Sherri Adams

I mentioned in my first post that I’d been home with the kids for a couple of years — it would be sensible then, I suppose, if I were to introduce them.

I have two boys, Ketchup and Mustard. No, I’m not one of those weird celebrity parents who gives their children strange names — I just decided that I’d prefer to be a little bit private about my family and so I’ll refer to my two year old as Ketchup and my five-year-old as Mustard. Why those particular pseudonyms? Because I’m eating a hot dog at the moment, and and those names just came to mind!

I never planned to be a stay at home mum, I always assumed that I would return to work and that the kids would be in daycare. But I never was so incredibly excited about my job (I was a fund raiser for a local charity) and Mustard was sick for a while during his first couple of years of life. Nothing awful, nothing terrible, but it would have been hard for both my husband and I to return to work full-time. And the simple truth is, after a while, I just got used to being at home with him. As time moved on and we realised that Ketchup was on his way, we made a decision that, at least until they’re both in school, that I would stay at home.

It’s a bit of a squeeze financially, but my salary was never so extraordinarily large, and of course I don’t have any work-related expenses — like real clothes, bus fares, gas money, or even the cost of eating lunch out. Thus the hotdog.