The Mumpreneur Diaries: Business, Babies or Bust - One Mother of a Year

Chapter 3 Sleepless Nights

Thursday 3 April 2008

You know that you’re a proper mumpreneur when you find yourself fixing your make-up in the dark in an underground car park using little more than Touche Éclat and a pair of blue Noddy pants, age 2-3.

I’m venturing out into the big wide world today. Often there aren’t just days but weeks when I don’t go much further than the edge of the village. But today I’m going up to town, to the smoke, to London. I’ve arranged to meet an old contact from my PR days who knows a bit about start-up businesses and how to go about getting them going.

The thrill of being allowed back into the world of the grown-ups (mothers’ corner at playgroup doesn’t count) is swiftly extinguished by yet another wardrobe crisis. That joey pouch is refusing to budge despite me spending the last four weeks pounding on the treadmill. Bosoms are also an issue, insofar as they don’t stay inside anything that’s not made of metres of cotton jersey. Shirts are a definite no-no as my cleavage is paying tribute to Debbie Does Dallas. I eventually drag on a dress which somehow manages to be both frumpy (hemline) and whoreish (neckline) at the same time. Hopefully the Pepto-Bismol-hued pashmina will distract my friend’s attention.

At least this time I remember the breast pads. Three weeks ago I was happily burbling away at Henry K on the radio show when I felt the telltale tingle under my armpits. This signals that I have exactly thirty seconds to deploy padding before the milk dam bursts and my top starts to darken in two very unmistakable ways. Halfway through dissecting the American Presidential Primaries I nonchalantly crossed my arms, hoping no one noticed me trying to stem the tide. I’m sure Henry thought it slightly odd that I kissed him goodbye and tried to leave the studio at the end of the show still with my arms firmly crossed over my chest.

My meeting today is instructive:

 Could I cope if lots of mums wanted to use the service straight away? (Probably, maybe, in fact no, not really.)

 Could I survive financially if no one used it straight away? (See 1.)

 Had I thought about marketing, had I developed a distinct brand and did I have a budget set aside for it? (Yes, no and although I have a percentage of revenues set aside for marketing, 10 per cent of nothing is still nothing so, no.)

 Was there a distinct division of labour between Partner in Crime and me to establish roles, boundaries, remuneration, etc. (No, in fact I haven’t seen her in ages. Must do something about that.)

 Had I arranged my tax, insurance, qualifications, criminal record checks, etc.? (No, no, no and um, no. Oh dear.)

There’s a saying: ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.’ Well, there are precious few solutions that come out of my meeting but a massive list of problems. At least I had a fairly comprehensive to-do list. I suppose I should be depressed that I thought I was good to go and it seems that I’m not even 5 per cent of the way to getting going on my own. But strangely I’m not. Now I’ve got my list of things to get on with, and if they’re all completed satisfactorily, I should have me a business.

Saturday 5 April 2008

Boy One has a date at his friend’s birthday party. Twenty screaming children aged three and four rampaging round a playbarn fuelled by cheesy puffs, cake and lemonade. This doesn’t frighten me as much as perhaps it should because:

 it’s someone else’s party,

 in someone else’s building, and

 in two hours Boy One will experience a massive sugar

 crash and lie comatose and drooling in front of The Lion King until it’s time for an early bed.

Therefore I can look forward to a longish period of peace and quiet this evening. I think I may sleep. Haven’t done that for a while.

Sunday 6 April 2008

Party was a great success except Boy One is now determined to have his own bash there in September. This will, I fear, be expensive and painful. However it has made me realise something about starting up this concierge service. Managing people doesn’t bother me, the tax situation is baffling but I’m sure I’ll figure it out. Setting up websites and whatnot is actually quite fun (new career as an IT wonk? Not impossible). But, by offering a party helper service as part of our package, it dawns on me that I could be stuck in a kids’ party filled with hyperactive three-year-olds every Saturday from now until the hereafter. This is terrifying.

I also give Boy One his biannual haircut today. I usually wait until 40-year-olds start saying, ‘What a pretty girl!’ before deciding he needs a trim. We’re going for the long-locked surfer dude look at the moment. The haircutting experience usually consists of a large bar of chocolate to keep him still, large quantities of spray-on conditioner to get the dreadlocks out and the kitchen scissors.

