JulieBhosaleAchive

School broke up for our eldest son on December 14 th last year and he started back this week on Feb the 4 th . This first week back has also been a short week due to a public holiday on Wednesday. Everyone has a different experience (and opinion) of the school holidays. I wanted to share my own experience of this time – which will continue to be different every year. Before Arjun was of school age, the holidays were always something I was quietly afraid of. We are two working parents with absolutely no family help at all. None. Yes, we need to work. My husband and I run three businesses. They do not just stop for eight weeks. These are not ‘big businesses’ that we can simply take leave from and have them still working. Our work does put food on the table. Our work is also enjoyable. We do not want to stop for this length of time. If we included all school holidays and public holidays for the year, we are looking at around four months of the year not working. Last year was Arjun’s firs...

Every year I set a word for the year. It is something I have been doing for a while time now after reading this in a business book. I used to do dream boards. I think these really helped when I was a lot younger, but after having the boys I have preferred to simplify the year goal-wise. Having a word for the year helps me to focus. I take actions and check that the choices I make are in line with this when the time comes. I do not spend a lot of time thinking about it. It is the first word that comes to me and feels right. A true gut-instinct. The word hope came so easily at the end of last year. In previous years I have had more grunter words, like ‘power’ and ‘unlimited’. Is 'grunter' a word....well it is now! Anyway, this year I want to change tack a little bit. It is no secret that last year was tough. I know that I did not even write my new year blog in 2018 until it was April! It was an up hill battle the whole time. This year while I know the fight is still going to be ...

As 2018 nears the end, I have been able to decrease the intensity of my work for a bit and it has been a time to pause and churn the year over. I have forged ahead into a lot of incredible ventures this year, but it has been a very hard process. Constantly stepping into the unknown and up against a lot of resistance. Like tackling a thick forest with a small blade trying to hack down a path in the trees, while also defending my back from creatures lurking out, attacking my business and my family. This sounds dark, but that is what it has felt like for a significant portion of the year. Looking over many of my blogs from the last 12 months reaffirms this. I guess I expected the small blade & thick forest as part-and-parcel of the deal, but not so much the hidden creatures. At least not at this point in the game. The ‘hidden creatures’ are also known as - other businesses, organisations and people who not only do not ‘get’ what we are up to but make an active and vindictive effort to...

When will it get easier? A question I have been asking myself a lot lately. This last week especially. I know from the outside it looks like everything is pretty sweet. I have published two books this year and have traveled around the country & started in Ausie. I am also now training new consultants and am working on book number five. It does not mean though that things have not gone according to plan or that things are not a struggle. I have been on the road for the best part of three months. I wish I could tell you how many things goes wrong behind the scenes with our events. How difficult people can be to work with and how they try and press you for every single dollar. When you run a business from the ground up with no mortgage to float you every dollar indeed does count. We had to change our Wellington event with a weeks notice because the Golf Club double booked with a wedding, were wanting to charge us the same for a different room AND they wanted to charge us for catering ...

It’s mid-July. Ask where the last few months have gone I would not be able to tell you. I do know what day of the week it is again. I have started to regain normality out of my ‘writing cave’. What ever normal is. As I shared on one of my Facebook LIVES the journey to finish The Nourished Toddler has been my toughest yet. Big call considering my other ‘projects’ I have done - a doctoral thesis and having two babies at the same time, self publishing a cook book and a year later my first non-fiction book. This time, the variables and odds were stacked against me hard and fast for a number of reasons. There were also a lot more people trying to bring me down. Now is not the time to go into that and many of you know some of this from previous blogs and posts. This may also sound left of field but it’s the aftermath which is harder to manage. I knew this too. Those previous projects taught me sharply about this. Everything gets put off and I mean everything . I must, in order to be able to ...

