February 29, 2012

3:52 am – Wake up (no alarm) and look over at my bedside table, realize that it’s 3:52 am and I don’t need to be up quite yet, so I doze for a bit.

4:14 am – Give up on dozing and grab my iPhone to read the morning Daily Office to connect with God, and to check Instagram to see what people are doing in the world.

4:30 am – Get into the shower, get dressed, makeup, etc.

5:00 am – Make coffee, cut up an apple, get a glass of water. Sit down at computer and check twitter/facebook/email real quick to make sure nothing exploded etc. Text. Gather papers for my meeting, look over my notes, look over my report. Open up Day One to start this log and then write my Morning Pages.

5:29 am – Start meeting for iPhone App project with my business partner (who is in another time zone, hence the early meeting time)! Yay! We are making progress!

7:14 am – End meeting. Gracie is up now! Get her breakfast while she watches Sponge Bob on Netflix on the TV. I eat another apple (raw breakfast, yay for me! well, except for coffee. Lol.). Make her lunch & get stuff ready for school. Get my stuff ready. Get Gracie dressed (an extravaganza that takes longer every day).

8:03 am – Leave for school. Explain to Grace the concept of Leap Day – she is very excited that there has only been two of them since she has been alive. She can’t believe we need to add days / seconds to keep calendars and the earth matched up. We are almost late but barely not, they do the rain stick just as she is entering the classroom so after a quick kiss she runs in to grab her spot on the carpet.

8:37 am – Leave her school, get gas (the car’s No Gas Alarm is going off! Wish I could wash my car there too but it’s raining), and go to Panera Bread. Lots of construction along the way and people driving crazy b/c raining, oy, which makes me feel like I’m running behind.

9:17 am – Finally sitting at my table at Panera. With coffee, you pick two (black bean soup and a veggie sandwich), laptop, notepads, headphones (to keep people from talking to me). Totally not eating raw this morning but oh well – I’m hungry and I need to eat right now, and I need to write a blog post somewhere that’s not at home, etc. At least this is vegetarian and remotely healthy. Well, except the chips. Well they are just potatoes and sunflower oil and salt so not too bad in the scheme of chips.

Start writing a blog post about yesterday’s nervous breakdown. Eavesdropping on people having telephone conversations about various startup ideas and someone else who just got their Cisco routers finally. People are entertaining.

10:23 am – Just published the blog post and posted on Twitter & Facebook. Now gathering stuff to leave Panera to go back home to work for the rest of the work day. Also want to use my own bathroom instead of a public one.

10:41 am – Home! My organic fruit/veggie box came from Farm Fresh to You – contains leeks again. That’s a lot of freaking leeks. I need to look up a new recipe or something. Do the 15 min tidy/clean daily routine – today all I got to was dishes & taking out the trash.

Guy with a chainsaw outside my window (apt complex has a tree service here cutting down trees that are allegedly diseased or something) so I was going to record a podcast … but I’ll have to wait until they go on break.

11:25 am – Create and send out an email blast – blog post plus 21% off MBTI Type II, now until Friday – and talking about my blog post that I just posted. Which means: set up the coupon code & test, change where the link is on the coaching page, write the email blast & test & send & check to make sure it worked.

11:52 am – Record the Live Your Truth Daily podcast. Along the way get distracted by Facebook and upgrading my Live Your Truth Facebook Page to the new layout and looking at Hiro Boga’s upcoming program. Then go back to finish publishing the podcast. Oops, distracted by email again and filling out a form for church. Now back to hitting publish on this thing.

12:32 pm – I’m taking a break. Had a snack and watched the first episode of Downton Abbey, via Amazon Prime streaming. Omg that was so awesome!!! Love!! I rarely watch TV shows (we don’t have cable and until recently didn’t even have a TV) but that show was really well done and I love British period pieces. It’s hard for me to let myself take a break.

[As I am posting this a week later, I still feel guilty about taking this break. Perhaps 30 minutes would have been reasonable but this was almost an hour and half!]

1:50 pm – Emails. I have a backlog due to me going off the grid when I was in Disneyland. I start going through the gmail deemed “important” emails – opportunities, clients, inquiries, stuff from my BFF, plus all the wrongly-labeled-unimportant junk.

2:19 pm – Okay that’s as much emailing as I can take right now. Going to get stuff together to go get G from school. Not sure what we will do after school, so I’m bringing stuff to do, just in case she wants to go ice skating (as in, stuff for me to do as I sit on the bench. I enjoy sitting on the bench while she skates.). Leave to get G at school.

3:25 pm – Gs friend invited her ice skating, so we are across the street at the outdoor ice rink. I’m happily sitting on a bench … going to see if I can get some Internet access so I can email and/or watch training videos. Yes there is free WiFi!! Win!! Watched an MIT lecture on Intro to Computer Science (lecture 4 of 12), to bring me up to speed re thinking like a programmer, for the iPhone App project. Email.

4:59 pm - Leave the ice skating rink as their afternoon session closes, get G drive through food on the way home (not exactly a parenting win, but oh well).

5:35 pm – Get home. Make myself an omelet with sautéed onions & goat cheddar cheese.

While eating, watch lecture 5 of the MIT course (45 min). With occasional stops to get G something to eat, to cut a piece of paper, to get a black sharpie to write on cardboard, to buy tickets to Cinderella, to rip off pieces of blue tape, to insert and then remove Gracie in/from a big box (that the vacuum came in), etc.

More emails. Get a band-aid for Gracie. Talk to Gracie about summer camps. Text. Take pictures of Gracie in a box. Tried to print a picture but printer is not working augh!!!

