Greetings from maternity leave! Yes, it has been three years, since the last post I wrote was at the end of my maternity leave with my daughter, Alice, who is now a crazy preschooler. I’ve spent many enjoyable hours this winter reading long-running blogs from inspiring women like Laura Vanderkam, SHU, and Lag Liv, and I found myself jealous of their online records of their lives. When I looked back over the past three years, I realized I don’t have a great resource for remembering what happened when, other than the pictures I take. Luckily we are pretty good about taking pictures and storing them in an accessible and methodical way, but I suspect many everyday moments and events of my life are being lost to the sands of time. Regular blogging seems to be a pretty great way to avoid that happening, so I’m attempting to dive back in! Easy to say now while I’m on leave, of course…
The biggest event of 2020 for our family was, of course, the birth of our son, Will. His birth story was happily fast and uncomplicated—scheduled induction, quick labor, happy delivery. We were out of the hospital less than 36 hours after he was born (our departure slightly hastened by a threatened snowstorm, which ended up not actually happening).
We didn’t find out beforehand whether he was a girl or a boy, and it has been such a surprising delight to welcome a son to the Michels family. Alice is so wonderful that it was hard for me to imagine parenting anyone other than a happy little girl, but Will is closing in on two months old and has fully convinced me of the benefits of being a boy mom—he’s such a sweet little dude. Proof:
He’s making it easy to be the mom of a newborn and maternity leave has been really lovely. Alice is in school three days a week and is busy most other days with activities (swimming and tumbling) and playdates with friends. She has a new little buddy she met at swim class and we have been spending lots of time with him and his mom, which is really fun. One of the things I didn’t anticipate about parenthood was how much my social circle would expand. We have a bunch of kids in our neighborhood and get along well with all the families, so our calendar is much busier than it was pre-kids when Matt and I had a tendency to stay home and do our own thing. We still like to do that, of course, but three-year-olds need to get out of the house most days, and we’re lucky to have a bunch of friends in the same boat so we can get grown-up social time in right alongside Alice. And now Will is along for the ride!
Apart from wrangling the kids, I’ve been napping, reading, and trying to get projects done around the house. This is likely my last maternity leave (although I’m not quite ready to totally give up the idea of having a third someday, it would make our life logistics pretty darn complicated), so I’m trying to soak it all in and snuggle my baby boy as much as I can before real life hits next month!