Working from home is sometimes a misnomer. Sometimes freelancers and remote employees work from anywhere but home. That’s not something I understood when I first started out doing this.

When I quit my office job in 2013 I actually had no plans to become a freelancer. I just wanted to stay home with my kids. I began working for Austin Texas Homes in February 2014 at the request of the owner, who also happens to be my brother in law. After working for him for about a year, I took a second job working for Wide Open Country, which took up quite a bit more of my time.

I had to adapt to a life where I was both a stay-at-home-mom whose job it was to take care of my kids, while also being a freelancer who officed from home. I wrote a blog post for the Texas Freelance Association about the humorous aspects of that juxtaposition.

Because my work schedule and my home life overlapped quite a bit, I found myself working in some pretty odd conditions, so I started documenting it. Most freelance “office” pictures shared to social media involve working from a pool or someplace tropical, but as a parent,  I can’t just up and go on vacation, and if I go to the pool, I have to watch my kids to make sure they don’t drown. So I don’t have many enviable work locations, they mostly are just strange or involve a literal balancing act. So here are the odd, precarious and boring places and ways I’ve worked since becoming an unintentional freelancer.

The backyard freelancer…

It started out easy enough. I put my youngest (at the time) in preschool and had 1/2 day off from parenting three days a week. Most of my mornings looked like this.

The idle freelancer…

(Rimshot) See what I did there?! Okay, moving on. Probably every freelancing parent has done this at some point. If I knew I was going to be sitting in the car a long time I definitely had my laptop with me to get some words hammered out.

While doing double duty as a baby bed…

After about a year we added a new kid into the mix. It’s actually not so bad working with a sleeping baby on your chest.

While spray painting a headboard…

You’ve got to get your home projects done at some point, right?

Revenge of the baby naps…

Shhhh…. He’s sleeping.

In front of an old VW bus…

I took this picture while waiting on these guys to replace one of the leather panels in my driver’s seat that my sweet husband accidentally poked not one but two holes in when he was driving to Home Depot with a screwdriver in his back pocket…not that I’m still irate about that or anything.

While nursing…

The obvious precursor to a baby sleeping on my chest pic.

While waiting for my daughter to get home from school…

The wheels on the bus go round and round, and the wheels in my head do the same.

And the Pièce de Résistance…

Under a deadline, at my daughter’s swim lesson, with an injured finger, while the baby continuously tried to kick the computer off my lap.

If you freelance, what weird places have you worked?