Working from home.

There are plus points to working from home. I’m not missing Tigerboy’s first cruising steps along the sofa, because I’m right there, looking up from a blogpost to savour the moment. I can work in every spare minute I can grab around the children’s needs, and while I’m cooking bolognese, or more likely, burning it.

Which is the drawback. When you’re trying to work around children and home, sometimes everything suffers a little. So the stew the other night got well and truly burnt to the bottom of the pan, and the dumplings were made with butter because with everything else going on, I completely forgot that I needed to shop at the coop for suet – neither Lidl or Aldi, our current shopping destinations of necessity, stock it.

But I don’t think I’d give it up. I don’t think I’d want to go back to an office, wave the children off to nursery or school, be a stranger in their world. I just need to work out how to balance the grown up side of working too. I love networking on twitter, not quite so hot on facebook, but I do enjoy the occasional outing, and it’s apparently good for me and my businesss. Loved MumsnetBlogfest and really enjoyed my evening before and morning after, when I seized a couple of opportunities to meet with real people. Breakfast chatter lifted the after fest low impressively well 😉

It’s left me wondering if there’s a way I could do that sort of thing more efficiently. So for example next week, when I’m over the other side of the country , I’m toying with the idea of booking a meeting room in Birmingham and hoping that some of my friends from that neck of the wood would be free to get together for an hour or two, maybe a cup of tea and a cake (I’ll be driving sadly) and catching up in real life.

Would that be too ridiculous for words? Are there any bloggers/PRs/startup businesses who would like to do that? I’m not talking anything in the blogcamp league, I’m not up to organising 100 bloggers and I don’t have any sponsors. Just wondering if we could throw together something informal that could work for us all. *Obviously* I might mention the new business venture (see lovely banner in the footer, isn’t it swish?) in passing, but I also want to just speak to people. Grown up people. Who won’t try to wipe their nose on my shirt in passing.

Though if you give me a chocolate cake, I might let you anyway 😉