work life balance

i've been thinking about this post for months now, thinking about how this blog used to be pretty balanced between my family life and my work life and how over the past couple of years i write less and less about my family/kids and more and more about work. and why this is so. manda wrote an couple of posts in a similar vein this week and really struck some chords with me, making me want to tackle this subject personally. there are so many reasons really.

when mae was a baby i wrote about her a lot and i love to go back and read those posts but as she got older, i started to feel a bit uneasy about sharing her in this completely-open-to-the-entire-world space. i'm not really much of a worrier about most things but the idea that someone could walk up to my kid and offer her her favourite toy/food or convince her that they know her by citing numerous details about her life kind of freaked me out. i know this is highly unlikely and truthfully she is pretty much always with me anyway but that's going to change in the next few years as she starts school. and then she'll be able to read this blog and what i've written about her and that presents it's own set of problems.

and that's just a small part of it because there is also the fact that as my kids get older i find it harder to write about them. their personalities are so much broader and more expansive than i could ever capture in words and if i can't explain something properly, as i never could their quirks and foibles and sweetness, i tend to just not write about it at all. which kind of sucks because i really want to capture these years and the girls as they are today, i know they are only going to change and change and change again.

these days i mostly share kid and family related stuff on my personal page on facebook, where i know exactly who is looking at it (i have all of my settings to share with friends only) and my family back home can get regular updates. this works perfectly for me but i realise it does leave this blog a little stale. it's hard because on top of the reasons above, i only have limited time/brain power to write posts and i really do have so much maze & vale stuff to share, i really love my job and am excited by the things i'm working on. at home, my work and family time are pretty divided - when the kids are home and awake, i really don't do any maze & vale stuff, aside from checking email or writing a quick facebook update. every once in awhile mae will hang out with me in my "snowing room" as she calls it, to watch tom & jerry on youtube while i heat set fabric or do a small print run, that's about the extent of the overlap. but i'd love to be a bit more balanced in this space. just need to find a way to make it all comfortably fit*.


*here's a start: in order to buy time to write this post i have given sophie a small bowl of ice chips to consume while she watches ABC2 and bought mae a dora & diego sticker game for the ipod touch.