8:11 pm – Enter “get the kid to bed” phase – her brushing her teeth etc., and then I read her a chapter from Little House in Big Woods (we just started the Little House on the Prairie books!) and a devotion from a kid’s Lent devotional. We pray. Then she listens to a children’s guided meditation and falls asleep.

While I’m sitting on the floor besides her bed as the meditation plays from my phone, I post a picture to Facebook and read thebloggess‘ latest post (is it wrong to internet while my kid is listening to a meditation? Hum. Not very Zen of me, eh?).

8:40 pm – Leave the kid’s room, as she is theoretically asleep. I do my yoga stretching, read the evening Daily Office, and get myself ready for bed.

9:31 am – Lights out. I turn on a guided meditation and presumably fall asleep a few minutes later, because I don’t remember any of the meditation.

—

Leap Day 2012 Summary:

Work: 5:55 hrs

Chauffeur/Driving/Drop-Off/Pick-Up: 3:02 hrs

Multitasking (work/mommy stuff combined): 2:36 hrs

AM Routine & PM Routine: 2:06 hrs

Get G Ready for School/Bed: 1:18 min

Break Time: 1:18 hrs

Housekeeping: 44 min

Doze: 22 min

Total: 18:21 hrs

Well, no wonder I feel like I can’t get anything else done. I think this is the best I can do.

1. We are not "real" business owners.  I personally know work at home moms who are making six and even seven figures.  I also know work at home moms who just make a few thousand bucks a year — and that’s exactly what they want.  How much money you make, and whether your business is in a fancy office, is not determinative upon whether your business is "real." 
2. We all work in our underwear.  I’ve never (okay, maybe once or twice) worked in my underwear and rarely work in my PJ’s.  Actually, I wear regular casual clothes 1/2 the time (today I am wearing a t-shirt and capri pants), and business casual the rest of the time, with a few fancy outfits for networking events.  Now, I do work in the early morning or late night in my PJ’s, but so do employed-office people who take work home. 
3. We all are doing MLM or network marketing.  Yes, some of us are, but many of us are also doing service-based businesses, information products, manufactured or home craft products, consulting, or internet businesses.   
4. We all homeschool our kids.  Some WAHM’s homeschool, but heck, my 2-year old is in preschool.  Not that I don’t admire homeschoolers, but it just does not work for us, and that’s not why I’m staying home. 
5. Our business income is "second-income" to the family and is not as important as our husband’s income.  Pleeze.  Some moms’ income is the non-essential stuff (toys, family vacations, eating out, etc.), but some are making more than their spouse, and some are single moms — for example, my sister. 
6. You can always tell if a business is a "home business."  I doubt it.  It’s not too hard to look "real" or "big" — I constantly have clients who think I am in a fancy office building and are very surprised to pull up to my house for a meeting.  I also get calls from salespeople who want to know if my marketing budget is over $100,000, and if my annual revenue is over or under $10M.  (ha! not quite yet!) 
7. We are going to get a "real job" when our kids are in school, or go off to college.  I don’t know about you, but I will never work for someone else again.  Once I’ve been an entrepreneur, I can’t go back.

Do you have any myths you would like to share?  Leave a comment below and I will address them in an upcoming post. 

Of course, not all working moms or stay at home moms feel this way – most don’t, I’m sure.  Most of us are perfectly comfortable with each woman making her own choices, and mostly comfortable with our own choices, and we stay out of any nasty fights — and even support each other!  But there are a few outspoken women who assume their choices are the only "Right" choices for everyone.

But where do we fit in?  The work at home moms?  Or even my subset, the work at home moms who opt for part time childcare?  Am I in the stay at home camp, because I am at home?  Am I in the working camp, because I have a business? 

I find that I am in neither.  When I tried to find a play date group for me and Gracie, I did not fit in.  The stay at home moms didn’t understand why I had part time childcare or why I sometimes had a meeting.  The working moms wanted to do everything in the evenings or on the weekends, which I like to save for family time.  From both camps I would get a lot of "It Must Be Nice" statements — as if being self-employed just fell into my lap from the WAHM fairy.  I always felt weird.  Maybe that was just my problem … but I find that I fit in more online with other self-employed moms, than any mom groups around here in the offline world. 

Have you all had this problem?  Where do you fit — or do you also find that you are in a separate category?  Have you ever found a good playdate group? 

A Mompreneur is a mother who starts a business

But, if you search Mompreneur, you will find this term used to describe women who have founded multi-million dollar businesses, some even publically traded. And describing a network of women who are starting small at-home businesses, as well as small-to-start businesses they plan to grow to empires.

The complaints are ridiculous feminist backlash. Acknowledging that we are women, and mothers, is not diminishing our success, or hard work, or legitimacy. It’s creating a community of women with similar challenges, who can network and support each other. It’s not like the big boys are calling us mompreneurs to keep us out of their fancy wood paneled club — we are calling ourselves mompreneurs, and creating our own club. Except ours has big windows overlooking a playground.

I call myself a Mompreneur as a completely conscious branding strategy. I am running my business differently because I am a mom and want to spend time with my daughter — not running it in any lesser way, but infinitely more efficiently, using technology and making choices to create a business where I can make great money, help people, and still have a great life with my family. And, that is part of my shitck. Having toys in my office, a playset in the garden, pictures of my daughter on my About Us page — my clients know I have a daughter, it give us a topic to discuss and bond over, and they buy into ME, not just my services.

Gracie has helped me take my businesses to the next level — now I have more reasons than ever to run my business Smart instead of Hard.