How I started PM Your Parenthood
People say “All great ideas come in the shower”. My idea of starting this parenthood-focused blog was close! It popped up when I was brushing my teeth two days after our honeymoon.
Like many newlyweds who are thinking about getting pregnant, I was excited, nervous yet overwhelmed by all kinds of information available online, through friends and families, and from traditional books. At first, it was fun to randomly read whatever seems most interesting. However, after a week, I started to wonder: “Where do I REALLY start?” “How do I even remember what I’ve read, internalize and apply them?” “Am I focusing on the right thing at the right time?” “What if I missed something important?”, etc. All these questions led to more intense researches, yet more confusion, and at the end – anxiety.
As a professionally trained Program/Product manager (PM) in tech, I have been dealing with multiple fire drills all day with composure. I was pretty surprised (or embarrassed?) that just the idea of getting pregnant got me anxious! I just wish there is a centralized knowledge bank that has documented a “Baby Development Cycle” SOP that I can simply refer to, a Gantt chart timeline that I can follow, or even a launch script if possible (call me a geek!).
Anyways, maybe it was due to the new toothpaste or maybe bathrooms really have the magic power of generating ideas, I had my ah-ha moment that day when I was brushing my teeth. “Why don’t you PM your parenthood like you are already doing at your job?”, I said to myself in the mirror…
Why I started PM Your Parenthood
I started this blog to document my journey, organize my learnings, and form some PM-driven mental models about parenthood. My goal is to leverage my PM skills to have all my questions answered and backed up by my own honest experience. I believe that once I’ve built up this centralized knowledge bank of parenthood, I will be able to achieve physical, mental and spiritual peace throughout. And hopefully, I can inspire/help some other similarly confused new parents (/to be) along the way.
Who am I
Hi, my name is Teresa and here is my 5-bullet-point elevator pitch ; )
- Seattle-based tech worker, wife, now blogger, soon-to-be mom (fingers crossed!)
- Middle child with a brother (+6 yrs) and a sister (-3 yrs)
- Business/Tech professional on the surface; Artist at heart (self-learning Procreate and Piano)
- MBA from George Washington University, concentrating in Data Analytics & Visualization
- My favorite book of 2022: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. It broke several values that I lived by for the past 30+ years, in an inspiring, cheering and life-changing way! The book is a collection of his quotes/publicly shared ideas. It is easy to read but definitely requires some brain power to digest and courage to internalize. His definition of Mental Models and usage of tweets to compress his learnings have inspired me to start this blog. You can find out more (even free versions of the book) from: https://www.navalmanack.com/
Enough about me! Let’s grab a coffee and get to read everything about Parenthood: