Although it’s only been a couple of weeks since we got back from our Easter holidays break in France, it feels like several months because so much has been happening.

The main change relates particularly to my husband, but has had a big impact on the whole family. Some time ago he had an idea for starting his own business. For a while it was just that – an idea. Then as it took hold he began to work it up a little more in his spare time. He chatted to friends who either worked for themselves or had relevant experience, and the consensus seemed to be that it was a good idea. He started to work on it a little more seriously during the evening or at weekends. Eventually we realised that this was a concept we both whole-heartedly believed in, and the time had come either to forget the whole thing, or put our money where our mouths were, and for him to quit his (steady, well-paid, secure!) job in order to pursue it properly.

We ummed and ahhed – it’s not a decision anyone can take lightly, but when you have a large mortgage, two small children and a wife whose writing career is yet to keep the family in anything other than a few extra, occasional treats, it really needs thinking about.

Then another university friend suggested that husband did some part-time, freelance consultancy work to pay the mortgage and the bills and put food on the table while he spent the rest of the time getting his start-up started. That made us feel a lot more secure than simply him quitting his job, and us living off our savings while the new business (hopefully) got going, and so that is the option we went for.

It has big advantages – the main one obviously being to keep the money coming in, but also for husband to keep in touch with an industry he has spent most of his working life in, and is still deeply interested in. It has also meant, however, that he has effectively been setting up two new businesses – one as a consultant, and one as a fledgling entrepreneur – and so life has been pretty busy.

Since we got back from France, he has been working two days a week as a consultant, and the remaining five on starting to get his business off the ground. The consultancy days don’t feel any different to me as he still puts on a suit and tie, leaves the house around 8am and gets back roughly in time for Anna’s bedtime. The other days, however, are totally different. For one thing he is working from home. In practice that often means working from a cafe round the corner (for some reason he doesn’t find a Weetabix-smeared dining table and a marauding one-year-old round his feet particularly conducive to work), but he might pop home for lunch, or be around at the children’s tea-time for an hour or so. The payback for this is that he is equally likely to be working at 10pm because he needs to make a phone-call to someone in America, or on a Saturday morning because at 5pm on Friday he promised to get some figures back to someone first thing on Monday.

His work-life and our home-life have suddenly become much more entwined. Apart from my writing, we’ve both only ever worked at management level for large organisations, and so it is a shock that suddenly the support systems you take for granted in that environment – HR, IT, Finance, Procurement, Legal, your own PA – just aren’t there. Anything that needs doing we either have to do ourselves, or pay (and at the moment that means out of our own pockets) to have someone else do it. Quite a learning curve.

And as if life with two new business and two young children wasn’t complicated enough, something about seeing my husband all fired-up about his exciting project has inspired my own creative juices, and I have started work on my third novel. You know, in my spare time.

So, there we are. Life is currently busy, exciting, demanding, chaotic, challenging, fulfilling, stimulating and somewhat exhausting, but it very much feels like the right thing to be doing, right now. Wish us luck!