This time a year ago, Sarah and I conceived Roar on her kitchen table (!)
We’d been planning it for a while but it took a few glasses of wine to loosen us up enough to take the plunge and send our application to Companies House.
Then came the obligatory frantic purchasing phase that all parents-to-be go through… website domain, email addresses, logo… We ‘painted our nursery’ by writing and designing our website and panic Googled everything from accounting software to insurance.
And suddenly, we were the proud owners of a brand-new shiny company !
The next obvious step was an announcement on social media. LinkedIn profiles updated and all the important people in our network notified of the new arrival, the congratulations came.
Importantly (and thankfully!) the work soon followed. Roar grew well and developed in ways that we hadn’t even imagined – she’s big for her age!
Like the first year with a baby, there has been a good dose of late-night worries, milestone celebrations, and of course, lots more panic Googling! But now, 12 months on, we finally feel like we’ve settled into our groove. We have a routine. We have grown in confidence about how to raise this thing we named Roar and we are already looking back with fondness and nostalgia, knowing we can never have the excitement, drama and unique challenges of our first year again.
We’ll celebrate Roar’s birthday quietly – a couple of drinks with a toast or two – after all, you don’t get a day off from parenting! We’re proud, we’re tired but we’re so happy. We’re also hugely thankful to everyone who has been instrumental in making Roar’s first year such a blast.
Fingers crossed we struggle to make a ‘terrible twos’ analogy next year though, eh?!