About Me & This Blog

Well, this is me! I’m the one in the back, middle. Dark circles under my eyes and, on this particular day, I couldn’t remember the last time I had a full night’s rest, blow-dried my hair, or wore a real bra let alone exercised or pretended I was good at drinking 8 glasses of water in a day – or even 4 for that matter. This photo was taken in mid-2019. My twins had just turned 1 and my oldest was 2 years + 3 months old. I was struggling to get by and everything in my life – work, husband, kids – was getting the short end of the stick because I wasn’t taking care of me.

Who am I? I am a wife, I am a mother, and I am a full-time professional. My husband and I each work 50+ hours per week at our day jobs and the rest of our time is spent keeping up with the kids. As many others can relate, with Covid-19, we spent 6 months, both of us working full-time with 3 kids 3-and-under at home. We were tired (read: TIIIIIIIRED), but truly grateful to be employed and have this special time with our kids. I appreciate how much things have been simplified in our lives over those months. My children are my passion and the absolute most important people in my life, and “mother” is my most important job. Because of this, the exhaustion is worth every yawn, ache, wrinkle, and gray hair if it means keeping them safe and helping them grow into good people.

Moving on! How did I get here? I am an old soul, and outside of the three little munchkins here, I don’t find my life to be all that exciting. I went to high school, was bored with it, graduated early. Went to college, loved it, hated graduating at all… would have loved to stay for another 5 years. But, money. So, I moved home (gut punch), got a crappy, low paying job, and started dreaming about the day that I could do something I loved. And herein lies the problem: I could not answer the question “What job would I love to do?” So I have stayed in the corporate world for, eh, 17 years… so far. I have a good career, and have found work that I enjoy most of the time, but there is still something nagging away at me that I could be doing something so. much. more. with myself. Some days it feels like I’m going to wake up “one day” and feel sad that I didn’t DO more to live the meaningful life we all deserve to live.

So, I’ll start by answering the question: What do I love to do?

  • I love spending time with my family, especially my husband and three littles.
  • I love to help people and believe that filling other peoples buckets also fills my own.
  • I love impacting positive, meaningful change.
  • I love finding a good challenge (or, gasp, problem), setting goals based on those challenges, and then laying out plans to get there.
  • I love to organize things… all the things.
  • I love to study yep, I said it – I love to study and get new credentials and professional designations wherever possible, sometimes just for fun.
  • I love fantasizing about all the great things we would do if we were independently wealthy (we are not), and think about how we can do these great things today.
  • And, I love to fail, because it means I took a chance at something new. Now, I might not enjoy the actual process of failing but likely learned something in the failure itself that I could apply later in life, and that builds character. I should have a lot of character by now.

The next question is: What steps do I need to take to turn my “loves” above into how I spend my life? Mostly, how do I make time to add all this extra “stuff” into my life?

And the answer to all of this is: Intentionally budgeting my life, which is what this blog is all about. I would say ‘intentionally budgeting my time,’ but it is so much more than that. Time sounds like something that will always be there. Life as we know it won’t.

What business do I have writing a blog? Possibly none, but we’ll see 🙂 I came here to write about a lot of the things above, the things I love. I want to share my journey in becoming more present in my life and making my time count. I wanted to share my successes and failures and how-tos in the hope of helping at least one other person. If that becomes one person a day – even better! I simply want to share my journey with others in the hope that it can help in some way.

I hope you enjoy and find something useful here!

Cheers!