Pandemic Baby Part 2

What is it like to be pregnant during COVID you ask? Well it's insane to put it mild. When I first found out I was pregnant I actually thought I had COVID, I was so sick and literally had zero idea I could even be pregnant. June 17 was an interesting day, from calling and booking a COVID test to taking a pregnancy test, to phoning back and cancelling said test all in the same day! Stupid me I'll just say that next time around I will definitely know what's going on with me! haha 

Being a first time mom during all of this was hard, you truly have no idea what's going on with your body on the best of days. Take all the symptoms of pregnancy and now add in COVID, holy man it makes for a ridiculous ride. Everything has a cross over so every time I didn't feel well the first thing that popped into my head was (oh my goodness I have COVID). 5 days of missed work and 1 COVID test later and it was just pregnancy symptoms but that's our world now. You just don't know until you get the long Q-Tip brain scratching test lol

March 2020, We had been trying since the beginning of the month and I was one of those women that decided that I was going to stop drinking wine, stop drinking coffee and change my eating habits to crazy healthy. Oh and I also started working out like crazy again because what else do you do when you are on a stay at home order from the government haha. Also let me just remind you that all this was going down right when I found out I was being laid off at work. Well as you can tell by the date the crazy habit changes I did, didn't really help. I think it was all the stress and unknown of what was going on in the world. So when I went back to work full time in the middle of May I may have fallen back into old habits, work was stressful, dealing with the public with all the new rules and guidelines was extremely draining. I'm not going to lie I needed coffee in the morning and that glass of wine at the end of the day to keep my sanity! I also had stopped thinking about us trying to conceive because work was taking all my energy / brain power. 

During this time Daniel was finishing up his last job at his dads construction company which to this day was the last time he worked since all this COVID madness started! Which is just crazy to think, so many industries have been struggling during this time it's devastating and our family truly knows the hard truth. Honestly with out Plaid and Pine we would be in a way worse place mentally, financially our small shop does not supplement our full income by any means but it is taking baby steps towards it! (Fingers crossed) I can stay home with Charlotte after my Mat-leave is up! It truly is weird to think that because of COVID our home based business is growing. Honestly if Daniel was still working full time we wouldn't be putting as mush time and effort into this.

Daniel and I decided to jump head first into this small business of ours during the summer of 2020, we spent months working on our Keep-Up design. We were babysitting our niece and she kept throwing her cup on the floor, which drove us nuts!! And we figured that this had to be an issue that everyone has, and since this whole craziness of the pandemic, we figured that it would also be an important time to design something that kept stuff off the ground since everyone is more aware of germs and what not too! Our niece was our product tester, she helped us fine tune our design over a couple months. Check out what the final design of Keep-Up was in the "Keep-Up" video! And you can see all the different colors we came up with HERE.

Once we felt it was right we took our business to the next step, that meant getting business insurance and registering our business here in Alberta. Holy man were those months a bit stressful, we knew nothing when it came to starting a legit business. It's definitely not an easy task when you are going into something new like this and honestly there isn't much resources out there to help small business owners. Luckily we had some really great people we have met along the way that gave us amazing guidance. 

When we registered Plaid and Pine Shop on August 15, 2020 I was 2 months  pregnant, expecting a baby is stressful enough, now add in a global pandemic and fully launching a business. From doctors appointments, to working full time and now trying to navigate the small business world it was a lot. It took us exactly a month to build our website, to take our product pictures and for us to figure out shipping and packaging. While we were doing all of this I was back at work full time so Daniel took on most of the responsibility. He taught himself how to build coding for a website and how to edit photos on Photoshop. I was only able to help in the evenings when I was finished work so honestly I didn't do much when it came to the website! 

Once everything was finished we made our first sale on our website on September 18, 2020 and shipped our first item to the other side of the country to Dartmouth, NS.