What I read on maternity leave #2

My total maternity leave book count came in at 29! I read some really great books over the past three-ish months. Here they are!

Out of the total 29 books, I read:

15 adults novels (5 of which I would classify as mystery/suspense)

9 works of prescriptive nonfiction

3 memoirs

2 narrative nonfiction

Almost a complete split between fiction and nonfiction! It’s my policy to only read what I want to on maternity (no reading for work), so I took the opportunity to dive a little more into women’s fiction than I usually do. I enjoyed everything I read and would most highly recommend Tisha, Back of Beyond, Dead Wake, and When We Were Vikings.

Diving back in

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.

Our neighbor has a flag for every occasion!

Time keeps passing

In some ways it has felt like time has almost stopped over the past two weeks, what with staying at home 98% of the time and cycling through the mundane but comforting routines of our lives right now. But just as I was opening up this blog post, Will rolled over onto his belly for the first time, reminding me that time does keep passing and we’re not stuck in some kind of eternal holding pattern, no matter how much it might seem like it sometimes.

Matt and I are in a friendly (read: highly contentious) competition about who can get more “ripped.” Given that I just had a baby and he has put on about 15 pounds over the last few years, our version of ripped is pretty unimpressive. But I have been doing 8 minute abs every day along with working on the 100 pushups challenge, and I loaded the kids up into the Burley this morning for a 2+ mile round trip walk. We delivered some handmade cards to Alice’s best little buddy’s house, and I took advantage of Alice and Will falling asleep to get some extra walking in.

Some neighborhood friends stopped by to visit with us through our glass storm door around lunchtime, which was fun and also sad because Alice couldn’t go out to play with them. We have one of those doors where the glass part can come down to reveal a screen that slides in and out of the door, so I can pull the glass down and leave about 12 inches of screen at the top—perfect for being able to easily hear people standing on the other side while blocking all potential germs! Then we got on a Google Hangouts chat with two other families before dinner, and Alice’s other little friend put a card for her through our mail slot. All in all it was a pretty social day, with zero actual physical contact!

Alice and I also mixed up a batch of bread dough this morning (recipe here) and it’s in the oven right now. We’ll see how it turns out—the dough seemed awfully wet even after its 7+ hour rise. I am the opposite of an expert baker, so it’s possible I managed to mess up even this extremely basic bread. Annnd I just looked out the window and saw that Matt and Alice are riding his (one-person) motorcycle down our driveway, across the street, up our neighbor’s driveway, and then back to our house again, over and over. Yay quarantine!

Reading Update:

Dead Wake by Erik Larson: A great read! Probably my favorite I’ve read of his after Devil in the White City. Also really made me want to re-watch Titanic. Finished on 3/26/20 (audio).

“A” Is for Alibi by Sue Grafton: It’s fun to start a new-to-me series with so many books lined up to read. I’m usually not a big fan of first-person POV in crime fiction, but it worked for me here. Grafton is one of the greats and it’s exciting to dive in knowing how beloved these alphabet mysteries are and looking forward to the character development of Kinsey Millhone. I thought these lines summed her up well, as she muses about how she doesn’t care to admire scenery as she drives: “Driving anywhere looks much the same to me. I stare at the concrete roadway. I watch the yellow line. I keep track of large trucks and passenger vehicles with little children asleep in the backseat and I keep my foot pressed flat to the floor until I reach my destination.” Finished on 3/27/20.

At least she’s wearing her helmet!

Denial

There has been a lot of discussion in the media about the 1918 flu pandemic and what we can learn from it as we manage today’s coronavirus. But as I’ve been listening to Erik Larsen’s Dead Wake, I can’t help but notice some other parallels from that completely unrelated disaster. On the surface, it’s tough to see connections between the two: the sinking of the Lusitania was a tragedy of humanity’s own making, motivated by a wartime agenda, while the coronavirus is a natural disaster that in many ways is completely out of our control. But there’s one underlying theme that runs beneath both events: denial in the face of concrete evidence.

