartily recommend her!).

Actually, if you take a look at her website you can see two of the photos she took of my kids – the first one, of my daughter, is the first picture you see – she’s wearing a red and pink dress, and my son is second from the left in the second row – with the bubbles. Now you must understand that product photography isn’t her thing, but she agreed to do it for me and this morning was when it all happened! We also had a lovely chat along the way

Michele Jones getting ready to photograph my alphabet story poster

I took bags of props with me but we actually only ended up using two – a little wooden train next to our first few shots of children’s greeting cards, and a garland of fabric hearts with the framed posters.

My Alphabet Story Poster

The fabric hearts garland was something I bought at the York Maze gift shop. We stopped off at York Maze on the way home from our week long holiday in Whitby and it was glorious weather and we all had a fantastic time! They also had a brilliant gift shop full of all sorts of gorgeous home gifts etc. and I thought the garland would make a great Christmas present for my daughter!

Flower Card Box

Well, just over a week ago it was my birthday (Sunday 15th August), when I turned 34 years old. We were away for a week visiting the grandparents, staying in their home in Brighton. It was a wonderful week (I’ll blog about it seperately another day!). When we returned home, late on Saturday 21st August, it was to find one of those “sorry you were out” cards from the post office who had tried to deliver a package. This morning I went to collect the package (being the next time the office was open for me to collect it). It was all very mysterious – inside the package was a big pretty box giving no clue to it’s contents! Then we opened the package… to be faced with dead and wrotting flowers. Oh dear!

It was a “flower card” and had a message on it saying it was from my Gran – she’d sent it as a birthday present. Such a shame! It had been sitting in the post office collection depot for 5 days. At least my daughter likes the box and I’m sure we can find another use for it some time!

Looking online, this is how it should have looked: http://www.flower-card.co.uk

You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning feeling hacked off about something that happened in the past? Well, this happened to me today and to try to expell the demons so that I can get on with the day I decided to blog about it! This one’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life!

One of the first projects I got after going self-employed as a Website Developer (I called myself a Web Consultant – something I was advised!), was to develop an online TEFL course for a fairly young company (TEFL = Teaching English as a Foreign Language – you can get a job abroad teaching English). It was the first ever TEFL course delivered over the web and had some modules automatically marked and others tutor marked.

The course was hugely successful and was a big part of enabling the company to grow bigger. I continued a very happy relationship with the company for the best part of ten years, improving and expanding the course and developing and maintaining lots of other new website projects. I also built up some good relationships with the staff I dealt with in the company, who I often had daily contact with, and had great loyalty to them. When I had a request for something it felt more like doing a favour for a friend than paid work!

Then the company was sold. I was asked to sell them the Copyright to the online TEFL course (I think there would be a big adverse affect on the selling of the company without it, I wasn’t privy to the details of course but I wonder if the sale would even have gone through). Due to the relationship I had with the staff and the company I didn’t want to stand in their way so agreed to sell it (not that I wanted to!).  Then I had to try to come up with a price – something I always find incredibly hard. Where to start with selling the Copyright to a successfull piece of software? I would no longer own what I’d developed, no longer be able to use it or sell it to other companies. This is a huge thing. Buying a copy and a license to a piece of software like Microsoft Windows is nothing like buying the Copyright to Microsoft Windows (Microsoft would no longer own the software and be able to sell or develop it, you would!). Consequently a fairly large price tag needs to be attached to the selling of Copyright. Even so, I put the price tag fairly low since I’m an individual and not a big business and didn’t have the confidence to ask too much.

Well, the reaction was that they didn’t even want to pay the amount I had asked for. Instead they sent round some big business man to sort me out. He came round to my house and my baby daughter had the lay of the land with him immediately – from the moment he arrived until he left she cried and cried (have never encountered anything like it before or since!). He told me I wasn’t going to get the amount I asked for and offered me a pittance. I was intimidated and accepted the pittance.  I signed over my Copyright, received my money, and the company was sold for many millions to a big American travel company. I continued doing work maintaining my system for a few years, although the staff changed and I lost my feeling of loyalty to the company, they brought in an internal website development team and gradually I was replaced. Well, actually I was dropped when I went on maternity leave for my second child – after my maternity leave finished they didn’t use me any more.

What I should have done, when the business guy was round at my house, was say that I wasn’t the one wanting to sell my Copyright, he was the one wanting to buy. I was in a position of strength and I just rolled over! I should have either held out a bit longer or forced a compromise price. Oh well, I’m just not cut out for the cut and thrust of business at all. Too honest!

