Yes - you can make a nice eggs benedict. No - you can't spend 5 minutes arranging your coffee, a copy of the Guardian and a pencil so you can get the perfect instagram snap. Have you lost your mind? It'll be cold. Just get on and eat your breakfast.
Raising children is a tough gig, always has been. A few generations back you only had to keep up with the Joneses. Now you have to keep up with YummyMummy4, DomGoddess1978 and SuperMumof4 who are on an unstoppable mission to make you feel like a failure by posting close up pictures of their craft and culinary successes.
Imagine if every picture had to be taken wide angle, showing the context. However amazing that meal or craft item, there was MESS on the way to the finished product. Big dirty piles of it. Creativity in all its forms is messy and glorious. But showing the horrific state of your kitchen after cooking cupcakes with little children is not a good look in the social media world - a place where we only ever show our best side.
Sites like Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest are undeniably brilliant; they are bursting with great ideas but the images are a tiny zoomed-in peek at the result. The process is so much more important (and a whole lot messier) than the outcome.
To that end, here's some of our process. The process started with a 6am start (why, children, why?) and we set to work on a lego drive-through museum. There was some sharing, designing, negotiating and writing 'The Gems of Insanity' on a Lego block in sharpie.
It's chaos, Jim, but we had fun.
And here's my nod to social media. From ImTotallyTheBestMumEver1980.....
