Do You Want To Play With Me?

I feel guilty saying this but I cringe every time my daughter comes to me and asks: "do you want to play with me?" Before you get disgusted with me, let me explain why. My daughter is now three and years before we had her I worked really hard to build my own businesses so I would be able to work from home once we had children. I wanted to be home with them and spend quality time with them and I feel that somewhere along the way I lost my way.

One of my businesses has become super successful and with a few other successful ventures I am a very busy person. I spend my day making orders, packaging orders, responding to emails, marketing, etc. I do all of this from home so my daughter doesn't need to be in daycare. Problem is I am not really "home" with her. I am too preoccupied with work to spend much quality time with her during the day.

She can possibly spend hours playing in her room or watching her fave TV shows but there are other days where she wants me to play with her all day. She has no siblings so I am sure she gets lonely but I have work to get done. Genuine work. Inevitably I need to give in at times and when I do I feel like I am not truly present in the moment because the post office is closing in two hours and I still have three orders to finish. I am internally freaking out.

I do have a lot of late nights so I can do things with her during the day at times but sometimes the work needs to be done during the day, whether it be an important email that needs to be answered or needing to finish something to get to the post office that day. I feel horrible every time I need to answer "Do you want to play with me?" with "later honey" or "I have work to do."

In September I plan on her going to nursery school for more days and longer hours so at least those days she has lots of time to play with other children and mommy can use those days to work my booty off so the days she's home I can play with her more. I am also contemplating getting a mommy's helper for the summer at least for a few days a week. My helper's only job will be to play with Liv and keep her happy.

I never knew working from home with little ones would be such a struggle in so many ways from constantly being interrupted to constantly feeling guilty. It certainly is a balancing act I have yet to perfect. Maybe for the next one. xoxo