Trump’s recent declaration that he wants the US open and “raring to go” by Easter (just a little more than two weeks away) flies completely in the face of what the medical community and public health experts are telling us about where we are in the trajectory of the pandemic. Each day, confirmed COVID-19 cases and related deaths rise, and some experts are predicting we’re at least three weeks away from the peak of the outbreak. But it’s a well-established fact by now that Trump doesn’t really care about data or facts the way most people understand them. What’s really fascinating is how he’s far from alone in this tendency. As described in Dead Wake, the denial of many, many people on the Lusitania, including a lot of the crew, as the ship foundered, is a striking parallel. If you’ve seen the movie Titanic, you’re familiar with the hubris of people stating confidently, “This ship can’t sink!” literally as the water is rising up to meet them. What is is about the human nature that we cling to hope and optimism, often past the point of rationality?

Today the stock market is on the rise as a result of the stimulus package rapidly making its way through Congress, promising $2 trillion in aid to individuals and companies. But realistically, if we’re facing down another four, six, or eight weeks of much of the country being shut down (which seems almost inevitable if you listen to the people who actually know what they’re talking about), it’s obvious that amount of money isn’t going to prop the economy up through this whole ordeal. And in a couple of weeks, when it becomes impossible to deny that fact any longer, we’ll be right back where we were a week ago, with investors freaking out and the market plummeting. It’s just so interesting how short-sighted we seem to be in the face of disaster and how desperately we want to believe that things can’t be nearly as bad as the evidence clearly shows they will become.

I don’t really have a point to make here—just musing about how very different events in very different times seem to bring out the exact same emotions and thought processes in people.

At our house, we’ve been taking walks, making pancakes, and painting with watercolors. Alice got a scooter as an early Easter present, and I don’t think there have ever been more people out wandering around the neighborhood. Clearly we’re all bored and just looking for something to do!

Casual unicorn out for a stroll

Quarantine - Days 4, 5, 6, and beyond...

It’s definitely starting to feel like Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day around here! We wake up, play, do Camp Kindergarten, play some more, eat lunch, nap, go for a walk, eat dinner, play, go to bed. Over and over and over and over…

I had been looking forward to the weekend, but it ended up being frustrating. Having Matt home just disrupted the routine and encouraged Alice to act out and push boundaries, and I didn’t actually get more time to myself somehow. Blargh. I have started up again with my tried and true 8 minute abs workout, which is kicking my butt, and I’m doing the One Hundred Pushups Project. So hopefully I’ll come out of this at least a little more in shape than I was previously (trying to give myself a break and remember that I’m less than 12 weeks postpartum when I feel frustrated about my fitness level).

I’m starting to get really stressed about “going back” to work in less than two weeks. I just can’t imagine how I’ll balance trying to be available/working during the day and watching two very young kids. I’m confident I can do my job well and put in 40 hours a week, but a lot of those hours are going to have to be early mornings, nights, and weekends when I’m not also being a primary caregiver. I know everyone is dealing with some logistics juggling but I think I have a bit more of a challenge than most of my colleagues in terms of my kids being so young and me not having a work-from-home spouse to switch off with during the day. Whatever happens, I’ll figure it out! I have a few manuscripts incoming right after I return that I’m REALLY looking forward to editing, so that will be my focus for my nights and weekends time while I focus on communications and smaller projects that don’t require as much deep concentration during the day.

I’ve been trying to stay away from book industry news because I suspect it’s mostly terrible. I can’t even imagine what all this is doing to independent bookstores and even to B&N, which relies heavily on people walking into stores and browsing. One thing I am confident in is my company’s ability to weather this and even thrive under tough economic conditions. I wasn’t working there during the 2008 recession, but the company’s proactive response during that dark time is a big part of our culture now and we’re able to draw on that experience as we meet whatever lies ahead in the coming weeks and months. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with my colleagues and my work, and figuring out what’s next for all of us.

Reading Update:

Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner: I ended up liking this novel quite a bit! I’m interested in going back reading some of Weiner’s earlier novels, which I understand are a bit different than this one. I enjoyed getting the perspective of the main characters as they grew and matured, and to consider the different roles women play at different times in their lives and how society dictates those roles. I’m still a little unsure whether the main characters’ names (Jo and Bethie) are supposed to be an allusion to Little Women. At the beginning of the novel it seemed like they must be, as Jo was a tomboy-ish aspiring writer and Beth was a goody two-shoes type, but it never really became clear, so it may have just been a coincidence. Finished on 3/19/20.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata: I had read about this short, strange little novel on both Modern Mrs. Darcy and The SHU Box (I think) a while ago. It was weird, but a fun quick read! What I found most interesting was the idea of the convenience store (or any workplace, really) as its own little world with accepted rules, culture, and vocabulary. I definitely feel this sometimes at work, and because I really jive with the culture of my workplace it’s actually one of the things I enjoy most about my job. Maybe that makes me uncool or whatever because I’m not trying to rebel against my workplace and genuinely buy into and agree with a lot of the corporate messaging, but… I identified with the main character in some ways because of it! Finished 3/21/20.

