Two hundred hours–that’s a busy month for some of you; a slow month for others. To maintain some semblance of privacy, I will leave ambiguous the number of days it took me to hit this threshold. I will also let you all decide whether defining life milestones in billable hours is a healthy practice. So…
Author: Billable Baby
Parenting Performance Evaluations (4 Months)
For a Type A person like me, one of the more challenging aspects of parenthood is the lack of feedback about how I’m doing as a new parent, especially during the phase when my kid is still a non-interactive potato (don’t tell Billable Baby I called her that). In my day job, I am used…
How I’m Feeling on the Eve of My Return to Work
“I’m in the hospital and will be offline for the coming weeks. My water broke this morning (two months early). The doctors are monitoring me and trying to figure out if the baby wants to come out.” It feels like a lifetime ago when I sent this abrupt out-of-office message from the triage room of…
Fire, Flood, and a Month-Long Hospitalization: Making Sense of Billable Baby’s Birth Story
It all started with a fire. A flood followed, perhaps foreshadowing a rush of water of a very different kind. Over and over again, I found myself telling the story of the birth of my daughter. The story flows out, in drips and dribbles at first: a pause, a sigh, and a hint at a…
Everything I Learned about PPROM (Preterm Premature Rupture of the Membranes)
“I think my water broke.” I told my husband one chilly morning early in my third trimester. I knew the signs because I had grown up hearing stories about how my mother’s water broke a few weeks early when she had me. Baby Me made a dramatic entry in to the world, and everyone was…
8 Pieces of Parenting Advice I Would Tell a Five-Months-Younger Me
A friend recently asked me if I had any advice to share with her friend who is pregnant and expecting her first child. I thought about what I would tell five-months-younger me. Here is what I came up with. 1. Take all the help you can get. Friends or family members offer to drop off…
How Much Sleep We Got with a Newborn
Many parents describe the newborn phase as “a blur.” The round-the-clock feedings. The lack of sleep. The terrifying new reality of caring for a helpless, tiny human. When you are in the middle of it, it feels never-ending. You hear that “it gets better,” and you wonder, but when?! Because I love data, I would…
3 Baby Products that Are Surprisingly Worth the Hype
To prepare for the arrival of Billable Baby, I spent many hours reading articles and watching videos about “must-have” baby items. In order to retain some semblance of minimalism, I told myself that my sturdy baby was not going to need wipe warmers or bottle warmers (turned out to be true, phew!) and that the…
Happy Mother’s Day, Lawyer Moms!
A special happy first Mother’s Day to the new mamas out there, who now viscerally understand what their mothers went through and profoundly feel the depth of a mother’s love.
4 Skills Essential to Good Lawyering that Are Useless for New Parents, and 3 Skills that Actually Help
Both my husband and I are the first person in our families to go to law school. Given my limited exposure to the legal profession growing up, I was fascinated by the childhood experiences of those who come from a long line of lawyers. One classmate, the son of two prosecutors, told me that discussions…