Balancing work and family

When we first started making pendants, we had no idea where it would take us. In the beginning, it was great. I'd package orders in the morning for an hour or two. Then at night, after the girls went to bed, Mark & I would make pendants for those orders and a couple for back stock. There were extra hours in the day for hanging out with the girls.

I remember sitting at the island with Mark, late one night making pendants. We would ask each other, "I wonder what Christmas will be like?" Wondering if we'd be busy or not. Well, Christmas was busy! It was great. However, there were many, many late nights. We'd wake up and start working at about 7 am packaging, shipping, emailing, paperwork, etc., and finish making pendants between 12 and 1 am. It was really rough on Mark since he's teaching early morning seminary. (Now, he has a team teacher, so he only teaches 3 days a week.) Sometime during the day we would eat, hang out with the girls, and hmmm, that's about all. The week after Christmas business really slowed down. It was a nice break. But 2 weeks later we were busy again. People buying online, wholesale orders coming in, and our rep sending orders from the gift show she had just returned from.

I took a photo of our largest wholesale order before we packaged them up. This is for an online bead company. Now, I'm not a good photographer like my friend Lillie, so you may have to squint a little so it looks better.

I love working at home. It's great not having to do my hair everyday if I don't feel like it. And I can wear my jammies if I don't feel like getting dressed (or really because I haven't had a chance to hang up the clean clothes). It's nice to work here and be able to help the girls with school work (well, just the older one). It's nice to have my husband working here too. We balance each other out pretty well. He does his stuff & I do mine. Sometimes I recruit him to help out - like today when I needed to get 3 wholesale orders packaged before the mailman came. Yay, we made it!


The only drawback from working at home with my little ones is that sometimes they don't understand that I might have a deadline (like getting stuff into the mail bin before the mail man comes). It's hard to say, "in a minute...mommy's working" which I'm sure I say way too often.


In order to stay balanced, we always have breakfast and dinner together. We listen to the scriptures on the computer while we eat breakfast and then say our family prayer together. At dinner, we always eat together - even if it's at Taco Bell! We make a point to have Family Home Evening together on Sunday night (easier for us than Mondays). If we don't have a lesson, then we'll have a fun (but short) learning activity. We had FHE last night where we learned about nutrition. We talked about it during dinner - the foods that are healthy and not so healthy. Then we went to Winco Foods to buy fruit and veggies so we can make juice in our new juicer. The girls had fun picking out the fruit. They even helped carry in a bag from the car. Tonight we'll make some juice.


I was reading a friend's blog the other day (after an exceptionally busy for me) and she talked about the little things. Those little moments. My goal this year has been to have more little moments with my family. I grew up as an only child with a single parent. I spent a lot of time in day care and then alone at home after school when I was old enough. I feel very blessed to be able to work at home and be with my family all day.

Balancing home and work is a challenge while working at home, but we're making it work (I hope).