Monthly brainsplurge: June 25
Opening up my brain for business again post 'mat leave'and dealing with a London heatwave.
365 days with our youngest baba
It is a huge milestone when a baby turns 1. I don’t want to spout a load of clichéd statements about it going too fast and all that stuff. It went fast, and it dragged. It was easier than the first time and doing it with a toddler was harder in a different way. I won’t pretend I figured it all out. There was (and is) lots of winging it, improvising and getting ok with not having control.
I did however, try and drink it in as much as I could as I know this is the last time I’ll have a baby. She does get her head sniffed an inordinate amount!
👆🏼Colour makes me happy. The Horniman, near our gaff
Opening up my brain for business again
On my first maternity leave I felt like I was starting from scratch with my business (The Joy Eclectic) when I came back, so this time I made the decision to say yes to small events and projects that came in after I had Reya. Stuff that I thought was ‘manageable’ with a baby... More on whether I judged this right and how it went in another post (including tackling a wedding and carting the whole family to Gloucestershire in order to do the job!)
Anyway, I didn’t take my foot completely off the gas during mat leave, but I did leave some space to try and work out what I wanted to come back to as I questioned EVERYTHING. This included:
three sessions with a coach
journalling - especially when I saw a clairvoyant at New Year and this was mentioned as being important to help me figure stuff out 🔮
treating events that came in as ‘experiments’ for my nervous system
listening to podcasts and speakers to help me try and unravel the ‘knots’ I felt I’d got myself into about what to do with the rest of my life
being a participant in Art of Alchemy with Kat River
thinking about coming back to my artistic practice
Childminder
Having some time back for myself is revelatory. We’re starting with 15 hours a week which is what the UK government supports us with. It’s not loads of time but I’ve felt huge surges of creative energy and flow because I can explore re-building who I am, what matters to me, and what I do.
Having two work ‘hats’ (an artist and an event designer) means that I’m constantly picking one up and putting one down. And maybe one day I’ll do a big old merger, but for this chapter it’s become clear; the ideas that have been coming in are from my artist brain. Spending days making endless Instagram content for my business that ends up being seen by 5 people is not on the agenda anymore!
I’m trying out focusing on what brings me joy, what is going to have a ripple effect for others, and what could help me pay the bills at the same time.
Heatwave in London
Getting a few more days of childcare support also coincided with about 10 days of HEAT. And not the fun kind. For the last few years London heat has felt a certain kind of unbearable HOT in the Summer - like sitting in the blast of a hairdrier when you step outside. So pair this with my first window to be ‘productive’ and you get - a woman sitting in her (not sexy) underwear in front of her laptop, sweating in the dark as it’s too hot to open the curtains.
Sadly our glitter-filled paddling pool from B&M took a bit of a battering on one of our spiky plants so we were down to one storey but we all managed to keep cool sitting in 2cm of water 😎
Seeds are starting to bloom - this year’s money saving mission
This year I was on a money saving mission when it came to the garden, as I had an inkling we might decided to move, so I’ve stuck to growing things from seed and re-using the Dahlia tubers from last year.
I always love it when the Sweet Peas are out and cut as many as possible for small vases to make the flat smell delicious.
The fence is now almost completely covered in white jasmine flowers. When the kids are down, I’m trying to spend as much time as possible grabbing a tea and inhaling the scent.
Limbo land
I’ve got mixed feelings about leaving the place that I’ve called home for the past 12 years. A lot has happened here. I’d love to meet the person I was when I moved in, in 2013 to bring that into focus.
We’ve found a place to go, not too far away but we’re in that total limbo of solicitors and paperwork, and weird-ass covenants from the middle ages to try and decode, so I won’t believe it will happen until we’re in. Hopefully more news to share in next month’s Splurge.
What’s getting fed down the brainpipe this month…
Reading 📖 :
All the Little Bird Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow - Particularly interested in reading about a mother’s relationship with her teenage daughter in this one, semi heart-breaking as I know this is on the horizon for me.
Motherkind by Zoe Blaskey - there are some good ideas in here, but sometimes with a lot of self-help books, I’ll read once and forget straight away. I might go back through this book one day and actually do the ‘work’ with a journal but I didn’t feel I had the headspace this month. Would still recommend to anyone trying to juggle life and motherhood.
Podcast 🎤:
Mel Robbins on Davina McCall’s Start Again, talking about the ‘Let Them’ theory.
Watching 📺:
We’ve finally got round to Severance Season 2, so sat down with all the fans on to watch the first episode. We did have to watch a 14 minute recap on Youtube first as we’d forgotten just about everything.
And I normally have something on the go just for me as Rob works a lot in the evenings but I try to be off my laptop by 8pm so I actually sleep. This backfired spectacularly with the last episode of The Handmaid’s Tale (final season), Rob said he heard me audibly gasping in shock 3 times, and the adrenaline produced kept me up til gone midnight 🫠