May 28, 2023

Parental Leave - Week 1

Hello!

I am now on the second part of my parental leave for Jonathan, which will take me through the beginning of August. I will be providing weekly flash updates on how things are going!

Jonny:

• My mornings, while Amelia is in preschool, are with Jonny.
• I have discovered that Jonny is entranced when I play the ukulele, so we will be doing more of that.
• While I didn’t get to do much this week due to appointments, I am looking forward to spending more of our mornings together taking walks and having brunch with friends.
• We also discovered that Jonny appears to have some type of food sensitivity, though it isn’t clear if it is a proper food allergy. Investigation in progress.

Amelia:

• In the afternoons, Jonny goes down for a nap and I look after Amelia once she is out of school.
• Amelia currently has a weekly rhythm class, math and reading tutoring, swim lessons, and violin lessons. We’re on week two of violin lessons and she is still engaged.
• In the evenings, Amelia has been pushing me to take her on ever longer walks. She rides her little balance bike while I jog behind. I remember much less than a year ago we’d be lucky to make it to the end of the block without me having to carry her. Yesterday, she made it a mile and a half under her own power.
• On our last walk, she discovered a dead crow and that has been the primary topic of discussion for the last day.

Me:

• Looking forward to spending some time organizing the house.
• The Wall Street Journal is interesting to negotiate a price with. My weekly subscription jumped from about $19 a month to about $38. I called asking to cancel, saying I couldn’t afford the increase, hoping they’d lower it back down. They gave me $4 a month.
• I have become increasingly aware that one of my biggest challenges with parenting (and parental leave more specifically (but also life generally)) is letting go of the sensation that there is something specific I need to be doing in each moment, or rushing through what I’m doing so I can do some other thing. Now is the only time we can ever be.
• I have also noticed with Amelia that (unsurprisingly) it is the more challenging homework that is the most difficult to get her to do; the ones that introduce new and unfamiliar concepts. But interestingly, she doesn’t tell me that they’re hard, they’re the ones she calls “boring.” The ones she knows and can blaze through are exciting, but the ones that are new register as tedious. There is probably a lesson in there somewhere.

And as I mentioned before, please shoot me an email if you’d like to grab brunch one of these mornings.