Friday, October 7, 2011

Babies & Business

Oh, my much-neglected blog! You know it's been too long when you can't remember your password to log in to blogger.com. As I mentioned in my last post, life has been busy lately and these last couple months are no exception. We have, I suppose, two newsworthy changes in our lives.

The first being that for the past four months or so I've been working on opening my own little shop called PuddleJump Designs on etsy.com selling baby blankets and quilts I make from home. I've been sewing for the past couple years, thanks to my mom buying me a sewing machine (thanks, mom!) and have enjoyed sewing curtains for our home and a patchwork blanket for each of the boys. I accumulated a lot of leftover fabric from these little projects and considered making extra blankets out of them to try to sell somehow, but could never really figure out how to sell them other than on craigslist or facebook and neither of those options appealed to me. Then a friend launched her own baby blanket shop on etsy and inspired me to do the same. I've really enjoyed selecting fabric and piecing together creative projects, just me and my sewing machine. And for awhile I even found it hard to sleep at night dreaming up my etsy shop; I've been so excited. It's a passion I'm so glad I realized and hope for great success!

We also are expecting a baby early April! This is our third and final "hurrah." I always imagined myself in a large family scenario, kind of like 7th Heaven. This was my idea of our family before we had any kids! Now we're hoping we can just manage with three. I know the first few months will be pure survival mode, and simply getting out of the house by myself with three kids five and under - and not in our pj's - will be my only daily goal for quite awhile. And I'm okay with that, with life becoming a little more chaotic and out-of-control than I prefer, for the purpose of the long-term big picture for our family. I can't wait for large family gatherings on holidays complete with daughters-in-law (and maybe a son-in-law??) and grandchildren at our cottage in the country - you know, when we strike it rich during our empty-nest phase! And it'll take several years of our lives turned upside down during the baby phase to reach that big picture. So... here we go! Let the chaos begin. Again.