Back To Reality
It took us a while to come down from our little getaway (we were on something of a sugar-high from all that ice cream!) but reality has hit again. The big kids are back from sleepaway camp, so we’ve been trying to scale the heights of Mount Laundry, while the little kids are finished with the various day camps they’d been doing. Now it’s just us and them, partners in a struggle to stay sane until they return to school in September.
I realize suddenly that I haven’t described what my husband and I do for a living. He’s a graphic designer, while I’m a writer. We cooperate on a lot of our projects, and also work independently for a bunch of different clients. We both used to work in offices — he was at a design firm, and I worked for a major corporation — and began to plot some years ago to begin working for ourselves.
We finally struck out as independents a couple of years ago, and we now work from home in a lovely shared office that we built over the garage. Lots of light, lots of space, and a schedule that we control. Not that we necessarily work less than we used to, but at least now we can choose to work ridiculous hours rather than feeling forced to do so.
Working at home has pluses and minuses, but on the whole it’s been a great move for us. The school vacations are hard though … I often feel like I have to be a worker and a parent simultaneously, and end up not doing either of those things very well. However, when we can we try and cut back on work while the kids are on vacation, and take on more projects when they’re in school. The whole point of us working at home was to create a more pleasant lifestyle for ourselves, so we try and take advantage of that as much as possible.