Thank you to Samsung for sponsoring this post!
With the countdown on to the most wonderful time of year, Scott and I are preparing for what it set to be our busiest and most exciting season yet for our small business and growing family! Not only are we gearing up for our local markets, pop-up shops and in-store events with Citizen Home Decor, but we also just welcomed the newest member of our family, a precious baby boy named Ace! Knowing that this season in life will be filled with busy days, sweet baby snuggles, late nights and many trips to our local post office to ship off orders, having our Wi-Fi (and life) working in top-notch order has become a must. This is where the sweet folks at Samsung come in, who we’re excited to be partnering with to integrate their all-new SmartThings Wifi, a Wi-Fi system and smart home hub, into our house to help us to easily manage and accomplish our day-to-day tasks as small business owners and new parents.
Since Scott and I both spend time working from home, having reliable Wi-Fi is a must in our household — but up until now it hasn’t always been easy thanks to the older internet lines throughout our neighborhood and the far placement of our router. After installing SmartThings Wifi hubs in the main living areas of our home, we’ve been so impressed with how smoothly our Wi-Fi (and life) has been running since. Over the past few days, SmartThings Wifi has worked to eliminate the dead zones we were having (my favorite corner of the house being one of them) and improve speeds as it learns more about our network with its Plume AI-based Wi-Fi technology, which learns and adapts to your Wi-Fi usage and devices. It’s also capable of adapting in real time to any interference — which were able to closely monitor via the Plume app! We both see this as being such a huge bonus, especially since we’ve been in a time crunch trying to get as much work done before baby arrived, thus needing our Wi-Fi to run seamlessly.
With the SmartThings and Plume apps, we’re also able to manage all of our smart home products — including our Samsung TV, outdoor cameras, music players, etc., along with creating custom automations to simplify our daily tasks! A few of my favorite features and automations thus far have been freezing devices while I download or upload large image files, setting the internet on our phones to pause while we eat dinner (because ya’ll know our days as a duo were numbered!) and monitoring our TV to ensure we have top-notch Wi-Fi strength when we’re finally ready to settle in for the night and watch an episode or two of something fun and quirky before we finally call it a night (which are slowly starting to turn into late night viewings during 2AM feedings around here).
Now that our home and Wi-Fi are in working order, there’s just a few other things I wanted to share that we did to help us better prepare for the baby’s arrival — all tips and tricks that other parents (many small business owners themselves) have shared with us over the past few months.
- Surround yourself with family and friends that can help support you during those first few weeks!
- Meal prep (or as I call it — shop prep) and keep a stockpile of food in your freezer so that when baby comes, you’ll have a handful of meals ready to go that you can easily warm up. Gotta keep those minds and bodies nourished, folks!
- Set up an out of office on your email so that your clients know you’re currently in baby bliss and will get back to them shortly (promise they’ll understand).
- Schedule any payments, social media posts or reminders now so that when baby comes, your business can continue to run without you having to give it any thought.
- Accept that at the end of the day, baby will come when they want and you’ll never be entirely ready. Enjoy this time and know that you’ll always be grateful that you did!
I would love to hear your thoughts on preparing your home and/or small business for the arrival of a new baby! Also, let me know if you’ve tried out or plan to try out Samsung’s all-new SmartThings Wifi in your own space. There’s so much it can do to automate and make life easier, which I know we’re even more thankful for now that our baby boy is here!
-Chelsea xo