BALANCING WORK & LIFE

Being a mum is the most fulfilling and hardest aspect of my life…

There is so much talk about “work/life” balance, so many inspirational speakers out there who preach the “agile worker”, not needing to work 9-5, the “4-day week”, and a general feeling of being able to have it all… Ah don’t get me wrong, I get inspired by these talks I feel like I can take over the world! with my child in tow of course – sure my decision to leave my previous job for a more demanding role (one which involves travelling) was made after I started listening to inspirational speakers… However I sometimes ask myself what really work/life balance means for me who invented the phrase? Do I truly de-stress? Offload? If not, how to go about it?

We recently moved to a completely new part of London and have been trying to settle-in. This clashed with the demands of my new job, brain has been so clogged up that I find myself always catching up with work. I find myself eating at my desk, not exercising not even yoga!, not updating my blog, I’m bringing work home only to end up worrying about not hitting deadlines – as you all know, these all lead to sleepless nights…

I remember being excited about the move – a bigger place meant more space for my bubbly 3yr to play and I could get an au pair to live with us; Dream #2 is taking forever, apparently many of these women do not want “non-traditional” English families. In addition, I’ve struggled with finding fulltime childcare in the new area, many of the places were fully booked or only had morning/afternoon sessions so I had to eat my words and go for a childminder. This led to another palava – the lovely lady closes shop at 6pm everyday… Just imagine the looks I get when I start packing my bag to leave the office at 4:45pm.

Good thing is I manage to pack some fun into our evenings and weekends; social media generally helps to liven mummy’s mood – Snapchat for the evening (mornings too!)sharing of our random moments of craziness. Then going to the local park at the weekends, I’ve also discovered alot of fun activities just within walking distance – benefits of living in surbubia. We have Jungle Monkeyz which is a compact playgym, a swimming pool, ballet, percussion class and the good ol’ library so it’s not all bad news 🙂

As long as I make family my priority, then it’s all worth it… right? Till next time folks!

Temi ♥