People say it’s great that I can bring my baby with me to work and how lucky I am to have a job like this. (Personally I think those of you who get 1 year of maternity leave are lucky!) But it took a couple years of planning to make this happen. Here is my story.
I studied music and earned a piano performance degree at university, so it was pretty much guaranteed that I would be self-employed. When I got pregnant the first time my husband and I thought it would be ideal that I could continue to teach piano lessons out of the house. I think this works for some people, however in reality this didn’t prove to be ideal for us.
I started working when our daughter was 6 weeks old. I worked for about 3 hrs every night, teaching in the living room between 6pm-9pm. I didn’t know that it is very common for infants to be most fussy in the evenings, and I didn’t know that many newborns tend to prefer their mothers over their fathers, nor that our child would have COLIC! All I can say is, my poor husband! The baby would cry the whole time, and I could hear it while I was trying to work. It was very hard on myself, my husband, and the baby. And when you are charging someone an hourly rate for a service, you can’t just leave the room for 10-15 min. to go nurse your baby. We somehow made it through that first year and miraculously we are still married. It was so tough that we vowed to space our children at least 3 years apart so that we would have time to recover.
In the meantime, I started selling cloth diapers working out of the home when the baby was 6 months old. (She was napping for long periods of time during the day and I was stuck at home!) I started daydreaming about having a store where I could bring my baby with me to work and all the cool products I could sell and community events I could host.
Fast forward 2 years, and we started thinking about having baby #2. I was still doing the cloth diaper business out of the house and had faith that if I opened a storefront I could make it work. I also promised my husband that I would never put us through that ever again so I needed a new source of income. I knew I wouldn’t be eligible for maternity benefits so I decided that a store where we could bring our babies with us to work would be my solution.
I opened Sweetheart Diapers & More in June 2010 and our second child was born in October 2011, so it gave me almost a year and a half to get the store running smoothly and find an awesome employee to take over for 1 month when the baby was born. Tina, my employee, is exactly what I had envisioned the perfect employee to be at the store. She is a cloth diapering, babywearing, breastfeeding mother who is friendly, trustworthy, knowledgeable, intelligent, patient, reliable, and creative! (I could go on with more adjectives, but I think you get the point). And she brings her daughter with her to work, who is currently almost 1.5 years old and is the most adorable little girl.
When my son was 4 weeks old I started going back in to work. (The business can only run for so long without the owner around, unfortunately.) The good thing about newborns is that all he needs is to be with me! He breastfeeds and likes to be in a sling all day, so it really doesn’t matter whether we’re at the store or at home. Just like my daughter was our cloth diaper model 3 years ago when I first started out, now my son is our babywearing model! If you come into the store when I’m working, most likely I will have him in a sling or wrap.
Bringing baby to work has its pros and cons, but what I like is that since I have to work, at least I don’t have to choose between working and being with my baby. And after all, I think it makes sense to walk through the door of a baby store and to see – a baby!