Dead Wake by Erik Larson: Another audiobook from OverDrive that I think I’m actually going to get through! I love a good Erik Larson book. Totally gripping narrative nonfiction about the last crossing of the British passenger ship RMS Lusitania during WWI. Very much enjoying it!

“A” Is for Alibi by Sue Grafton: Somehow I’ve made it this far in life without reading any of Grafton’s famed “alphabet” Kinsey Millhone mysteries. I’m remedying that now, and looking forward to working my way through the whole series.

One good thing about being forced to stay at home is the number of art collaborations Alice and I are doing together!

Quarantine - Day 1

This weekend included a wild trip to the grocery store with insanely long lines, cleaning the laundry room (and enjoying our new dryer!), band practice, helping my mom test her work-from-home capabilities, and voting. And now we’re heading into at least two weeks of self-quarantine and social distancing.

With all schools closed in Illinois, activities canceled, and social distancing highly encouraged, we’re entering a weird period of “figure out any and all potential fun stuff to do at home.” Yesterday (Monday) wasn’t too bad. Alice slept in until nearly 8:30 and then we had breakfast and tuned into a Facebook Live event at 9:00—Miss Megan’s Camp Kindergarten, which was a fun school-like hour, even if the content is a little advanced for a three-year-old. Will snoozed on the couch through most of it, so I was able to focus on Alice and do the activities and songs with her. Then we played Barbies for a bit before I loaded the kids up in the car for a quick trip to the bank drive-through to deposit a check. Then lunch and nap (I fell asleep with them despite wanting to read instead).

When I woke up from the nap I had a bunch of texts on my phone from a neighborhood group thread with rumors that Illinois will go into lockdown soon in similar fashion to San Francisco (there has not been any confirmation of this yet). I freaked out and texted Matt, who had heard the same thing from a different source. Imagining the absolute madness of the grocery store after this potential news breaks, I got the kids back into the car and went to our small neighborhood grocery store, hoping to avoid the massive lines that have been standard at the larger stores around here. I was able to get a good amount of stuff, including eggs, milk, and bread alternatives (pretzel rolls, focaccia loaf, etc. because they were out of regular sandwich bread). So now we’re pretty well-stocked. Then I had a really frustrating text conversation with my mom, who is still in the denial/this is all ridiculous/there’s no way we could go on lockdown state of mind and insists on taking the commuter train to work even though she could work from home. Gah.

Matt came home and wanted to get quarantine cigarettes as a treat for himself (gross). I was dying to get out of the house by myself, so I went to the tobacco store/hookah bar, which was completely empty of course. The store owner was obviously stressed about the current situation and had a lot of questions for me about where I worked and whether my business was still open. When I told him I work in book publishing he looked at me quizzically and asked, “How do you make money”? I was like, well… we publish books and people buy them? It was odd. But he had roll-your-own American Spirit tobacco, so I bought the cancer leaves and went on my way. Picked up A&W for dinner because I needed to eat some feelings, and it was delicious.

It wasn’t a bad day, but definitely different from what our Mondays looked like a month ago, which included story time at the library in the morning and swim class in the late afternoon. Alice has only been going to school Tuesday through Thursday since I’ve been on leave, so today (Tuesday) will mark the first true disruption in that she will be home when she was supposed to be at school. Matt’s work is still open and will continue to be, I think, even in the case of a lockdown, since plumbers are on the list of essential workers. I’m happy he will still be working because $$$, obviously, but having him out of the house all day every day means all the childcare falls to me. Being confined to our house and yard makes this more challenging than it would be normally (and will become extremely challenging when I go back to work on April 6th). Because he’s going on jobs, I think his risk of contracting COVID-19 (and bringing it home) is fairly high. We’re not able to completely self-isolate the way families with both parents working from home are, and that means we really shouldn’t have contact with anyone else because our household isn’t a closed system. So that sucks—both the risk of contracting the virus and the social isolation our potential exposure necessitates.

