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…
Category: Parental Leave
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…
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…
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…
NYT: Inside the Dance Baby Boom
The New York Times published a fascinating article about the pandemic-fueled baby boom in the ballet world. Whatever qualms or anxieties I had about balancing my legal career and my family really paled in comparison to the dilemmas these professional ballet dancers face: A dance career is relatively short, and so is the window for…
A Day in the Life of Billable Baby
Before I had a baby, I was obsessed with “a day in the life of a newborn” videos and articles because I was curious about what new parents did all day. Now that I’m approximately three months (!!) into this parenting thing, I thought I would share a snippet of my day with Billable Baby…