It's my birthday today. And I've somehow turned 39.

Now I have two young kids and I'm sitting here typing this while half-listening to the baby monitor.

(9 years ago, I celebrated my birthday at the doomed Fyre Festival. Things look a tad different today 🙃).

To celebrate this trip around the sun, I just booked us a weekend getaway... an hour's drive outside of Barcelona. Nothing ambitious.

I spent 10+ years as a digital nomad where jumping on an international flight with a carry-on was genuinely no big deal. Now, I need to vet the entire hotel situation before booking.

Blackout curtains? Check. Two separate sleeping areas? Ideally. Hotel breakfast? Non-negotiable.

(That's why I use my AMEX points on 5-star hotels when I can. I need at least ONE thing to go smoothly on family trips. And hopefully, that's sleep.)

Wish us luck.

What I actually want for my birthday...

8 hours of uninterrupted sleep.

My Apple watch has been tracking my sleep and rating it as "low" each morning – with 10-20 wake-ups a night and basically only 20 mins of deep sleep.

I keep wanting to grab it and say: I have a baby. 👹

But speaking of watches and birthday gifts, if I were to want anything material, it'd be this one: the No Watch. It looks analog, but has all the health tracking built in.

I've already decided I'm getting the gold one. Maybe as a push present to myself. (If that's still a thing?)

My current favorite 1-minute social media moves:

Time is tight these days. Baby will be up in approx 4.2 minutes. Here are my fave ways to get back to posting for my business:

1️⃣ Take a basic or even an ugly selfie. Post it to Stories. Add text + a keyword that triggers a DM automation. Your followers see the story, and reply to it with your keyword.

Boom. 10x your Story views. (Took 2 minutes.)

​The whole strategy is here.​

2️⃣ Whenever I make a new reel, I save it as a draft, and then go to my Drafts and hit the 3 dots... then tap Duplicate. Now I have one Reel ready to publish to my feed, and one ready to publish as a Trial.

Btw, you can now schedule Trial Reels to reach non-followers. Instagram says Trial Reels have already driven an 80% increase in reach among non-followers. So that's huge. Worth trying!

My Claude era continues.

I'm still working my way through learning Cowork – which is where you give Claude access to your actual computer files and tools, and it just... does the work. Not chat. Actual work.

I've been learning it all from Brittany Long, who just delivered a workshop on exactly this last week.

If you missed it, the replay is still up. ​

​👉 Watch the free replay here →​

You'll see what had people saying:

To the privilege of getting older,

~ Elise

P.S. 39 feels exactly like 38, which felt exactly like 37. Maybe that's a win?

P.P.S. In honor of 39, a few things I've genuinely stopped worrying about:

1. What my face looks like in a Story
2. Whether my caption is typo-free before I post
3. What people think of my prices
4. Keeping up with every new AI tool
5. Whether my office is clean before a video call
6. Being the most productive person in the room
7. Posting every day
8. Learning new hairstyles
9. Responding to every DM each day
10. Updating my millennial "cat eye" look I've had for 10 years
11. Whether I look tired on camera. (I am tired. Moving on.)
12. Saying no to collabs that don't feel right
13. Justifying how I spend my work hours
14. Whether my kids are too loud in the background
15. Comparing my business to where someone else is, sans kids
16. Pretending I have it all figured out
17. Sounding too casual in my emails
18. Making every piece of content "valuable"
19. What my old followers think of my new mom direction
20. Trends that feel off-brand
21. The number of unread emails in my inbox
22. Whether people unsubscribe after each email I send
23. Launching on someone else's timeline
24. Justifying a 5-star hotel
25. Getting the "perfect" photo
26. Having a 5-year plan (ha!)
27. Getting 8 hours of restful sleep
28. What my pre-baby business looked like
29. Doing things the way everyone else does them
30. Pleasing all 300K+ people in my online audience
31. Tracking carbs or calories or protein or...
32. Walking around Barcelona, makeup-free
33. How my body looks in a swimsuit these days
34. Getting my hair cut (it's been 8 months...)
35. Being the perfect homemaker with homemade meals each night
36. Spending money on healthy, nourishing foods
37. Hiring the professionals – trainers, physios, dermatologists, etc
38. Upgrading to business class seats
39. Being a little late. It's a Spanish thing 😆