The plan for this summer was a good one.
Keep the drops on schedule, get ahead on fall, spend the slow afternoons designing. I wrote it down in June and it looked entirely reasonable on paper.
Then the summer rec activities started.
If you're also building something in the margins of a full life, you already know what happened next. Not a disaster. Just a slow, cheerful erosion of every block of time I'd penciled in.
So this is the honest version of my summer. Not the highlight reel, because I don't think the highlight reel helps anyone. Just what it actually looked like to keep a small business moving with three months of kids at home.
The Hours Got Smaller
My business runs during school hours. That's the whole design, and it works beautifully for about nine months of the year.
In summer, that structure disappears. There's no quiet stretch from eight-thirty to three. There's a morning that starts with somebody needing something, an afternoon of driving, and whatever's left at nine o'clock when I'm too tired to do anything precise.
What I found is that the work didn't shrink to fit. My expectations had to.
The first few weeks I tried to do a full week's work in a third of the time and just felt behind constantly. That's a miserable way to spend a June.
Around the third week I stopped pretending and cut the list down to what would actually fit. Fewer things, finished. It's not a revolutionary idea. It was still hard to do.
What Actually Got Done
Looking back, more happened than it felt like at the time. That's usually true and never obvious from inside it.
The June and July drops went out on schedule, and the summer reading designs were some of my favorites of the year.
The free reading download went live, and people actually signed up for it, which was the quiet highlight of the whole summer.
And a lot of planner tab sheets got cut. There's a particular kind of satisfaction in running the cutting machine while the kids are watching something in the next room. It's the one part of this work that doesn't require a clear head.
If planner tabs are new to you, The Planner That Finally Clicks is a free guide to the seven-tab system, which is where most people start before building out a full month.
What Didn't Get Done
This is the part most summer recap posts leave out.
The August drop didn't go out on time. It was designed, which felt like most of the work, but it never got printed, cut, or photographed. Then I added to it, which threw the whole thing off further.
That's a very specific kind of stuck. The creative part was finished and the tedious part wasn't, and the tedious part is the one that requires a quiet afternoon.
The Bookmark of the Month Club was supposed to launch this fall. It's now planned for next year, because the honest truth is that sales aren't yet where they'd need to be to ask people to commit to something monthly. A subscription is a big yes, and I don't want to ask for it before I've earned it.
That decision took a while to make and felt like a loss for about a week. It doesn't anymore. It was the right call, and I'd rather launch it well later than badly now.
There's also a broken link on my website that I have known about since June and have still not fixed. I'm telling you that on purpose, because I think we all have one, and it's oddly comforting to know that other people's businesses also have a small embarrassing thing sitting on the list.
It'll get fixed this month. Probably.
The Days That Fell Apart
Some days just didn't go.
The plan was always the same. Me at the kitchen table with my laptop, working on designs or Pinterest or emails or packaging, while the boys played with Hot Wheels or oobleck or whatever Lego build they'd found that wasn't a screen.
Some days that actually worked for two hours, which was blissful.
Other days it fell apart after thirty minutes and we ended up at the swimming hole instead, because the saying is true. If they get cranky, put them in water or take them outside. More days than not, we needed both.
What I've learned is that these days aren't the exception to building a business around family. They're the actual conditions. Planning as though they won't happen is what makes them feel like failures instead of Tuesdays.
Now I leave more room. Not because I'm organized, but because I've been surprised enough times to stop being surprised.
Some days they get a movie and popcorn while I sit at the table and catch up. Some days I set an early alarm and then reach for whatever I'm reading instead of the laptop.
And in reality, I've done more after bedtime this summer than I thought I would. That's turned out to be fine.
The Packing Table
Here's the part I'd keep even if everything else about this summer had gone badly.
My kids help pack orders, and they give me ideas for bookmarks. Small hands tucking bookmarks into muslin bags, sticking labels on, taking the whole thing very seriously. They argue about who gets to do which job.
There haven't been as many orders this summer as I'd have liked, but the boys have helped with every one of them.
My oldest puts the magnets on the bookmarks and slides them into the packaging. My youngest tucks the thank you card into the envelope and seals it shut, usually after I've written the customer's name on the front. Sometimes not. That's okay too.
