I've Coined a New Working Mum Concept- Baby Pooling!

Well there I was all excited, thinking I had coined a new phrase ‘baby pooling’, but when I Googled it to see if it already existed, it seems some Chinese mums have got there before me. I say that, but there is only one tiny paragraph I could find on baby pooling and somewhat dissimilar to the idea I had in mind. I thought that this idea would be all over America with city moms etc. but apparently not, so I will take all the credit!

My ‘baby pooling’ concept comes from a slightly different angle. The Chinese article was about sharing the parenting of children. Mine is about allowing you to have the best of both worlds- staying accessible to your child during the day and earning money/pursuing your freelance career at the same time.

When Esmé hit 7 months, the end of maternity leave was looming closer and closer. Many of my new mum friends were heading back to work and were feeling quite emotionally torn. I had already decided that I wasn’t going to go back to full time teaching and that I wanted to focus my time building my writing career.

As a freelance writer, work is very flexible. I can work from home while Esmé is napping, in the evenings and on weekends when John is home. However, there are those times when I have just gotten into a certain frame of mind and the creative ideas are rolling when I hear the wake-up cry from upstairs. This is what led me to come up with the idea of baby pooling. You’ve heard of car pooling I’m sure? Well my idea for baby pooling is that mums who work from home can pair up with other mums and baby share.

Here’s how it works: You meet at an agreed daily time, I think work hours work best so that you can stick to a routine, which keeps you in a professional frame of mind. You might decide to meet at 9am at one person’s house. One mum looks after both babies from 9am-12 noon. While she is with the babies, the other mum is working in another room. At 12, everyone can have lunch together and have some play time/ story time etc. Then from 1pm-4pm the other mum works for her 3 hours. This would give each mum 15 hours per week without any daycare costs and it would mean that breastfeeding mums could carry on feeding. You would just pop your dependent other on the boob for 10-15 mins and then back to work you go. The hours could also be tweaked so that mums with older children could pick them up from school. Or the mum ‘in charge’ for those hours could do the school run if the mums lived in the same school district.

This is something I am looking to set in place as work picks up pace. The concept works well for mums like me, who just need a laptop and internet connection to work. If there are mums who need their own home base to work from, hopefully they would be able to pair up with a mum who is more flexible in terms of location. What do you think ladies? Is it something you think could work for you- a daily timetable, access to your child at any point during the day, no day care fees, continuing to breastfeed on demand? 

Why Mums Love Salt's Mill

I recently had a lunch date with a group of local mums to Salt’s Mill in Saltaire. For those of you unfamiliar with this venue, it’s a beautifully restored, 4-storey mill which houses a large collection of the artist David Hockney’s work, as well as an excellent children’s and adults’ bookstore, designer kitchen ware store, a bespoke jewellers, a diner, a café, an outdoor clothing range and an antique dealers. Retail heaven. Enough said.

Esmé saw her first Hockney there at the tender age of 1 week old as John and I raced around frantically trying to find Christmas presents. Madness I know, but having been put on limited mobility in the last 2 months of gestation (and moving house!), I had left myself 2 shopping days to buy the majority of our Christmas presents. And the one place I knew I would not find endless swarms of  eleventh-hour men frantically rugby tackling their way to the nearest shelves, was Salt’s Mill.

The mill is one of my favourite ‘Me Places’ in Bradford. The calm instantly descends when I walk in, and the first thing to hit my senses is the smell of the freshly cut lilies arranged in over-sized vases throughout each level. After wakeful hours on end at home with a newborn looking at the same walls, the sense of light and space is like a wheatgrass shot for the soul.

But the main reason I am recommending the Mill as a mum favourite, apart from the stationery porn (don’t get me started!), is the space. We arrived at the Salt’s Mill Diner with 5 prams and parked them all up around one of the round tables without having to “Sorry”, “Excuse me”, “Do you mind if I get past” our way through. Not only that but they must have at least 20 high chairs, Oxo highchairs no less- must have cost them a tidy sum, and we managed to pull 3 of those around us too. I cannot think of another coffee shop I have been to in and around Bradford that can so easily facilitate such a large group of mums.

There is also ample free parking to the rear of the Mill with a few hundred metres walk to the side entrance with pram access, which is currently being renovated to improve accessibility.

On the down side, the baby changing facilities are at the other end of the level, and Esmé managed to need 3 nappy changes in the 2 hours we were there! However, it didn’t bother me too much as it gave me the excuse to peruse the poetry section on my way there and back. I just had to remind myself I had come with friends.

(Don’t forget to treat yourself to the chocolate milk shake made only from ice cream and milk. One reason alone to make it worth the drive.)

www.saltsmill.org.uk

A Bit About Me

I’m writing this blog to connect with new mums like you. Mums who lie awake at night, our smart phones under the duvet, Googling our way through all the baffling idiosyncrasies of babyhood. Amongst all the how-many-weeks-is-he/she-nows out there inspecting you up and down, there is also thankfully a huge amount of mutual support, advice and encouragement. I’m here to add my constructive drop to the ocean. 

My name is Natalie Rees, I’m in my early 30s and over the past 6 short years (the older you get, the quicker they fly), I have come to call Bradford my home. Originally from a small town in Tipperary, Ireland, I moved to Bradford on a career break in 2006 to study and to do community outreach work. But in the words of Robert Frost: ‘Knowing how way leads on to way…’ I never made it back. Before the switch to copywriting, I had been working as a primary teacher up to that time and had just been promoted to Deputy head at the age of 25. It was a huge accomplishment for someone of my age. But having survived a house fire, which destroyed all of my earthly possessions, it really made me re-evaluate my outlook on life and what I wanted to do with it. I saw it as a way of existence ridding me of all the ‘stuff’ I had acquired, physically and emotionally, without having to cough up a 10 week smartly sum to my nearest New Age centre. I left the comfort and security of the known, packed my 15kg Ryanair baggage allowance and set off for Bradford. 

In 2009, I graduated from the University of Manchester with a Masters in Creative Writing in hand, married one of the reasons I planted my feet in Bradford, John, and our beautiful daughter Esmé was born on a snowy night in December 2011. I love to read, but I am admittedly a bit of a book snob. I generally stick to Faber and Penguin for my staple diet. You will often find me at Yorkshire poetry readings, bringing the average age and hair colour down by about 20 years. I also love walking in the countryside and forests and my latest addition to my ‘mild exercise’ regime has been a turquoise mountain bike (it was donated).  Three years’ ago I picked up the violin again, having learnt it for a year or two in my teens, with a goal to get to Grade 5. I proudly reached this tickable target last year. I think my skills will cap there. The theory gets too mathematical for my brain beyond that. Plus, my music producer husband says my sense of rhythm isn’t precise enough to take it further. But he is happy to spend many an evening tinkering around with folk songs on his guitar with me and I am happy enough with that.

Along with continuing to teach in primary schools across Bradford, I also became a freelance copywriter and steadily built up my client base over the past number of years. On maternity leave, I've decided that this is where I want to solely place my energies (it's been a long time coming), and I now work as a freelancer.

So that's the tip of the iceberg for now. Enjoy the blog!