This all sounds bitter, but it’s just that the mistake is playing on my mind this morning! I’m not bitter with the company or the staff I worked with, they were wonderful to me and I wouldn’t have had a business without them – I got a lot of work from them. They weren’t my only client, but they were by far my most important client and the one I did the most of my work for.

My daughter learnt this alphabet song at school this year (Reception year), and it’s great! Here goes:

A B C D E F G,

all the letters came to tea,

H I J K L M N,

the food was quite delicious,

O P Q R S T U,

V and W, they came too,

X and Y ate all the pie,

and Z washed all the dishes!

Talking of the alphabet, if you haven’t seen my finished alphabet poster yet then take a look here! It’s completely unique in that the captions for each letter emphasis the sound and use of that letter and tell a story throughout the poster – “Adam the antelope, bathed at the beach, caught a crab”…

A few weeks ago I created my first kids poster, featuring numbers and animals. I’m now working on my second kids poster, which will be A2 in size aswell. I had a brainwave yesterday, whilst driving my kids home from my daughter’s ballet class, and it was to make the whole poster a bit like a story. So each letter block not only has the letter on it, and a picture, but it also has a description at the bottom emphasising the relevant letter – using words with that letter & sound – which continues a story from the start to the end of the poster/alphabet. It means that you can almost read the poster like a book! Here’s a sneeky peek – I’ve printed out the letters I’ve done so far and placed them side by side as they will appear on the finished poster. What d’you think? (Click on the picture to see a bigger version at twitpic: http://twitpic.com/1×2zbb)

YummyMummyNo1 recently did a post on this subject and invited others to do one to. Having not done a blog post for a while I decided to give it a go – so, in no particular order:

1. Cutlery in the drainer
I eat my lunch, then decide to have a yoghurt. I get one out of the fridge and put it on the kitchen worksurface. Then I open the cutlery draw, no teaspoons – my heart sinks as I glance across at the cutlery drainer which is half full of clean cutlery which hasn’t been dried and put away. Aaaggghh! There’s no point in rummaging around in there, it’s hard to do and the teaspoons always end up right at the bottom. In anger I grab the teatowel and dry it all up and put it away, then I can finally eat my yoghurt.

2. Queuing
Who doesn’t hate queuing? I find it particularly annoying when I’m having to wait in a queue with my toddler though – hard work! Also if the queue is unnecessarily slow or the people at the front are incompetant or useless!

3. Driving whilst on mobile phone
Seeing someone driving whilst on their mobile phone! I’ve even seen a van driver waiting to turn right off a main road, and then doing so, whilst holding a pint glass of what looked like beer in his left hand – what?!

4. Minimum order numbers
I have lots of ideas for other products I think my greeting card designs would look great on, but it’s just not feasible to get them produced – because of minimum order numbers! I’ll do lots of searching around on the web, find printers which can do what I want for a new product, and then find that there is a minimum order number – usually of 100 items, which would mean spending 100’s of pounds getting that one product with one design on it produced. That’s all fine and great if you’re a big business, but when you’re small like me you can’t afford to so that – I want to order just 10 or 20 so that I can see if they’re actually going to sell or not, and I’d be happy to pay a higher price per item for that but there isn’t even the option of doing so. Grrr!

5. Clothing sizes run out
I actually got shopping for new jeans this morning for the first time in 2 years, dragging my son along, I desperately needed new jeans as all mine have holes in the crotch! I managed to find a good pair I liked but the shop only had one pair in that size and style, so I was only able to buy one. Ideally I’d have liked to buy 3 pairs. So I now have just one pair of jeans without holes in the crotch – not helpful – which means I’m going to have to try and keep going back to the shop to check for new stock!

6. Spam
Enough said! (I get huge amounts posted to my blog comments that then queue up and I have to waste time deleting!)

7. Unsuccessful naps
If my son’s nap time doesn’t go according to plan so that he either doesn’t get a nap, or has a rubbish tiny one.

With my little boy turning 2 years old today I thought I’d write a quick blog post about his birth!

I went into labour exactly 7 days over my due date, which was not very surprising since that’s the same thing as happened with my daughter. I woke up at half past midnight with contractions and wasn’t going to be getting any more sleep, so quietly went downstairs, not wanting to disturb my husband or daughter – no point in them missing out on sleep too! I sat on my big excercise ball, which my husband had got for me for my first pregnancy, in the lounge and watched TV. Thankfully there were back-to-back repeats of Have I Got News For You on one of the channels on Sky which was lucky! I gently bounced and rocked about on my ball between contractions. When a contraction started I jumped up and noted down the time, then ran up and down the length of the room like a mad thing until the contraction was over and wrote the time again. The running really helped to ease the pain – it was awful for those few seconds at the start of each when I was standing still writing the time down!

