Nothing. Totally naked right now. Not a metaphor for anything deep or interesting; this here is literal, actual nudity right here on the internet. I know the Internet is full of naked ladies, so this isn’t really worthy of note to anyone else but for me it’s a rare treat to be nude and online at the same time. I am also wet.

I used to take baths all the time. In grad school I did all of my reading in the bath away from all distractions. And once Kevin and i were married “Is it okay if I go take a bath?” was our polite way of getting time alone. Very much love each other, very much like to be social but we are both people who need to recharge sometimes or we become frazzled and horrible.

A normal bath lasted up to two hours, but there have been bathing marathons that rocked half the day. It’s probably unhealthy for your skin or something, but we make up for our few vices by being mostly safe and boring by modern human standards. I also clean my ears out with q-tips. I can’t be stopped! It’s the fault of the cotton industry and Johnson & Johnson for tempting me with such a perfectly ear canal-shaped wand. I wouldn’t have even thought of putting it in my ear if they hadn’t put a big thing on the package saying WARNING do not put this in your ear, no matter how satisfying it may feel to do so.

So judge me. I wear my seatbelt, have never tried a single illicit drug, have never smoked, rarely drink. Instead I clean my ears. And when I was younger, I took a lot of very long hot baths.

But something has gone way out of balance. I work all the time, stopping only to parent, to let the dog out, to eat and to pee. Otherwise I am working. It’s not a complaint; I like working. It’s exciting! It’s non-stop problem solving, puzzle-wrestling creative analytical back and forth. It’s hard and exhausting and I love doing it.

The problem is that lately I feel guilty any time I’m not working. I can’t goof off and enjoy an episode of Misfits without working at the same time. I can’t relax and eat a meal without having a browser open so I can do some work-related research or reply to emails. If I take the kids to the park, I bring paper and pen so I can work on pricing while I’m there… Which would be okay if I didn’t feel guilty otherwise, as thought I was wasting time. Time spent watching my kids play at the park. Is that wasted time?

Of course growing a small business takes a lot of work and a lot of time, and I think that’s perfectly okay. I don’t think parents should feel bad for needing to work. But the other side of that, the side that’s not okay is the voice in me that berates me when I’m not working. That’s what keeps me from indulging in the fun of writing blog posts, the fun of doodling little sketches that have nothing to do with our products, the fun of having a glass of moscato and watching a show with my dog and/or my husband and simply enjoying the experience itself.

The other problem is that it’s not good for mental health to be so focused work all the time. The stress is familiar — in school I used to load up on hard courses and work until I was nothing else but a buzzing brain walking around, forgetting my keys everywhere and forgetting to eat and forgetting what I was saying right in the middle and then being surprised and annoyed when the person I was talking to was actually interested in hearing the whole thing so now they are making me put in effort to remember this thing that wasn’t all that great anyway.

And that’s why we are up in the mountains this week, in a beautiful rented cabin where everything is so quiet I could cry from relief. Like a jerk I brought my laptop so i could design the labels for the new magnet sets (yay magnet sets!) but my clever stressed-out brain forgot to bring the power supply. When we get home I am going to force myself to start practicing willful breaks in every part of the day. In the meantime here I am, in the bath. The boys are playing, Kevin is cooking bacon, and I am doing nothing. It feels wrong! But the part that makes it feel wrong… is wrong.
So Hello, blog. I miss you very much.

Another guest post is live over at Little Ladies Who Lunch.

Why do I always set out to post a recipe and some photos and end up writing a long self-reflective post about the meaning of food? Food is powerful, food is a big part of a family dynamic, a huge part of the budget, and maybe even a defining part of childhood. Scary. Food is scary! Food can kill you! Food brings people together, takes time and energy to create, forms the center of good days and bad days. Even on days when you are sick and you scrap everything else in the realm of parenting, you still have to feed everyone.

Yikes, I leave for a couple of weeks and come back to a comments section full of jumbled up spam. Sorry about that. And if my spam catcher is eating real comments again, please let me know. I have it set to KILL for now.

