What it means to me to be an entrepreneur and a mom**

**This is my specific list – others lists would be completely different than mine…it’s not a contest, nobody is ‘winning,’ we’re all just doing the best we can.  Honesty is my goal here.

  • It means staring into the future and seeing very clearly a vision, but having no idea how I’m going to get there
  • It means protecting my work time from others and from myself, so that I can be productive in the short amount of hours that I have 
  • It means not showering for 3-5 days on a (very) regular basis because my personal hygiene never seems important enough to give up doing something else
  • It means waking up at 4:30am to get my workout in and plan my day before my son wakes up, and it means going to bed at 8:30pm so that I can do it again tomorrow 
  • It means between 4:30am and 6:30am, glancing from the monitor to the clock every few minutes and saying “pleeeeease keep sleeping”
  • It means loving my instant pot 
  • It means loving frozen veggies, caulipower pizzas, and breakfast for dinner (whatever is fast and healthy right?!)
  • It means I have dirty carpets 90% of the time 
  • It means not leaving my house for entire weeks and going completely stir crazy
  • It means constantly finding the balance – between work and play, busy and bored, looking up from the computer to simply sit on the floor with my son and letting go of the 100 things I have to do, but also sometimes letting him figure it out for himself because I can’t be there for his every wish….dinner needs to get slapped together, emails must be answered and yes, sometimes Mama simply has to shower.  
  • It means finally letting go over the pressure I’ve created for myself because it’s a necessity…I no longer having the luxury to freak out over 
    • The house not being clean enough
    • Dinner not being good enough 
    • Making a mistake 
    • Not answering every email, every day 
    • My tummy not being flat enough

Updated after my 2nd son was born:

  • It means nursing my baby while on conference calls 
  • It means delegating way more than I typically would and giving up on self imposed deadlines
  • It means getting crazy specific about priorities and letting go of everything else
  • It’s flying across country to appear on Shark Tank at 31 weeks pregnant
  • It’s getting up at 4am to work and handing my son my phone to look at pictures when he gets up too early
  • And it’s letting my house get messy, feeling behind on dinner prep, and zeroing in on priorities out of necessity.