Diving back in — Anna Michels

The weirdness of the past several weeks has been compounded for me because I’ve been on maternity leave… but tomorrow I’m diving back in to work from the comfort of my home workstation set up on a dining table in my living room. Matt is still going to work, so I’ll be here watching two young children and doing my job simultaneously. I am nervous. I sat on 2 1/2 hours of conference calls on Friday and while it wasn’t a disaster, it was pretty exhausting. This is how I’m expecting my schedule to basically function:

4:45 a.m.: Wake up, brush hair and teeth, put on professional-ish shirt (no one can see my pants on conference calls!), make highly caffeinated tea

5:00 a.m.: Sit down at computer, edit or do other focused work (no checking email until after some real work gets done!)

7:00 a.m.: Check email, probably feed Will

7:30-8:00 a.m.: Get Alice breakfast and set her up with some kind of activity

8:00-10:00 a.m.: Conference calls, manage email, work on small projects, cater to children’s whims as necessary

10:00-11:00 a.m.: Take kids outside, run Alice around as much as possible, manage urgent emails from phone

11:00-12:00: Manage email, work on small projects

12:00-1:00 p.m.: Unavailable for work, making lunch and putting kids down for nap

1:00-3:00 p.m.: SACRED NAPTIME! Edit or do focused work, participate in extremely important conference calls that require no child drop-ins

3:00-5:00 p.m.: Work on projects (Alice will get screen time after nap)

5:00-6:00 p.m.: Clear out inbox and close things down for the day (Matt will hopefully be home at 5:00 or before most days)

And of course I can always hop back on later at night and on the weekends as needed. I’ve had several conversations with Alice about how I’m “going back to work” and will need her to play by herself a lot more, but she’s three—she has no idea what work is or why it’s important. So we will see how it goes. I’m really hoping to limit her screen time to two hours every afternoon. Wish me luck!

Reading Update:

The Highway by C.J. Box: This is Book 2 in Box’s Highway Quartet thriller series. I read the first book, Back of Beyond, a few weeks ago and enjoyed it a lot. BoB is set in Yellowstone National Park, which is why I picked it off the shelf at the library—any book set in a national park is a book for me. The Highway takes us out of that setting into small towns in Montana and features a really sinister villain who doesn’t get his comeuppance in the end, leaving a clear path to Book 3. Box’s writing is fast-paced and engaging, and while I didn’t enjoy The Highway quite as much as BoB (mostly because of the lack of national parks content and because the story felt a bit more grim), I'm definitely planning to finish out the series as soon as our library system opens back up. Finished on 4/1/20.

168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam: I read one of Vanderkam’s other books, I Know How She Does It, on my maternity leave with Alice, so it felt fitting to dive into her best-known work now. 168 Hours reminds readers that we all have the same amount of time in a week, but some people make much better use of that time than others, and gives us ideas for how to optimize our hours. There wasn’t really anything new for me here since I’m pretty familiar with Vanderkam’s thoughts on the subject via her podcast “Best of Both Worlds”, which I wrote about recently in my favorite podcasts roundup, but I enjoyed going into a bit more detail and reminding myself as I head into what is likely going to be a fairly busy and stressful period of time working from home and caring for children simultaneously that I have a lot more control over my time than societal narratives may tell me I do. Finished on 4/3/20.

When We Were Vikings by Andrew David MacDonald: I first heard about this quirky debut novel from an editor at Book Expo last spring and I immediately added it to my TBR. Fiction, about a young woman named Zelda who was born on the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome spectrum and is obsessed with vikings. I loved the narrative voice and all the references to Norse culture, and I devoured it in less than a day. Also, the packaging of the hardcover edition is beautiful, and it’s definitely earning a forever place on my bookshelf. Highly recommended! Finished on 4/5/20.