This week I’m doing a some guest posting over at the very lovely http://littleladieswholunch.com/post/15457448012/crunchy-guest-post Little Ladies Who Lunch blog.

How I got mixed up in a healthy home made food operation would be a horrifying mystery to the me from the 1990s, but here we are.

Meanwhile, we are working like dogs to get all of our new products put together for this year. We want to do more jewelry items, more cool baby stuff, more more more. We have so many ideas that may or may not actually be good products. A couple of weeks ago I was in OMG Let’s Just Have Everything Made in MFing China meltdown crisis mode. It was awful, born out of total frustration from trying to get what we want produced here.

It’s not a matter of going overseas to make a little more money on a product — it’s a matter of not being able to find USA manufacturers at all. It’s a matter of asking customers to pay $25 for a small plush rattle that’s on the shelf next to dozens of $8 rattles. A lot of times it means a choice between going overseas or just scrapping this or that product altogether. Which is fine except that it’s so cuuuuute and I want to produce all of the adorable nerdy things. But “I wannnaaaa” is not really worth compromising over, is it? No, not yet. There has to be a solution and this is what I spend my late nights doing instead of writing and updating my blog; I am working on all of the designs and searching for creative ways to use local resources to produce everything for a cost that American consumers will pay.

It’s exhausting being this neurotic, let me tell you. But! I think we’re figuring it out. Little by little by little… slowly slowly slowly the little train climbed the mountain…

Must type quickly — everyone is sleeping late except me and very soon something will burst and the day will start. Either my bladder, forcing me out of bed, or my kids will burst into the room demanding to be fed for the tenth time this week which sounds reasonable until you remember that it’s only Tuesday. Morning. Even the dog is letting me stay in bed a little longer, and oh oh I should be using this peaceful moment to sleep but oh blog, I miss you, blog!

So many half-written posts are in my drafts folder from the last month, but I fell asleep while writing them. I just looked through them and one ends with the auto-saved sentence “My roommates knew that I was not the type of per on to let eonferfiln food go to eastel. ”

That’s true, I don’t let eonferfiln food go to eastel. Because I’m not even Swedish!

Clearly I was typing in those last minutes of the day, the minutes when nobody is asking me to do anything or telling me about the map they just drew or the game they invented and nobody expects me to do any work or pack any orders or feed them or do anything. Except for my own stomach and brain which use those quiet moments to remind me that they, too, would like to be fed.
(children whomp into the room, mutter something about bad dream, dive onto my stomach, dog gets excited because oh wow! It’s you guys! And the day started and didn’t stop until just now. Thursday at midnight.)

So hi! How was your December?

Ours was absolutely ridiculously avalanche busy. Exciting! Hectic! Unreal.

At one point I thought oh man, this is so much, the day seems so unbalanced, I must be really even more horribly disorganized than I thought. Which was upsetting because I’d worked on organizing things somewhat and streamlining shipping etc. My exhausted, hormonal lady brain was quick to point out that SEE this is exactly why you are a ridiculous human being who sucks. But last night I added everything up and holy night you guys, this December we TRIPLED our sales from last year’s holiday season. Well! If we had sold this much last year, I would have died because back then, oh I was so very young and I didn’t know the world of thermal printing and bulk mail drop off like I do now. I didn’t know about automated emails and tracking numbers. I was hand writing every address with my hand! And then I was loading everything into IKEA bags, standing in line at the post office and paying those nice people to weigh and stamp every single package. With their hands.

Nowadays we copy and paste the address into a thing, enter the weight, click click click dang old bzzzzzpop! That’s the adorable little thermal printer. Then ping! My shipping robot sends a friendly email telling people what the thermal printer just did. Then pack pack pack, into the USPS bin, which can be handed to the post man or dropped off at the post office loading dock.

So yeah. Yay! Wow. Many many many things to report, discuss, write, think, talk about here. But right now? Right now I’m going to drink some water and go to bed. I suggest you do the same. Sakes alive, boy, Christmas is coming! We’ve got to get ready!

