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

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…

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.

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!

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.

And I suspect the first time I was on I couldn’t have been too coherent, since I was horrifically hungover. When I got the call the night before (being called onto BBC Breakfast is all very urgent, last-minute stuff and is a deeply thrilling ‘I only got the call at 6 pm the night before and simply didn’t have a thing to wear’ affair), I got all overexcited and insisted on bending the Husband’s ear about how great I was going to be over several gins and bottles of white. As I was being conveyed in a luscious Jag – nice to see the wise use of my licence fee, Auntie, by the way – to Broadcasting House at 5 am the following day, or it could have been the same night for that matter, I was clutching my 2-litre bottle of water very tightly and attempting to turn my eyeballs from pink back to white. The make-up ladies were very sympathetic and didn’t mention the fact that I was sweating pure ethanol. And apparently studio lights are so strong they bleach out your eyes anyway, hence the orange pancake make-up.

This time I didn’t make the mistake of staying up all night drinking. Instead I stayed up all night breastfeeding. The pink eyes were still there and instead of ethanol I seemed to be sweating Gold Top. What poor Sian Williams thinks of me I do not know.

But even with an hour’s sleep and leaking boobs, I’m ducking and diving, doing deals. Once I was back in the green room (an affront to trades descriptions since it is the orange broom cupboard), I had a chance to chat with the bloke I was pontificating on screen with. He’s the publisher of a dads’ mag and I’m anxious to get my foot in the door. Much as I’m getting excited by my nascent mumciergery, wonga for words is what’s currently paying the bills and it’s good to have a standby. I loosely pitch a couple of ideas at him and leave it at that.

Call the editor of the dads’ mag to go over what I’d said to his publisher yesterday morning, but he’s not in so I leave a message. On the school run I bump into the Glamazon. She’s a fellow pre-school mum and I’m always guaranteed to bump into her when I’ve failed to shower for three days and have dragged something to wear out of the washing up box. Never leaving the house without full warpaint, she’s got this old school glamour thing going on. Masses of long, wavy black hair, eyes kohl’d to the max, red lips and HUGE Jackie O sunglasses, she positively sashays. She’s also filled with boundless energy and seems to know everyone in the village as the playground echoes to ‘DARLING!! How ARE you?!’ at 3pm every day. She’s a blast.

We get talking about deadlines as you do and she mentions that she’s running late on one for this men’s magazine she occasionally writes for, one for the dads. I realise that this must be the same magazine I was talking about with BBC Brekkie and get all excited that we have a shared interest.

The second thought I have, following hot on the heels of the first is ‘Oh bugger – I’ve just tried to poach this woman’s column from under her.’ The editor must realise that we’ve got the same dialling code and, as we’re in the sticks, we must live very close to each other. I hope he doesn’t call her to tell her. Hacks can be at each other’s throats for the exclusive on a story, but equally it’s bad form to poach a column from under a fellow hackette’s feet. Particularly when you share the school run. Frantically think of ways to get her onside – perhaps she’d like to be in the mumcierge biz?