Hmmm…. where to start. With the big news I suppose, followed by all the consequences!
Marina, my wife, is just about 8 months pregnant. This is wonderful. Wonderfully wonderful. But it certainly adds a new edge to life, a new urgency as THE BIG CHANGE approaches, fast.
What can I tell you about having a baby in Spain?
In Spain the question isn’t “Are you going to find out the sex before it’s born?”. Instead everyone asks: “Is it a boy or a girl?” Why? Because everyone finds out the sex of their baby as soon as an ultra-sound can tell them (around month four).
In our case the answer is ‘boy’. This means finding a boy’s name that sounds good in Spanish and English (for when we take him back to the ‘old country’). My current favourite is Rafa, after my number one tennis idol and all round super hero, Señor Nadal, but Marina still needs some convincing!
So what else does this mean?
It means I’ve got to get my shxt together! We run a business from home, and now we’re going to be running a child as well… in the same office, so to speak.
Hence my recent obsession with time management. (By the way, forget anything else I’ve said about that, and buy “No BS Time Management for Entrepreneurs”, immediately! Do what he says, he’s totally OTT and even more obsessive than me, but it really really works.)
Managing time better means cutting down on certain luxuries, one of which is the commnets on this blog. I’ve turned comments off for the time being for all past and future posts. There are a few reasons for this:
– As well as having a baby (or because of!) we have to concentrate 99% on our Learning Spanish site, notesinspanish.com, over the coming months. This means I just won’t have time to reply to comments left here, and I feel really guilty when I don’t reply to comments!
– We have the wonderful forums right here on this site where wonderful discussions go on, so please please go and comment and discuss things there instead! Feel free to take any topic I discuss here in the future and expand on it there. I’ll be popping in a lot to join the conversations there.
– Having comments very occasionally makes one write ‘for the comments’. It makes me think ‘I wonder if this topic will get lots of comments’, rather than, ‘I think this is the most interesting thing I can write about write now for the readers of this blog, regardless of whether people are likely to comment or not’.
(This may be a very inside-baseball bloggers point, but I think it will free up, and improve the writing here. As for the ‘is a blog a blog without comments?’ discussion, Yes it is!)
What will I be writing about?
Creativity, Spain, having a baby in Spain, anything else I deem of interest to those kind enough to keep showing up to have a look.
I often say to Marina “I wish I could write about x or y, not just Spain, I might start Notesfromben.com again”. She says, “Just put that stuff on the Notes from Spain blog”, so that’s what I plan to do.
I can’t promise how often I’ll be posting. I made a list recently which on one side said ‘Cool things’ and on the other ‘Not cool things’.
On the cool things side it said: Writing blog posts when I’m in the mood.
On the uncool side it said: Writing blog posts because I feel I have to (blogging pressure).
I’m going to take the ‘cool things’ approach. (By the way, I highly recommend you make two of these lists, one for not-work life, and one for work. You then do everything you can to remove the things on the ‘not cool’ side of the lists from your life, to concentrate on the cool things list).
So, enough rambling. Keep coming back, I’ll keep posting good creative content whenever I’m inspired, I hope it will be useful and helpful, not just ego-to-pixels blogging. New times are coming!
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 