I’m trying my very best to become a more grownuppish company. After doing a lot of research/ watching Shark Tank on Hulu while I rode my exercise bike, I decided that it was time to:
* Research licensing. Doesn’t that sound impressively corporate?
* Push to finish the new products that have been in development for more than a year now. Just solve the silly problems already and be done!
* Maybe set up a more sophisticated accounting system than the one I do in Excel. Not saying that YOU aren’t sophisticated if you use Excel for tracking expenses and income; for a lot of people, Excel-based book keeping is probably perfect. But my Excel skills equip me to use it as nothing more than graph paper. I know how to set a print area because one day I finally called my friend Nina almost in tears saying for dear lovely Christ, why won’t it print??, and I know how to make different workbooks because she happened to mention it in that conversation and that’s about it. So after a few years of being in business, I reached the limits of graph paper and began researching accounting software for small businesses. Nobody can drag out comparison shopping like this lady right here, but after carefully weighing all of the options for months and months I panicked one night and bought QuickBooks.

Holy shit.

It’s just software, right? I know how to read and how to balance a checkbook. I would simply walk through the setup steps and learn as I went. I proudly told our accountant, “So we have Quickbooks now, so you know, i guess we’re pretty impressive with how mature we are, even though it is so intimidating that we havent installed it but STILL.” He was excited for us and said not to worry, it is very easy to use but now that I think about with hindsight and all, our accountant thinks a lot of things are exciting and easy and wonderful that we think are boring and difficult and horrible and that’s the whole entire reason why we pay him to do those things for us. So when he said “Quickbooks will be easy!” I should have immediately returned it and used the money to pay an out of work college student to follow me around recording expenses and income. But no, no I think I am so clever. Quickbooks! I can do this!

I installed it and launched the super easy quick setup wizard. Perfect! You already know what this next stuff is going to say, right? It kicked my bottom. I had to stop every few minutes to look up the words they were saying to me. A lot of times I just made my best guess. I was going along alright until I got to the question: START DATE.

Start date? Today, right now? No, not right now! There are outstanding balances and whatnot. A month ago, a year ago? What do they MEEEEeeeeean asking for a start date? And why is there a warning saying that this is very hard to change later if you do not choose well. The wise Google chorus agreed that a start day of today would be easiest, but for some reason that felt weird so I split the difference by closing the software and not looking at the set up wizard for two months.

When I finally came back to it, oh right. Start date. Sheepishly clicked “today” and went on. Back to looking up every new term, and many old terms that don’t mean the same thing in accounting as they mean everywhere else. Words like ACCOUNTS. and BALANCE. And OH MY GOD why am I making you read all about this when my own brain defends itself against learning Quickbooks by going to sleep? Every time I launched the little cute Quickbooks icon, it was a race against time because no matter what time of day or night, no matter what kind of lighting or sound or chaos there was in the room, in ten minutes I would be asleep. Big Pharma would lose a lot of Ambien sales if people knew how well this worked.

But in those tiny little windows of awake setting-up time, I think I might’ve gotten it mostly pretty well set up. There are still things that make me run to the Facebook thingy and beg strangers and loved ones for help… For the love of poop, tell me how to make it print! How do I add shipping to an invoice? When I make an invoice or a packing slip from a customer job, why do I have to re-enter all of the items and quantities even though doing so leaves room for errors and makes me want to give up and go buy an above-ground pool full of giant gymnastics foam blocks and list it as a business expense?

But we all have to start somewhere, right? I got the For Dummies book, and I’m using Google as my Quickbook for Dummies for No-seriously, DUMMIES guide, and in a couple of months I hope to sit down with our accountant and show him our beautiful books and he will say well done! This all looks perfect! Clearly it was put together by someone who is not an idiot! Didnt i say it was easy?? And I will laugh because ohhhh you! And then I will run at him with a sharp pen like I’m going to kill him with it!

But then I won’t kill him because we love him and we are so deeply grateful for whatever is wrong with some people’s brains that makes them love accounting. For that I am thankful, amen.