Life: Make toddlers baby-friendly
Julia's book helped her child welcome little brother
00:00, 15 FEB 2008
There just aren't enough seconds in the day when you're the mother of two very young children.
But that's not the only fact that makes it so remarkable that stay-athome mum Julia Vincent wrote a children's book before her youngest child's first birthday.
What is even more impressive is that she self-published the book without having any professional help or writing experience herself.
Undaunted by the vagaries of the literary world, Julia committed her family's life savings to the ambitious project, which started life as a scrapbook that she gave to her then two-year-old daughter Jemma.
Julia was pregnant with her second child, Jack, at the time, and the idea behind the scrapbook was that Jemma could chart the progress of her baby brother from the start of the pregnancy, by sticking in photographs, colouring pictures and so on.
Julia, from Cambridgeshire, hoped the book would help her daughter feel more involved with the new baby, thus avoiding any jealousy problems.
She says: "Jemma couldn't really understand what me being pregnant meant and it got me thinking about what I could do to help her grasp it.
"The scrapbook charted the baby's progress and made Jemma feel included in everything - she really enjoyed it.
"After Jack arrived I could see how successful the idea had been. When she came to the hospital after he was born, she was desperate to get a photo of her brother so she could put it in her book.
"After that, I just thought that other parents and children could benefit if I put a similar book together and published it. So that's what I did."
Julia, a 26-year-old former secretary, started the book when Jack was about 10 months old, and finished it just two months later.
She used the internet to learn how to structure the book, and her mother, June Burton, provided the many impressive illustrations.
But with two young children to look after and her husband Andrew at work, how did she find the time to put it all together?
"I just did it as and when I could - when Jack was sleeping, when Jemma was playing," she explained.
"When you're a mother you just have to try to fit everything round the kids."
The book, called My Family is Getting bigger, includes pages where soon-to-be big brothers or sisters can stick photos of their mum's pregnant tummy, and scan images, as well as various pictures of the new arrival and all the family.
There are also games to play, and a record of the progress of the pregnancy and the baby, which parents help fill in.
"It's very much a template, to which families add their own story," says Julia.
After she'd completed the book, Julia looked at a computer programme on book publishing, and took her work to a local printer to run off the first 500 copies.
Having spent around £2,000 on the project, she couldn't afford to advertise the £5.99 book, so most of her sales so far - through Amazon and WH Smith, but mainly from her website jjbooks.co.uk - are through word of mouth.
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