Where to start?? I have no clue but I really need to have an about us page.
Who are we?
A mom and her daughter doing stuff. (My daughter likes to be my helper on a lot of the stuff I do.
What stuff do we do?
I (mom) design printables. I started designing back in my junior year in high school for yearbook and just have kept designing. I am a very visual person. I love photography, pretty packaging is a favorite of mine and fonts can either make me swoon or cringe. I had another blog but I wanted to switch over to this one to give my kiddos and our family more privacy. On that other blog it was more house decor driven which lead me to feeling like I suck because my house was always just so-so decorated and normally a mess. Why would I want to be creating and keeping up with the Jones’ just for the sake of a blog post. Pushing stuff out of the way to take a photo and look like I have it together.
Let me be the first to tell you. I DON’T HAVE IT TOGETHER! I hope you don’t look at the stuff on this blog and think, “Man she is so awesome because she does x,y,z. I suck because I don’t.” I am all too familiar with that phrase floating through my head. I don’t want you to be discourage. I don’t want your mind and your heart filled with “Shoulds.” Ya know, the, “I should be more like this person” and the “I should do that project” kind of shoulds. I think there is a big difference between being inspired and having comparison heavy on our hearts.
I genuinely want to just inspire. The most important people I want to inspire are my little ones. I have 2 of them and they are a blessing. Just this morning my son crawled into his bed, yes HIS bed where I was sleeping. You see, they both fell asleep with us in our bed so I escaped to the comfy, twin mattress on the bottom bunk in their room in the middle of the night to be able to stretch out some. Musical beds is all too often here at our house. Anyway, back to what J said. He crawled into his bed and snuggled me closely and said, “Mommy, I want to print. I love printing with you.” I smiled because I had been praying to feel better about what I am doing with myself and my time.
I’ll be honest. I feel guilty. All I do is design and print things off on my little $30 printer. I am not making a huge difference in the world. I am not helping people who are in poverty, I am not stopping a war. I am still working on releasing the feeling of not doing enough. “Enough” is right up there with “should.” A mixed message trying to make me feel like I am a failure for not measuring up to an invisible standard I have fabricated for myself. A friend shared a photo and I needed it as a reminder. It had a photo of a sweet kiddo hugging his mama with a content smile on his face and it read,
How true is that! I have to remind myself that my kids are just grateful to have me. Who I am, Printables and all, is enough. I have gone through spells of trying to create content on what I anticipate people needing and let me tell you that gets exhausting and leaves me with stuff that I don’t really need.
I had made the goal of trying to simplify our lives as a family. Reducing stress, reducing stuff, moving away from commercialism and overspending on needless stuff. Just the excess in life was and still is bogging me down. So the printables I make are always trying to fill a need that we have in our own home. I find that I work the hardest and love the outcome with those collections. Creating and making printables are the one thing that I loose track of time doing. I made Small and Simple in the hopes of helping others out too. Printing at home has been a relatively cheap hobby. I had tried to cut it out because I was buying printer paper but then I could tell that a little bit of my spirit was wanning because I was lacking a creative outlet. I go through spurts of loads of designing and then a couple months of not sure what to make. Don’t expect new content each week. I am not in this to make money so if it is taking away from important tasks and duties then it will be on the back burner.
So on that note, I hope you like what you find here. I am open to suggestions if you do have a need in your home. Its likely that I have designed something already and haven’t listed it yet!
With love, Emily