So far I’ve entertained the idea of starting up as a PR, childminder, doula, radio presenter and website manager. I don’t think we’ll be adding hairdresser to that list.

Wednesday 9 April 2008

We make yet another pilgrimage to the venerated grandmother north of the border. It’s nice to visit the old home town. In a life where I’ve picked up two fathers, four mothers, two half-siblings and three step-siblings, seven schools and twelve family homes – and that’s just up to age 16 – it’s nice to know that Gma and Gpa stayed put in the same village for all of my nearly 35 years. Gpa’s moved on to stay with some floozies with white dresses and wings and a big bloke with a beard, but Gma’s feet are still firmly planted on Scottish soil (as opposed to in it).

Indeed, there is much to love about the old family homestead: discovering an old printing kit I was given for Christmas 1983, ink all dried up and letters missing; or finding the electronic keyboard Gpa made for me out of wood, a sheet of aluminium, some wires and a battery bigger than his fist. The benefit of having a relative with a double first in Physics and Maths and part of the team that developed RADAR was that he could take a bundle of wires, wood and metal and make something really quite wonderful. You can take your Barbie, I’ll have my home-made stylophone any day.

Unfortunately, despite being fascinated by computers and the internet, my Gpa selfishly failed to install broadband into the bungalow before he popped off to electrify the angels’ harps. So here I am armed with a laptop and a feature on toddler play to file by tomorrow and no way of getting on the internet, not even with dial-up.

We are but minutes from Silicon Glen where many of the IT advances were made in the 1980s and 1990s but I can’t get a signal on my mobile or connect to the internet. With my web habit this is a serious problem. Nor does Gma’s village have anything like an internet café. It has a café but the only cookies they’re interested in have chocolate chips and go nicely with a cuppa.

In the end I resort to filing copy the way so many hacks did before the war – over the phone, using my voice instead of the beeeee-awwwww-bipbip-beeeennnnnnggg of the modem.

I’m also too embarrassed to do this direct to the editor of the magazine. After all why pay a freelancer to dictate to you something that you may just as well have knocked up yourself? Instead I call Middle Sister who is handily at her desk in a super-cool sports and music marketing agency in London.

I wonder what they make of:

‘“Your toddler will enjoy shouting rude words like POO and WILLY”—got that?’

‘Do you want me to capitalise all of poo and willy?’

‘Yes, please.’

I hope her boss in their nice open plan office is understanding.

Tuesday 15 April 2008

The trip to Scotland was nice but it puts us all out of sorts. Perhaps it’s the seven-hour slog up and down the M1 in the middle of the night that does it. You can’t contemplate a journey like that during the day. Bored children with permanently full bladders make for slow progress. And during the brief moments when you are actually making time up the motorway the children are bouncing up and down in the back, hyped on sugar from the endless chocolate bribery. Boy Two is a little young for the sugar rush but Boy One has a surprisingly long reach for someone strapped into a car seat.

So an overnight drive it is, speeding through the wee hours down the coast, listening to mad programmes on Radio 2. The Husband ponders why stations insist on playing bagpipe music or Wagner when you really need a bit of Bon Jovi or The Eagles to keep you going. But the children are both snoring peacefully in the back so we have to be grateful for small mercies.

At one point we both get hit by a dose of the snoozes so we need something more peppy to keep us going. The Husband has stored some comedy on his MP3 player so we plug in a bit of Billy Connolly to blow the cobwebs away. We’re right in the middle of a lovely juicy skit about inventive sex, in which Billy C gets himself in a right old froth and shouts, ‘FUUUUCCK, Fucking FUUUUCK!’ with great gusto, when a little voice from the back pipes up:

‘He said “fucking”, Mummy. Has he got naughty manners?’

I find myself completely incapable of speech. I’m trying so hard to stop myself from laughing that I clamp my mouth shut and my eyes well up. The pressure threatens to blow my ears off. It’s just as well there are few other cars about because I’m finding it hard to see. Eventually the Husband recovers his composure long enough to say:

‘Very naughty manners, darling. Now, how about a bit of “Puff the Magic Dragon”?’

