WAHM Has Balance

StarTribune.com:

As a communications consultant, Valerie Gunderson crafts messages for businesses and government agencies.

Except when she is taking care of some other important clients, of a sort — her two young sons.

“Everybody has meetings,” Gunderson said. “Sometimes mine are with my kids.”

Gunderson refers to herself as a “microbusiness mom,” balancing dual roles of running a home-based business and raising children.

An early riser, Gunderson, 37, works several hours each morning before her sons, who are 9 months and 3 1/2, wake up.

She does more work while they nap and sometimes at night after her husband gets home from work. When she needs to visit clients, she hires an on-call nanny service.

When she can’t take calls from clients or can’t make meetings, she just says she’s unavailable, without going into detail about the time she blocks out for parenting.

“As I toggle back and forth between work and kids, I think [that] helps me be better at both jobs,” she said. “When it works as it should, there is an invigorating flow to it all.”