Thursday, October 30, 2008

The First Week Back Continues

The week continues to go better than I could have hoped. There is a woman in HR who had enthusiastically leapt to the task of setting up a room for me to use the breast pump in. But it turns out that going to the nursery to feed Gabe is just as easy as using the breast pump, so I don’t need to use the pump at work at all!

We’re still ironing out the details, but so far it looks like if I nurse Gabe in the morning when we drop him off, at lunch, and then once during the afternoon, followed by a bottle, I can keep up my milk supply without being out of the office more than the typical smoker or latte-a-day employee. It means I have to give up going out for lunches and walks with my coworkers, but it’s a worthwhile sacrifice. Chris has been bringing me lunch, and I get nearly a mile of walking to and from the nursery over the course of a day.

And I get to spend time with Gabe! While watching other babies!

It is such a dramatic contrast, crossing back and forth between a game development studio and a nursery. After recharging in the peaceful glow of happy human larva, I am recharged, and ready to pour my focus into getting the next task done. An unexpected benefit of having a baby is that I feel like a more efficient employee, since my time is limited and valuable to me in a way that it wasn’t before. In much the same way that I have been able to relinquish non-essentials from the rest of my life, it has been a natural next step for me to drop the fluff from my workday.

I think in the back of my mind I was worried that I wouldn’t be as productive now that I have a baby. I am deeply relieved to find that the opposite applies.

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