#35 Bring Your Baby to Work
We've found a really good rhythm for us, and it includes many good meals each week.
⭕️ Spinach & Feta Lentil Bowls served with boiled greens and a soft egg. Quick, easy, makes great leftovers.1
⭕️ Red Kidney Bean Curry I used an heirloom bean that we had from our backstock of Rancho Gordo subscription beans, and it was delicious.2
⭕️ Chicken Chili A true throw-everything-in-the-pot-and-go slow cooker recipe, with a short ingredients list and a hearty outcome.3
⭕️ Anylist is an app for collecting and organizing recipes and building meal plans and grocery lists. I love it.4
I don’t want to jinx anything, but…
Cass is now 15 weeks old, and we’ve both been going into the office since early October.
One of the reasons I thought it might be a good idea to have a baby, now, at almost 40, with two teenagers edging in on adulthood, is because my employer has a bring your baby to work policy. Before my current job, I hadn’t even imagined that it could be possible to keep my career tracking forward, sustain financial stability, and also be a present participant in the early months of my baby’s life in the ways I wanted to be.
I’ve always wanted another, for many reasons. I wanted the opportunity to do it with all the perspective gained over these past 17 years, with financial and housing security, with a solid partnership and the community we’ve built. I wanted it because babies are delicious, toddlers are grounding, kids are magic, and teenagers are so so fun. I wanted it because it’s hard work, but it’s work I know how to do and embrace fully.
But it never felt like something we could do without completely shaking up the order and ease we’d finally found.
I don’t mean to be disingenuous — life absolutely looks different than it did four months ago. But not so different that I don’t recognize us in it. Not the way it did the first time around, when Sebastian and I had hardly known each other a full year and I was just out of school (for the first time in 18 years) and neither of us had real jobs.
I still read myself to sleep at night (while feeding Cass) and wake up early to write (while Seb gives him a bottle). We jog along the cross country course to cheer Pan on (with Cass in the baby carrier). We give Orion rides to the Goodwill bins when it’s late and raining (with Cass in the carseat, sometimes cooing, sometimes screaming). Yesterday, I went to the Portland Book Festival (and pumped in the basement junk room of The Old Church).
And, Monday to Thursday, I go into the office downtown with Cass in tow.
We have a room dedicated to feeding and pumping, and I spend a lot of the day there, doing those two activities. Cass cycles through napping in the carrier, tummy time on the floor next to my desk, and distracting my colleagues with full body smiles. If he’s fussy before falling asleep, we go on a walk (which is usually more stimulating than sleep-making, but at least we’re getting the noise out of the office).
Some days, Sebastian keeps Cass at home all day. Most of the time we split the day, with Sebastian either bring him to me or picking him up midway, so we can both get things done with baby-free time. This works because Seb is currently doing project-based work and makes his own schedule. We’re still figuring out what we’ll do when Cass ages out of the bring your baby to work policy.
In six months, four babies were born at my work. Two more are on the way. It’s a baby boom! And it’s also totally normalized bringing your whole life into the office with you, in the sweetest way. The other day, there were two babies, two dogs, and a kid out of school. Meetings still happened, calls were taken, emails were sent.
Am I as productive as I was before? Hardly. But I feel deeply content with how things are. I do what I can, with the time I have, and then I get to walk into our living room to the delightful sight of a chubby baby naked on a blanket, trying his darndest to roll over.
And I happily drop everything to get down on the floor and watch.
P.S. While I was writing this, he rolled!
I ended up eating the leftovers for breakfast several days last week.
My favorite way to cook dried beans is in the instant pot. If I have more time and the beans are going to stand on their own (rather than be incorporated into another recipe), then Molly Baz’s master bean recipe is the way to go.
No need to soak or cook the beans first!
I’ve used this app for about two years now and I love it. It takes some time to build out your recipe collection, but Anylist has replaced pinterest for me when it comes to saving recipes from the web. I use it to build grocery lists (which can be exported and shared with others), meal plans, and to organize for big food holidays. A well-worth-it $10/year.