My Perfect Office Area

As a stay at home/work at home mum, I literally have to take what little time I have to do my blogging.

My desk is in one corner of the lounge with Andy’s in the opposite corner behind me. Andy has the corner where the plug sockets are so my laptop has to slide down the side of one of our units to charge as there is no socket by my desk. It also gets turned into a dumping ground for James and all his school stuff!

We have been in our house nearly three years yet we haven’t managed to decorate our lounge yet! 

What I would love to do is where my desk is, I would love to have a couple of shelves, something like the Ekby Alex from IKEA would be amazing as it has two draws as well so I would have the shelf to display things and then the draws to hide things away from the boys! In the drawers I would put things like my tapes and pens away from James as he always trying to borrow them! He seems to forget he has his own pens and pencils to use but I think mummy's always seem to be much more interesting to him!

I also love this HOME Cube shelving unit from Argos. This would give me a lot of storage to get things up off my desk like my pen pots and pencil case, which in turn would give me more space to work and also to use my desk for photographing products for blog posts!

I would also be able to put up some photographs of us as a family in the smaller cubes! I would hopefully be able to hang my twine photo holder off the bottom of this as currently it it held onto the wall with blue tac and it keeps falling down!

Another big issue I have is not having a place to store letters that come home from school. 

This desk tidy from IKEA would fit perfect on the desk and would take a lot of my paper work off my desk and I would be able to put my phone into it as well so if I got an alert I would see the screen flash instead of having to get up and go across the room to get my phone! 

It would also mean I would have to go through my school paper work more often as at the moment I tend to only go through it at the end of term and end up filling the bin with paper work that is no longer needed!

My current desk is the HOME Calgary Corner Office Desk from Argos. I do love it but the boxes are a lot smaller than the IKEA kallax unit so the kallax boxes also from IKEA do not fit meaning I have to store things on the shelves where the boys can get to them or they are on the desktop leaving me with very little space to work, meaning I end up on the sofa with the laptop on my knee getting distracted by the TV!

I really do like this desk but if I had more space then I would love to have something like this HOME Tall Unit also from Argos as it would take up a little bit less space! 

I love the fact it has a small shelf and also quite a big draw where I would be able to keep papers shut away from the boys! The only downside I can see with this desk is the shelf is quite small and the draw is not very deep. 

So these are things I would love to have to make my working area a bit more user friendly. I think having a more user friendly working area in our house would encourage me to sit and work without the TV being on to distract me!!!

All going to plan I will be updating a post soon on what we have done to make my desk area more user friendly!

A DITL of a Blogging Mummy in School Holidays!

So as it's Easter holidays for 5 year old James, I currently have both him and 2 year old Freddie at home 24/7. My blogging days are so different in the holidays to term time, So I decided to do a post detailing what happens, especially on a day daddy is at work!

Both kids are normally up and about by 7am at the latest so it's downstairs we go. The boys settle on sofa watching milkshake on 5 while I head into the kitchen to make my first cup of tea of the day and get the boys some cereal. 

One the boys have their cereal I will sit down with my tea and start checking my emails. Starting with the blog account and then going onto my personal account. I star things that need replying to and delete things that are junk mail. 

By the time I have finished the boys are normally shouting for more food, so I get them their second breakfasts and I will grab another cup of tea then I head upstairs have a quick shower or bath. Then once I'm ready I will be back downstairs to where daddy has been holding the fort before he leaves for work around nine am.

Depending on the weather it depends on what we will do for the rest of the day. We've had a lot of wet days so far this holiday so we haven't been venturing out and it's been a lot  of snuggling on the sofa with Netflix and Amazon prime. By around ten am my phone battery will need charging so I will plug it in downstairs and grab my iPad.

The boys will quite happily watch a film on Netflix or Amazon prime, so I will use this time to check social media and start scheduling on Facebook and Twitter. I then go into Evernote on my iPad which is where I do the majority of my post drafts as I can access it on my phone, iPad or laptop. I also keep a list on here of things I need to do for blog posts. I will sit and draft out some posts and come up with titles for posts ready to copy into blogger later on that night!

By around 12 the boys are wanting lunch so I put the phone or iPad away and go make us some lunch. After we have eaten we might play with the toy cars, Freddie's Beatbo or some of the other toys in the toy box. If it is a nice day we might take a walk to the local park or go to the local shop as we will nine times out of ten need to buy more milk!

Around 3pm I will put another film or TV series on to keep the boys amused while I go and cook the tea. This is normally done and ready by half four for the boys to eat. 

Wind down time will start after tea. If Freddie has not napped he is put into his pjs and he will snuggle up on my knee with some milk and CBeebies. I try and keep him awake till at least 6pm then it's up to his bedroom with more milk which he has lying down in his bed while I put his night nappy on.

Once he's asleep I'm back downstairs to James who will be watching CBeebies or playing on his tablet. I will then finally open up my laptop and log into blogger. I will copy posts over from Evernote into blogger and schedule them on Facebook and Twitter. Andy will get home around quarter to 7 so he will have his tea, then take James up to bed between 7 and half 7. I've just started to take on paid blogging jobs, so I will browse sites like Get Blogged to see what opportunities have been released and put some pitches in.

I will normally try and shut the laptop down by 8pm at the latest and go to bed and browse social media then I try to read a book on the kindle app on my iPad.

So this is my day in the life in the school holidays, If anyone has any tips on working more around the kids or things I could do then drop me an email!

**This post is in collaboration with Get Blogged!**