Hey, friend!

Whoops. I let a bit of time go by there, didn't I?

Here are some quick bullet updates:

VA
I switched to a new Virtual Assistant, but she's taken on a lot of work while one of our team members is on maternity leave, so I haven't put her on my tasks, which means I forgot that "prepare and prompt me to write and send the newsletter" is a VA task. 😬 My bad. We'll fix that.

Book
The rough draft of Laravel: Up and Running, 3rd edition, is due May 1. That's Monday. I have a long two days ahead of me, but I'm very excited this thing is finally getting close to published!

Valet
The Valet v4 launch went great! We've had a few bugs but nothing serious. What a freaking relief.

Twitter
Man. Twitter is a really wonderful space, but it ain't what it used to be. Mastodon isn't either. Who knows about Blue Sky. I just hope we regain everything we had with Twitter at some point, somewhere.

Single parent
I reject when people call me a single parent. I'm not. I'm a half time single parent. Single parents struggle to find time to breathe because they're always single parents, whereas I'm a single parent half the time and half the time I'm a sort-of bachelor who still is actively involved in my kids' extracurriculars and finances.

But lately I've started giving myself permission to acknowledge that it's still hard. Not just the time I'm trying to work a full time job running a company and also be fully present for my kids, cooking cleaning teaching loving etc... but also the time they're not with me, because then I'm still thinking about their school, their food, their clothes, their summer break plans, and I'm also working extra to make up for the fact that I don't get in full days when they're with me.

I had a meltdown literally yesterday where I just couldn't keep up. And everyone I trust--my girlfriend, my therapist, my family--keeps telling me I need to learn to ask for help.

I'm great at asking for help at work. I've learned to be a very effective delegator. But asking for help in my personal life, when my family is far away and I don't have many friends in Atlanta who I know like that... I haven't figured that out yet.

Hopefully the meltdown yesterday will help. Thankfully, it happened on a weekend my sister and her partner happened to be in town, so they've been hanging with the kids on and off while I get stuff done around the house... slowly catching up.  But I also know my next step is not "get things done" but "change my life"... somehow. I'll let you know how it works out.

What Else?

That's it for now!

Until next time...

Your friend,
Matt Stauffer