Please welcome Sara Goodwin Brown as our newest guest blogger. Sara and her husband, Ethan, opened their very own Great Harvest Bread Co. in Burlington, Vermont, during the summer of 2003. They moved across the country from Montana to New England to make their business ownership dream a reality.
I tell myself, on the days when my two boys are running wild and neglected in the back of the bakery while Ethan and I focus on our work, that across the broad expanse of history, this is how it often has been done. Surely our ancestors brought their kids to work - to the fields, the shops, the bakeries. Right? it makes me feel better about having my boys spend such a big part of their childhoods in a decidedly not child-centered environment with distracted parents. I try to stop often for cuddles or to buy pretend ice cream from an imaginary ice cream stand, or to read a book, but some days I feel like I am parenting neither children or business as well as I should.
Deep down, I believe that I am doing right by my boys to have them here to share in our days and our work, and to participate in this family endeavor. Recently I overheard our four-year-old Olin telling a stranger that he worked in a bakery. When she asked what he did, he told her with pride that he was the taste tester.
Truth be told, it is often our crew that does the parenting when our boys are at work with us. It is our loving, patient (childless) employees who invite Olin to help make cookie dough or who hoist Eamon to sit on top of the ingredient brutes at the kneading table and drive toy trucks through mounds of flour. Just this morning I overheard an employee correct Olin saying "Olin that is not a very nice way to ask for something. Can you think of a better way?" Bless her. Ethan and I are full of gratitude for the crew - past, present, and future who are playing a bigger role than any of them realize in our boys' lives. It really does take a bakery to raise a child around here.
Any readers out there who have been to Sara & Ethan's bakery?
