Jilly Loves – A Fresh Start

Hello! Welcome to my brand new, fresh and shiny blog. You may have been a reader of my previous blog, but I decided it was time for a fresh start for a few reasons.

First of all, I’ve wanted to move to WordPress for ages, and secondly because I feel like my blog is going to have a bit of a change in direction, I wanted a fresh start. If you read on, you’ll understand why this feels like a fresh chapter in my life, and so I felt that a new blog would be best.

So if you’re a new reader, a quick introduction is in order!

My name is Jilly.. which you probably guessed for yourself. I live in Glasgow with my husband and 2 house bunnies, Alfie and Belle. I work full time as a primary teacher, which I love.

If you’re a reader of the old blog, a little update for you is needed here too as things have changed quite a bit recently, mainly the fact that I’m now 34 weeks pregnant with our first baby. The journey to get to this point is basically what’s been consuming my life over the past 4 years, as we suffered with unexplained infertility, culminating in 3 cycles of IVF to get where we are now.

Before going through this myself, I had absolutely no awareness of how trying to start a family could challenge you, and take over your life. Particularly when it came to preparing for and starting IVF… it literally changes everything. What you eat, drink, how you spend your money, when you make holiday plans, relationships with friends and family – everything. Every day I thank my lucky stars to be in the position we’re in now.

I’m still on a forever quest to get my house in order. I’ve finally accepted the fact I’m never going to be a minimalist, but particularly with a baby on the way, our house has been undergoing a serious clearing out. We’ve also been doing quite bit of decorating in preparation for little miss arriving in 6 weeks.

I’ve also taken some baby steps into starting my own business. My ultimate goal is to have a small business that will supplement a part time income, if I decide to go part time at school after baby is here. So I’ve spent a lot of time researching, reading and goal setting in terms of my business. I’ve always let fear of failure hold me back but I know I need to just go for it, so watch this space!

So, life has been busy, but I am back! I don’t intend to become a Mum blog, but obviously with the big life changes there will be some Mum type posts. I plan to return to doing some crafty, DIY and scrapbooking posts, as well as some home organisation, life organisation and general lifestyle posts. I also plan to do a few posts about infertility and IVF. I know this is pretty far removed from my usual kind of topics but it’s important to me to raise awareness of IVF. When I announced our pregnancy on Facebook and Instagram, four separate people messaged me to say they were going through the same. It’s much more common than people let on about, and so many people are suffering in silence, which is heartbreaking.

Finally, I’ll be blogging a little about my small business journey and featuring some of my products when I finally get ready to launch the shop. Don’t worry, it won’t turn into a sales page 😉

So that’s been my life lately, I hope you’ll stick around to read some more about my next adventures!