Every path I took before this one was missing something I couldn't name. A layoff in 2024 cracked a door open, and I tried a handful of things after that. Website building. Virtual assisting. Digital products. Each one taught me something, and none of them were quite it.
Then I started making magnets and the missing piece turned up. It was creativity. It had been that the whole time.
But the packing table is the other half of the answer. I didn't just want work I loved. I wanted work that fit inside my actual life instead of pulling me out of it.
A summer with the kids home is the hardest test of that. It's also the proof.
The Small Wins That Counted
None of these would make a good headline. All of them mattered.
An order from someone who had bought before, which meant the first one held up.
A note from a customer about where she keeps her bookmark.
Designs finished for a season that felt very far away in July and is now here.
A morning where the work went smoothly and everyone was content and I remembered, clearly, why I chose this.
If your own summer produced a handful of things like that, it was a good summer for your business. That's not a consolation prize. That's what growth looks like from close up, before it's visible from a distance.
If You're Building Something Too
A few things that genuinely helped, offered gently.
Cut the list rather than the hours. The hours are already gone. Deciding what won't happen is kinder than failing to do all of it.
Batch the work that doesn't need a clear head. Cutting, packing, and photographing can happen with noise in the background. Writing and pricing cannot.
Move a deadline before it moves you. Deciding in July to push something to next year felt awful and saved me an entire bad autumn.
Finish the tedious part first when you can. The August drop taught me that a design isn't done until it's printed and photographed, and the creative half is the half that gets done on its own.
Count the small wins out loud. They're invisible otherwise, and they're most of what's actually happening.
Let the season be what it is. Summer isn't a broken version of the school year. It's just a different season with different capacity, and it ends.
And Now, Fall
The house goes quiet again soon.
There's something about that first genuinely quiet morning that makes the whole thing feel possible again. Fresh calendar page, sharper light, a stretch of hours that belong to the work.
The autumn collection lands the second Wednesday in September. Watercolor florals and cozy Sunday illustrations, which is exactly what I want the next few months to feel like. And I'm doing my first in-person craft fair a few days after that, which is equal parts thrilling and terrifying.
If you're heading into September with a list of things that didn't get done this summer, they'll keep. The season just started.
Before You Go
If your own book has been sitting at page forty since June, The 5-Minute Reading Reset is free and arrives in your inbox right away. Seven realistic ways to start opening your book again, without waking up earlier or finding an extra hour, plus a tracker to get you through your first three reading sessions.
No pressure and no pile of emails. Just first look at new designs and a little quiet in the middle of everything. 💜
Thanks for reading, friend.
Warmly, Cindy
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you run a small business with kids home for the summer?
Cut the task list rather than trying to compress a full week into fewer hours. When a business runs during school hours, summer removes that structure entirely, and expecting the same output in a third of the time creates a constant feeling of falling behind.
Two practical adjustments help most. First, separate the work that requires focus from the work that doesn't. Writing, pricing, and planning need a quiet head. Cutting, packing, photographing, and shipping can happen with noise in the background, which makes them the natural summer tasks.
Second, build in far more slack than seems necessary. Days that fall apart aren't unusual during a summer at home. They're the normal operating conditions, and planning as though they won't happen turns ordinary interruptions into failures.
Is summer a slow season for small handmade businesses?
Summer is often slower in output rather than in sales, particularly for makers with school-aged children. Orders may continue at a steady pace while the available working hours drop sharply, which creates a mismatch that feels like falling behind even when the business is doing fine.
Many small shops use summer for preparation instead of launches: building out autumn collections, writing email sequences in advance, and producing stock for the busier final quarter of the year. Front-loading that work in a low-capacity season pays off in September.
It's also common and reasonable to move planned launches out of the summer window entirely rather than launching something at partial attention.
How do you know when to delay a launch?
Delay when the business conditions the launch depends on aren't in place yet, rather than when you simply feel unready. Those are different problems with different answers.
A useful test is what the launch asks of a customer. A one-time purchase is a small ask. A subscription, membership, or recurring commitment is a much bigger one, and it generally requires an existing base of repeat customers before it will succeed.
Launching too early tends to produce a weak result that's hard to recover from, since relaunching something customers have already ignored is considerably harder than launching it well the first time. Moving a date is uncomfortable for about a week. A poorly timed launch is a problem for much longer.