I hope we don’t get sick (or if we do that we have only mild symptoms), I hope we’re all doing enough social distancing to slow the virus’s spread. I hope in four or six or eight weeks things will get better and we’ll look back on this time as super strange and temporary. Fingers crossed!

A little Peppa Pig to help get us through the day

COVID-19 on maternity leave

On Wednesday I took Will to his two-month well baby check (he’s tall and skinny with a big head, just like his dad!), then stopped by work afterwards to show him off. I had gone back and forth over whether to take him into an office building of 100+ people in the midst of coronavirus panic, but decided the risk at this point was probably reasonable as long as I didn’t let anyone else hold him and was careful about my hand-washing. It seems likely that a week or two from now things will be much worse, so I took the opportunity to see some friends and also grab some stuff from my desk in the event our physical offices are closed when I return to work in April.

Being on maternity leave during the rise of COVID-19 has been kind of a surreal experience. I have a lot of time to read the news, for better or worse. Initially just the thought of the novel coronavirus would send me into a tailspin of anxiety, but since it has become clear that the virus is not as dangerous for children as for some other groups (although there isn’t a lot of data on infants at this point), I’ve been able to mostly move past that emotional reaction, although my mom and Matt’s parents are in the 60+ age group and I worry that my mom isn’t being as careful as she should (she has a strong Bah humbug this whole thing is ridiculous attitude right now). I cruised around Target and got us stocked up on supplies last weekend before things got really crazy—definitely didn’t go into full-on prepper mode, but made sure we were topped up on TP, laundry detergent, diapers and wipes, etc. The price tag kind of made me choke (I don’t usually spend $150+ at Target!), but I’m glad I did, seeing all the pictures of empty store shelves on social media now!

The governor decided to close all Illinois schools starting Monday, so I’m losing my precious three days a week of Alice being out of the house. Honestly, it’s going to be a challenge being with both kids literally 24/7 for the next three weeks—I’ll need to make better use of nap time for my mental health maintenance rather than just passing out in bed with them for 90 minutes every day. But I am SO LUCKY to still be on maternity leave and not having to deal with worrying about childcare or working from home with them underfoot for at least a few weeks, and I’ll be offering myself up as a back-up babysitter to friends who are still working. We’ll do playdates and hang out with families in our neighborhood, but not having park district and library programs and all the fun things like children’s museums, etc. open will definitely change the way we move through the world. I hope the weather warms up a little so we can spend more time outside.

It seems like the news changes every day, so we’ll see how things go from here on out! For now, we’re happy and healthy and doing just fine. I hope everyone is able to stay safe out there.

Reading Update:

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell: I grabbed this audio book from OverDrive and actually managed to remember to listen to it! I like Gladwell’s stuff (although I wasn’t crazy about him as a narrator) and reading TTP felt particularly apt right now because the book opens with an example of how viruses gain momentum and “tip” into epidemics. Relevant to life right now! Overall I didn’t come away with any life-changing takeaways (maybe because the book is 10 years old?). Some of the topics, like the power of word of mouth, are things that I’ve thought about pretty extensively in relation to my work already. Finished on 3/12/20.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: After seeing the excellent movie, I had to dig out my childhood copy and re-read it for the first time in probably 20-ish years. I have really specific memories of reading Little Women as a child because it was the longest book in my elementary school library and I REALLY wanted to get through it so I could take the Accelerated Reader test and get all those sweet sweet points. The story was just as lovely this time around, and as an adult I have more appreciation for how well the content holds up. It’s pretty amazing to think that Alice will most likely read and love a story written shortly after the Civil War, and find a reflection of herself in the characters and their lives. The human condition!! Finished on 3/13/20.

Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner: I started this one around the same time I cracked open Little Women and have kind of neglected it, but so far so good! I haven’t read any of Weiner’s novels before, although I’ve seen her stuff online and followed her feud with Jonathan Franzen, so I’m looking forward to digging into this one more. I haven’t looked up anything online about it, so I don’t know—are the character names Jo and Bethie coincidental, or is there an overarching allusion to Little Women running throughout the book? Very funny if so, considering my timing for reading it!

Who wouldn’t want to self-quarantine at home with these two??

Baby #2!

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!