It’s not every week that your trailblazing Prime Minister gives birth to her baby girl while in her first year running the country. Impossible for me not to be moved to write about it. Just the day prior I was also asked to give a speech to our university degree students on their last assessment day – literally where I sat 12.5 years ago. If someone told me then that I would be where I am today about to send my second published book off to the printers that people have pre-ordered NINE MONTHS OUT I would not have believed them. When you are in the grind and hustle you just don’t have time to cast your mind back to where you started. This week forced me to stop and think back. I shared with the graduating students the choices I had to make in having a family, setting up a business, starting and finishing a PhD –giving birth to two children along the way, all with no family support. I shared with them how I made the choice – yes choice- to take one week off after having Sahan in order to...

I have been struggling. It is time minus 12 days until the deadline of book #2. I have been working on my next book for 18 months now. Yes started writing this before I even finished The Nourished Baby – before I knew if anyone would like my first book, let alone buy it! 18 months of work which I am bringing all together on a tight deadline – which came a bit sooner than expected. Welcome to the tough as nails world of publishing. It is tight but doable. I am actually not worried about getting it done. The writing is not the hard part and I am right on track. It is juggling all the puzzles pieces outside of my writing that is hard. The boys, the house, the work, the other deadlines, the finances, the never-ending to-do list and my hundreds of tabs open. Make that the finances times a million. There is no book advance. There is no bank of mummy and daddy (never has been, never will). But I am also struggling in another way. Not with the writing. But with me. I am struggling with me. Se...

I type this following yet another morning of tug and war with my heart. It was not an unsusual morning. Rather typical to be honest. But oh how I wish, as I have done for many, many years now it was easier – and wonder if and when it will actually get easier? The mornings are my best work time. Always have been. I produce three times the volume of work to a higher standard than I do in the evenings. That should not be a surprise right? Come evening I have done a 12 hour shift one way or another. Be it all day mum-duty, half and half mum-duty and work or work and then mum duty – hell sometimes it is even just straight work. Ok you get my drift....so doing any work after this when the kids go down is hard, doable but not effective especially for writing a book! So yes, mornings are my best time, fuelled by not so secret coffee addiction too. BUT How do you get morning work time with children? That my fellow mamas bears has been the problem I have been trying to solve for a while (like ye...

I have had this blog sitting here for….well nearly four months now! When I say ‘sitting’ I mean the title written, a few sentences roughly jotted down on a word document and the rest sitting in my head. I guess I originally wanted this blog to be quite inspirational. Like bring on 2018. But I have not found it easy to get my head space right for the year and felt like you do when you first start heading off for a run when you have not been for a while. Like my arms and legs are going but just not very smoothly at all and everything has felt out of rhythm. This year I am taking a lot on - I am finishing my next book due out in August, have established Dr Julie’s Kitchen which is still in it’s initial launch phase, preparing for a new tour season while also continuing with lecturing and researching. The big unknown however is planning for baby number three. We would like to try for a third baby and are starting the process of looking at different fertility options and the hard conversat...

It hit me like a ton of bricks today. It is always there. That is grief right, but sometimes it sneaks up on me and just whacks me cold in the chest. Christmas is by far the worst time of year and today was no exception. My mother is very much alive. She just has not really been in my life since I left home at 18 and not been in the boys lives despite my best efforts. She was asked if she wanted to host or just attend my baby shower when I was pregnant with Arjun (my first son) but did not want to do either. She was invited to the hospital when in labour, but never came. She has been asked how she would like to be involved with the boys but says she is only ‘interested’. She did not even know I had given birth to Sahan (second son) until he was eight weeks old as she never called or asked or came to visit. She lives less than 20mins drive away but has never looked after them, never spent more than an hour at a prearranged visit with them – the amount of times I could count on one hand....

Like a lot of true-blue startups, our company was started at the kitchen table - which was to become my ‘work-station’ for a long time. While I have always had a desk at the university research office, a huge part of my work (research and business) has been done at home. With two young children this made the child care juggle easier as I could work when they slept and for a large part I was still breastfeeding both of them. Before our second baby was born I did have one of the rooms of our 3-bedroom place to do quiet work if I needed it…but I lost this after his impending arrival. When it came to writing my book ( The Nourished Baby ), just like my thesis, it was also largely written at the kitchen table late at night, as well as in a desk in our eldest sons room. This meant I could shut the door and forget the rest of the chaos of the house while looking out to at least something green. Not a long-term solution but one that worked in the interim and indeed I got the book done! Recentl...

