(100 points if you can name the song the title is from)
I have been writing this blog post for months now, it has sat in my drafts folder since March. After a lot of tweaking and altering I finally can hit publish and update everyone on what has been going on behind the scenes here.
First up some back story…
You know from reading ‘our story’ why we moved from Surrey to Ireland. After reading many a self help book along the lines of ‘your life is short so get out and get shit done’ (fabulous one here by the way) we finally took the plunge upped sticks and left for pastures new.
Today we went and picked up some Library books and one of the stories Amelie chose to read is ‘The places you will go’ by Dr Seuss. Well, I have to say this is pretty much the most awesome ‘get out there and get shit done’ book I have EVER read and I am kicking myself for not reading it sooner.
This book speaks to me and where we are in our lives so much I wonder if there was some kind of divine or universal intervention in Amelie picking it up for me to read to her.
You see when we moved here, for a simple life, we only completed say 50% of our dreams. I can say that now with the benefit of hindsight, however at the time we were thinking this….
Shortly after moving here Mr Clev was made unemployed, and everything turned awful. We tried once again to turn things around and make the negatives into positives, he found new employment – less money but more time at home. We loved it!
We were plodding along ok. We got hit with
the car saga and my poor lovely husband was getting sadder and sadder by the minute. I guess doing a 2 hour commute to Dublin in a Nissan Micra will do that to you. While my husband has had great successes in full time employment, he has also had failures, and his heart truly lies in working for himself. For the longest time I bemoaned that my husband failed me by not holding onto a job, by changing his outlooks all the time, and for living in ‘la-la’ land. In short this is what happened to us….
One night I had an epiphany that maybe he wasn’t failing me at all, but I was failing him by telling him to abandon his dream. We share many of the same dreams, namely a big rambling house filled with our beautiful children. We moved here to pursue this dream. Instead of pursuing it activley though we just got stuck here….
The place where people wait. We were waiting. Every month getting a steady paycheck, slowly paying off debts, paying our rent, feeding 5 small people and keeping them clothed. Saving up for holidays. Saving up for our dream house. Waiting, waiting, waiting….and getting further and further into our slump.
We found out in May that after the 30th June Mr Clev would no longer be in full time employment, or part time employment either. He had always worked a bit on the side as a freelancer, but found it difficult to juggle everything. I failed him in this too, loving the extra money but not loving the time and effort that he would put in which took away from time with me and the kids. We were once again faced with the whole ‘oh crap we have 5 kids to feed what the hell are we gonna do’ dilemma. But this time we approached it differently.
So in the spirit of 2 people who are facing 30 and starting to get a bit panicked that 1/3 of their life is already over…we made bank appointments, we made tax advice appointments and we threw ourselves into researching what it takes to launch, run and make money from your own business.
‘Ian Clevett Designs’ went from a dream to an idea, an idea that we were spending more and more time on as the kids went to bed each night. The more we read, and talked, and garnered advice the more we actually thought ‘lets do this’ (please say that in a deep booming American accent and fist pump someone while you say it). While you are in deep booming American voice mode you can chuck in ‘we are a TEAM, we work TOGETHER’.
People think we are crazy to be doing this, but we have 5 small children, and being at home with them is what we both love. The only ways we can do this is either be benefit bums (no way!) or work from home, and work around the kids (we have an awesome routine which is so far working – I will update in a month and see if it still is!). Now the hard work my husband does no longer goes to a standardised salary at the end of the month, it goes towards our dreams. I don’t want to sugar coat things and say its going to be great, like the Dr himself said, you have ups and downs. I know that while things are great one month they may not be the next. I hope we can weather those times together and hike on to better times. Life is too short to not be doing something you really want to do. Life is too short, end of.
Dr Seuss said it best at the end of his book. As for our book, who knows how it will end!
If you need a website or know someone who does then check us out at
ianclevett.com ps – Bixby. How did I miss this legendary name??? Bixby Clev, baby number 6 FTW!!!!! haha!!!