The humorous interlude is unfortunately short-lived. Every time we do this trip the combination of petrol station food, recycled air and sleep deprivation leaves us all twitchy and tetchy. Back home the Husband starts to pick on the state of the house, a niggle that then swiftly descends into the usual argument over money or, more importantly, the lack of it:

‘I just can’t stand all this clutter, it makes me claustrophobic, ’ he complains.

‘It’s only Boy Two’s toys and he’ll grow out of these soon, then we can get rid of them.’

‘But can’t you put them somewhere?’

‘We don’t really have anywhere to put them, but I have ordered some storage boxes to go under Boy One’s bed. When they arrive we could stuff a lot in them.’

‘How much did they cost?’

‘About £80. Why?’

‘You shouldn’t be spending any money. We don’t even know if I’m going to have a job in a month. You don’t seem to have got anywhere with this business thing.’

‘It takes time to get going.’

‘You haven’t even got a name yet.’

‘The name’s the most important thing, I’ve got to get that right. And what about you? We’d have had that cheaper mortgage if you’d got your paperwork to me in time.’

With that I deal the decisive blow. The Husband is on my case in a second if I let a credit card bill go past the payment date. He is an arch-interest avoider. And yet when we had to bail from our mortgage company last month because the monthly payment went stratospheric, he dithered for so long about getting his proof of salary to the new one that we lost the low percentage deal. I managed to secure another one that was only a tiny bit more expensive but not before blubbing down the phone to the operator. She must have thought I was a victim of spousal abuse:

‘It’s just [sob] that my husband won’t help me.’

‘I’m sorry, we can’t get that rate back. The system’s automated.’

‘But we had everything, all the papers but his and he wouldn’t pull his finger out [sob]. Can’t you do anything?’

‘Sorry.’

The new deal we finally secured wasn’t a great deal more expensive than the first but I now have some great ammunition to shut the Husband up when he starts nagging. I’m not sure how long I can get away with it for, though.

Thursday 17 April 2008

Returning from the shops I find a waif and stray on my doorstep. I often find friends and acquaintances loitering on my doorstep as it’s a conveniently warm place to hide if you miss your train, what with the station being barely a two-minute walk away. Anecdotally, ours seems to be the coldest station in England with an icy wind howling past the platforms as frequently as the trains. Of course, being of good Scots stock and naturally well-insulated, I don’t find this a problem at all. I am, however, surrounded by soft, southern Sassenachs.

Perched on kerb is in fact the Partner in Crime’s husband, the Family Friendly Businessman. Though he’s often away for days at a time on business, when he is home he’s a real hand-son dad and you can tell from his expression that he genuinely loves kids. Mind you, he’s quite slender so he clearly couldn’t eat a whole one.

I invite him in for a coffee and small talk while we wait for the telltale horn sounding at the bottom of the garden that tells him his next train has arrived. He reveals that he and the Partner in Crime have been discussing this mumciergery idea already. As it will affect his family finances as well as mine, and therefore he has a pretty big say in whether or not she goes ahead with it, I tentatively ask him if he thinks it’s a goer, really not wanting to hear the wrong answer.

But Family Friendly Businessman thinks that a mumciergery should fly with no problem. But…

And then he spends the next half-hour coming up with all sorts of questions that I have no idea how to answer. It shows how little I’d thought this through. If I charge a booking fee but I’m not there to enforce it, what’s to stop people bypassing me and going straight to the source? Have I got a criminal record check and do I realise how hard it is to get one? What about insurance – what would happen if a child choked while in my care? Could I cope with offering all these services at once – shouldn’t I think about starting out smaller?

I try to keep smiling in the face of this onslaught but in my head all I can think is ‘What the hell have I let myself in for?’ Finally, the horn sounds and Family Friendly Businessman shoots out through the door to catch his train. I’m left with a head swarming with more questions than answers. To shut them out I self-medicate with a large glass of wine and crappy telly. Am I going to have to rethink the whole thing?

Monday 21 April 2008

Out of the blue a child modelling agency gets in touch about the email I sent them weeks ago. They’re interested in getting Boy One on their books and would I mind bringing him for an ‘audition’. This sounds like a sensible option while I wait to get everything else off the ground, until I read further.