Ah parenting…just when you think you might be getting a handle on this gig….something comes along to remind you that really you don’t have it all figured out! Last week as some of you know I took on flying with both boys on my own. There is a LOT of logistics behind the scenes of our nation wide tour at the moment and for our Wellington leg the most efficient and cost effective way was for hubby to drive down (with the car loaded with stock) and me to fly down with both boys. I was very glad that I had done a  practice flight   with just our big boy as it made me slightly more confident but I was still worried – could I actually do this? Would I end up with both of them running in different directions…actually this did happen! But travelling with the boys is a massive part of what we are hoping to create with our business so it was now or never! Step one – get to the airport! I thought I had timed things perfectly so that Sahan would sleep on the drive out to the airport….he stayed awa...

Our littlest guy, Sahan (aka Smushie) is going to be leaving his beautiful daycare very soon. I would keep him attending there until he was 18 if I could. It has been our home away from home for both our boys since – well practically since they were born. The daycare centre caters specifically until three years of age so like our first son, it is soon Smushie’s turn to ‘leave his nest’. Milestones tend to pull me back to my memories – in this case back to Sahan’s first day as a six week old. Contrary to what it may seem on social media my journey to 'own' being a working mum has been that – a journey. I know it may look like I have always known this and felt comfortable being a ‘working mum’ but it has not been a black and white process. Before Smshie was born we looked at all options. We first discussed the possibility of me totally stopping work for a few months.  This would mean taking our first son out of his daycare (that he had been attending since 12 weeks old) to be at ...

A year ago today I officially graduated from my Doctoral thesis. A four and a half year undertaking during which I gave birth to my two beautiful boys and also had another pregnancy which we lost. This photograph which my friend Kerry took captures the essence of the day. I have not shared this photo before. It was a moment which I dreamed of and visualised thousands of times during that period. The moment when I was about to walk across the stage and be granted my thesis. The look on my face says everything. I was fighting back tears feeling a huge roller coaster of emotions- as I thought back on the nearly five year journey that had led me to that moment. All the times I was so close, so very close to giving up – literally I think over that time I had drafted at least five emails to my supervisors saying I was going to pull out. That first harsh winter with our eldest son when he was about 8 months old and we were in hospital just before my data collection was due to start. The loss ...

August the 26 th 2017 in Auckland marks the official kick-off to our massive 10:20 starting solids tour. It has been months of work behind the scenes – but we are pumped with that mixture of excitement and nervousness. Ages back… when I was writing my book…my husband and I were talking about the tours and what cities to go to. I wanted to reach as many people as possible so we decided just go for it and go as big as we could – taking the boys with us. While having a break from them is always welcome (and sleep too) in order to travel the country for the period of time we have planned, leaving them at home was just not going to be an option. I did not want to be away from them that long AND we would have struggled to get help with this too. More importantly, none of this would have been possible without them. Doing it as a family was the way forward. Truly merging my passion, our lives and business together. And so the 10:20 tour was born. First job was for me to finish writing the boo...

It has been just over two years since I posted my blog, My Real Postpartum Body. Two years and it is still going viral. Two years of mums reading this, major media outlets sharing it and being asked for interviews. Two years of getting messages time after time saying how relieved mums are to not feel alone with this. To me this just shows how much the changes that happen to us after having a baby affect us. How much pressure we have to look a certain way after having a baby. A few weeks ago, during one of the last days of our ‘real’ summer…you know when it was hot enough to get in the water, we took the boys to a family day at the beach. I had just finished writing my book and we were all looking forward to some quality time at our local beach. My husband took a small video of all of us – one for the memory books - he loves doing this. That evening he showed me the video and some of the photos he also took and asked me if he could share this (on social media). My first thought when I...