By 8am-ish things were really getting very painful and I decided it was time to get the hospital soon. I forced myself to go and have a shower and get dressed, and after my shower my husband and daughter were getting up and about and I told them it was time to go. So as soon as possible we set off, going round to a friend’s house nearby (her son and my daughter were friends, and we’d met at 2 local parent/toddler groups we both went to each week). I’d tried phoning a few times but no answer. Husband rang the bell and eventually they came to the door in their dressing gowns and took our daughter in for the day! Luckily it was a Sunday rather than a work day! Husband and I continued on our way to the hospital – the drive is to painful as you can’t move around!

My priority was to get some pain relief ASAP, but that wasn’t the hospital’s priority! They told me I had to wait until I’d been assessed – which took AGES! I was standing with my back to my husband hopping from foot to foot through each contraction. Eventually I was assessed and found to be 4cm dilated which I found a bit disappointing, although by then I was having an epidural with my daughter, so perhaps it’s not too bad! I was then allowed some gas and air – finally! Due to my experience with my first labour, and the pain I was in now, I decided to just continually breath the entinox rather than waiting for a contraction to start – they were coming thick and fast anyway! So from that point on I only breathed entonox!

I remember being walked over to the labour wards, but only about half way, and I remember being asked to lie on the bed when I got there so they could assess me. After that I was pretty out of it. I never got off the bed. I was in so much pain I screamed at the top of my lungs throughout each contraction, only stopping briefly to gulp more breaths of entonox down as I didn’t want that to wear off with too long a scream! They tried telling me not to scream but the fact was that it made me feel slightly better, it released the pain a tiny bit, and so there was no way I was going to stop.

I’d been asking for an epidural since walking across to the labour ward, but nothing happened. I accused them of lying and saying I was going to get one but wasn’t really (you hear of this if labour is too far along!) but they insisted it was just that the anethsatist was busy. I never got one.

I started feeling the urge to push. I was then told to push. After quite a while I was told not to push – they’d got it wrong! I couldn’t help pushing a little bit with each contraction though, it was a natural instinct and it also eased the pain slightly. I felt awful and so guilty pushing a little when I could hear that my baby was in distress with each contraction and I was probably only adding to that distress – the heartbeat went really slow during a contraction.

So it was another emergency caesarean for me – same outcome as my daughter. Although I got pretty much fully dialated with my baby boy he never even engaged into my pelvis (I don’t think he was going to fit to be honest – I’m not very hippy!). So I had to sign a consent form, then they botched putting a needle in my wrist (I have a scar there) so they had to put it in my hand instead.

In the recovery room my husband held our little baby boy (a surprise – we waited to see what gender came out!) up his t-shirt for skin-to-skin contact and to keep him warm. My body was in a state – I was shaking/quaking massively with my teeth chattering like made. For the first half an hour in the recovery room after the caesarean I wasn’t at all interested in holding my baby or anything and it was really worrying me. Then my body calmed down and I wanted to hold him and completely bonded with him and fell completely in love with him. Even now I look at him thinking how much I love him and get butterflies I’m so in love with him. He’s just perfect!

My husband and daughter came to visit for a little while each day, and then after 3 days we came home from hospital in the evening. Two days later we went out for our first lunch out as the 4 of us and then went round to my daughter’s friend’s for a playdate for the afternoon and to show our new baby. We also took them flowers and chocolates to say a big thankyou for looking after our daughter for the day when our son was born.

And here he is, on his birthday, playing with one of his presents – a Lego Duplo fire station & vehicles:

I need a new bag! I don’t need to take so much stuff around with me now that my boy is turning 2 years old, and with the hot weather I can’t stand having a rucksack on my back! Rucksack’s make sweaty backs and armpits in warm weather – yuck! This is the rucksack I’ve been using:

Before that I used a bag I bought from a local maker at a craft fair. In fact it’s that craft fair again tomorrow at the Chorlton Arts Festival craft fair and I’m hoping to go along. It’s rather tired and worn now, and again I don’t need anything this big anymore. I used it after my son was born to cart all our stuff around! Here it is:

I’d love to support a maker again – so if you make bags or you can recommend someone who does then please leave a comment or tweet me @fionahreeves !

The new bag needs to be big enough to hold: milk bottle (son still won’t move to a beaker!), 2 nappies, bag of wipes, small tupperware tub which holds some bits of breadstick,  and preferably have a zippable inside pocked for my purse and mobile phone. And be beautiful of course