She strictly schedules evenings with her family, and her office knows not to call her then.

"You have to protect your family time, for sure, because otherwise it will get sucked in," she says. "It is hard."

Working mothers need to forgive themselves for not having perfectly clean houses, and they shouldn't compare themselves to stay-at-home mothers, she says. "I don't bake my own bread. I go buy bread and that's OK. God's not going to punish me for buying bread."

Despite the success she's achieved, she says she would prefer that her 12-year-old daughter choose to stay at home with her children, if afforded the choice, when she's an adult.

"I think if you can be home, that's awesome, a great blessing," Rees Anderson says. "If you have to work, if there's a way to do a career from home today, that's one of the things that didn't always exist. And now there's these opportunities. It's hard to be outside the home with kids, because you still have your mom duties when you get home. You have work, and you still have got to do laundry."

When her children were younger, she employed a nanny during the day, and she took care of them at night. She also frequently brought the kids to the office. They had little desks and kiddie telephones and "worked" while their mother worked.

"They're not the typical kids," she says, because they grew up around computers and office technology. She recalls an occasion when her daughter approached her with a piece of paper and said, "I drew a picture for Grandma. I want you to fax it to her because it will get there faster."

And despite wanting a more traditional path for her daughter, Rees Anderson knows that may not happen.

"My little girl, she's going to be a good little CEO some day," she says. "She learned to command the forces at a very young age, and she was never intimidated by anything, because she just grew up with that. She grew up walking around the office and pointing at what she wanted and getting it from most people. She's very tenacious, I would say, in a good way."

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E-mail: lhancock@desnews.com