Would I also mind paying a couple of hundred quid for his portfolio shots, oh, and his insurance premium. Plus, they can’t really guarantee he would be used in the campaign shots that they have in mind for him as the client will ‘order’ a few boys to come along and only use the one that looks best on camera. Apparently you’ll get paid a nominal fee for them to go along, but only the boy who is to be used in the campaign will get his hands on the moolah.

Due to the ongoing failure of the new mortgage company to provide us with the actual mortgage, money is getting a little tight. I got away with insisting to the Husband that we spend a few hundred pounds teaching me how to deal with screaming women but I don’t think he’s going to be happy about funding the next Naomi Campbell (I can’t think of any well-known male ‘Naomis’ – perhaps that should tell me something about Boy One’s potential career trajectory as a model?). I send the agency a polite thanks but no thanks on this occasion, making up a spurious story about getting over a bug and not being in the most cooperative mood. I initially wondered about pretending that he had chicken pox but thought better of it as they’d instantly think ‘spotty, scarred’ and therefore modelling career aborted before it began. Perhaps with a bit more money in the kitty in the next few weeks I’ll call them back to get that portfolio done, but not right now. We need to eat.

And despite the flow of funds dwindling to a trickle, we are eating rather well. I am in love with Ocado. As I’m perpetually tied to the computer anyway, I decide to shop online instead of schlepping to the supermarket every day. I’m going to try to train myself to do the weekly shop, rather than the daily impulse buy. And, apart from the fact that I’m wedded to posh shopping, I love that they’ll deliver for free at 10 pm after the kids are in bed. The Husband is mollified by the fact that they claim to be no more expensive than Tesco and Boy One thinks Santa comes every week now. If he’s refusing to go to bed I say, ‘You have to be asleep when the man with the van comes or he’ll realise you’re awake and won’t leave any treaties for the treaty basket.’ Oh Mr Sandman, bring me some bream, and the sweetest taters, that I’ve ever seen…

Tuesday 22 April 2008

I get my first taste of what it will be like to run the mumcierge service. One of Boy One’s friends came over to be child-minded today. The Very Capable Childminder had to go to an appointment so I took her only other ward. Normally with a house full of three-year-olds, I’d let them tear around the house and garden, refereeing fights from a distance, lazily blowing kisses from the sofa to kiss anything better and surveying the damage long after everyone has gone home. However, because I’m ‘on’ in a professional capacity, I feel I have to loiter no more than 5 feet from their every position. This means marshalling games of ‘bonk each other on the head with a tennis racket’, ‘lob the ball into next door’s garden’ and ‘running in circles really fast until you fall over in the funniest way possible’. For its novelty value it’s amusing but each game rapidly becomes crashingly boring. The Very Capable Childminder earns her money twelvefold. Just don’t tell her that or she’ll put her rates up.

Sunday 27 April 2008

From tomorrow, Boy One will be at pre-school in the afternoons as well as the mornings. It’s going to be bliss. This means I will be able to achieve more than simply the journey to and from the school, one supermarket shop and one nappy change before the three-year-old whirlwind returns. I might even be able to – gulp – get some work done. If only Boy Two would sleep! Goodness knows I can. Aren’t babies supposed to be sleeping for around 16 hours in 24 at this point. Now, I know that I’m not getting that much sleep, so why won’t he stick to what the book says? Honestly, can’t he read!

Monday 28 April 2008

I got back from an interview at 9.45 am and am already so tired I don’t know what to do with the day. BBC Breakfast rather deliciously wanted me on at 7ish to talk about the insanity that is Nannycams – plastic trinkets that ‘hide’ a camera where you can check up on the hired help. I have never seen anything that so obviously screams WE’RE WATCHING YOU! If you’re so scared about leaving your children alone, don’t. And if you have to, do your research, don’t just abandon them with the local psycho and hope for the best, secure in the knowledge that if they’re being slapped six ways from Saturday, you can watch it all happen 40 miles and two hours away.

Despite a background as a cynical hackette, I still get excited about the prospect of being on the goggle box (if TV is a goggle box, does that make a computer the google box?). The first time I was on TV it was about men being useless at home. I suggested on air that they weren’t and that division of labour was key. However, as my maths isn’t up to squat, division of labour at our house comes down to: work divided by 2 = emptying dishwasher by husband + rest of everything by me.