About Becoming Domestic
April 2008
Below is the original About page for the Becoming Domestic blog written when I first started writing a couple of years ago having moved with our little kiddies from East London to rural Worcestershire in search of a better quality, slower pace of life on a reduced income.
Two years on we are now parents to two rambunctious five year olds and a 12 week old baby, we run a successful internet software business ‘Siftware‘ with local offices and three full-time employees in addition to ourselves. I primarily manage the house, money and the children but work a few hours a week for Siftware doing bookeeping and office management and when I have a tiny amount of free time I try to keep this blog up to date with a fresh post. Bealers, my husband, is doing a sterling job at keeping his clients happy, thinking of innovative ideas, managing Siftware team. He is also becoming known on the UK internet scene as a competent speaker on his areas of technical expertise and still finds time to manage our greenhouse /vegetable garden, takes the children swimming most weekends, cooks a few times a week and gets away for a couple of annual windsurfing weekends with friends.
The twins are attending the local village school which they both love. We can’t believe what a positive experience of education they are receiving. Just twenty children are in their class, none of whom have special educational needs and alongside their main class teacher they have at least three other classroom assistants. They have learnt far more in the six months they have been there than they would have learnt with me at home had I taken reponsibility for their education at home, as originally planned. The friends they and I have made via the school are all lovely.
When we moved away from London in mid 2006 we rented our three bedroomed house out to individual tenents and paid a local friend a monthly fee to manage the property and its residents. This ensured we had a place to return to if our move to the countryside didn’t work out as well as we had hoped. By the end of 2007 it was clear that the move had been sucessful, the new business was thriving and because our original fixed rate mortgage on the London house was due to switch to a higher rate of interest we sold the property and have continued to live in our rented house.
2008 is likely to be a year where I am mainly concentrating on rearing our new little baby, continuing to become even more domestic by juggling the needs of everyone in the house, the house itself, making sure we achieve our financial goals by living within our means. We have several caravanning holidays booked into the diary, loads of weekends with friends and family coming to visit. I really do count my many blessings several times a day for our existence as it is now.
September 2006
Hi and welcome to Becoming Domestic the blog of Cathie Ackroyd (a.k.a ‘Ackers’ to most people and ‘Mummy’ to two very special little ones).
We are a family of four who have recently left London and full time office-based jobs in order to live more simply in rural surroundings and spend as much time as possible with our rapidly growing three year old twins.
Prior to our move in July 2006 I had very little experience of being a full-time mother and homemaker as I returned to work with great glee when the children were just 7 month old babies.
This blog serves as a record of my voyage of discovery as I ‘become domestic’ trying my very best in my new role as trainee domestic goddess, reading all that the local library and the internet has to offer on the subject of household management, parenting, living on a budget, living simply and being self-sufficient. It is here that I will share my successes, my hints and tips, my questions with the answers as I discover them.
Just 2 months ago my husband Darren and I both had very good salaries, enjoyed eating out a couple of times a week, frequent babysitters, regular foreign travel, new clothes, shoes, gifts and treats whenever we fancied them, a cleaner came twice a week to our house and the fridge was perpetually stocked with tasty ready-meals. The rearing of our very small children was effectively outsourced to a local private day nursery where the children thrived but as their parents we only saw them briefly to get them dressed and to bathe them at the end of the day (before 8am and after 6pm). One of the many final straws which came in quick succession was the children learning to speak with a strong local accent picked up from their very sweet nursery carers - not in itself an offensive accent but too strange to have your 2 year old sounding so different to their parents.
Darren and I made a somewhat hasty decision to somehow remove ourselves from the relentless rat-race during fallout from the horrors of the London Underground bombings (July 2005) and the run-up to having to make hard decisions about where the children would be educated.
I did a lot of reading about home education as an alternative option to the local primary school and during this research I read a lot about UK families who placed the environment their kids grew up in as a very high priority and had sacrificed money in favour of quality of life. Not one of them regretted making this shift.
Suddenly the crime, the traffic and the noise of London became overwhelming. The fact that all of our high salaries were spent at the end of the month lead us to realise we’d be no worse off finanically if we earned very little but spent a great deal less on childcare, the high mortgage, fancy treats and food which had been cooked by other people.
At the time of writing (Sept. 2006) we are renting a beautiful Victorian house in the heart of England with fields and hills in to look at from every window. We have a large garden, very few neighbours except rabbits and cows and I look after the children and house fulltime while Darren runs an internet software business (www.siftware.co.uk) with local offices and staff.
Contrary to the beliefs of some of the colleagues I’ve left behind in the City of London my new role is far from easy. It is a fairly steep learning & stamina curve as I learn to keep a family of four well fed, clean, dressed and happy on a budget from the moment I wake up until I drop from physical exhaustion at night. I no longer have people patting metaphorically on the back to say ‘Good Job!’ for a project delivered on time neither do I have weekly status meetings with anyone to point out areas I should focus on for the next week. Quite the contrary my small daughter has suddenly started saying ‘I not talking to you ‘cos you not my friend anymore’ if I do something to upset her…
The impetus for writing this blog is to serve as an inspiration to other working parents who have an idea that they could or should reduce their working hours or give up fulltime employment in order to spend more time dedicated to their families.
For us it has turned out to be the best thing we have ever done we are leading a fabulous life. Yes, we aren’t dressed as smartly as we used to be and see fewer people but our kids are no longer pasty faced, toddlers are looked after by various 19 year olds but instead rosy cheeked little people who already know far more about how the world works than they did at the begining of the summer.
I’m thrilled at how lucky we are to have carried out this huge change and feel no pangs of regret at all for leaving my former life behind. Indeed I now feel a huge relief that I will not carry the burden of guilt for what might have been had we continued to work as employees Mon-Fri while our kids were elsewhere.
It is also worth mentioning how much stronger a couple Darren and I have become since we embarked on this journey. Before our move the majority of our communication was conducted via email from our offices now we have three meals a day togther as Darren freelances as a web developer from home, enjoy planning and cooking what the family will eat together, share the delights of reading bedtime stories to the kids and spend a whole load of time together as a family enjoying the great outdoors.
There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of information ‘out there’ available to people transitioning from a well paid employee/consumer to a rural downshifter, homemaker. I hope this humble blog fills just a small bit of that gap.
Cathie