The Jabberwocky Family

It’s a terrible title, I grant you that. It sounds like we’re all off on a team-building weekend in the Brecon Beacons with trust exercises and raft building. However, we did actually start a family. This is why the blog has been much quieter than usual recently. Everything else has been significantly louder, more likely to be awake at four in the morning and usually needs to be fed.

I don’t normally stray much into our personal life. It’s a sad fact that in the last few years our personal life has mostly been the Jabberwocky anyway, but the blog is always largely factual. At the moment though, I am out of the van with a severe case of offspring, and Barny is running the whole thing by himself. I would have thought that with me out of action I’d have all this this time on my hands. I could redesign the website, write loads of blog posts, finally watch Breaking Bad and generally morph into one of those parents who look like they know what they’re doing.

It turns out that tiny little humans, despite being really much, much smaller than average humans, take a lot more work. I was under the impression that babies sleep for most of the day. While this is true, our one only slept when he was being bounced, at a gentle walk, in laps around the living room. I can see the appeal, but it does make it quite hard to do anything else.

Three months on and he now consents to occasional chilling in a sling, napping in a rocking chair and a slightly less energetic version of the bouncing. Still, Jabberwocky as we knew it is now gone.

The wonderful thing about being your own boss is that you can admit the following: The Jabberwocky is not the most important thing in our lives. It is our only source of income, sure, but there are bigger (smaller) things to worry about. Many of them are centred around the bowel movements and eating habits of my son. Without going into detail, because those conversations are reserved for other people who have kids or for grossing out those who don’t, there are a lot of conversation topics that are suddenly no longer taboo.

This does not mean that the blog will turn into one of the infinite army of mummy-blogger clones out there. We’re sticking with street food. More so than last year in fact, as we continue to work on van number two. The main difference to the Jabberwocky going forward is that the person standing on the left in the van is not quite as likely to be me, and blog posts are interrupted with breaks for food, nappies, play time and cuddles.