Whew! The first two months of my son’s life has flown by, where to start?

The Birth

Kittridge “Kit” Emanuel Boyanoski was born on January 24th here in Greenville. We ended up having to induce since he was a week late. I was terrified to get induced, I was so worried it wouldn’t work the first time and we’d be stuck there for days. I was also worried about not being able to eat or drink any water. I of course love food, but I’m a huge water guzzler. Having to go all day during labor with no water was not my idea of fun. Despite all my worries, my labor was actually relatively easy. We started the induction at 6:00 AM and I was pushing by 4:00 PM. Kittridge was born just a short 20 minutes after I started pushing, wohoo! There of course was pain early on and afterwards, but I was all about that epidural. My family came to visit us that night in the hospital, and then we got to sleep fairly well the first night.

The First Week

The first week at home really should have been called week in hell. Truly my son has been a fantastic baby, it’s just the exhaustion that hit me hard. Breastfeeding was easy in the hospital but as soon as we got home it got really difficult and incredibly painful. Two months later I’m still in some pain with nursing, but we are working through it. My goal is to get to 6 months before we stop. The first week was hard just because it takes some getting used to the schedule. He was up every 2-3 hours to nurse, which means you never get fully asleep. It was also challenging because Kit refused to go to sleep in his crib, he was only happy when he was being held. Thank goodness John stayed home the first couple of weeks! Work-wise I didn’t even turn my computer on the first week, it was strange but great at the same time.

The First Month

My plan after Kittridge was born was to stay home until April. Right away I got pulled back in with a major event with CNN (we hosted a Republican Town Hall at The Old Cigar Warehouse) and our Anniversary Party. I got frustrated quickly when people wouldn’t leave me alone or understand that I really was trying to take a “real” maternity leave. I’ve always been good about not giving my cell phone number out to just anyone, but that didn’t stop dozens of people from trying to get in touch with me via text, email, Facebook, etc. It always started with “I know you are on maternity leave, but…”. There was one day I counted 5 different phone calls I got for work-related things someone from my team could have handled. I anticipated there would be things I would still have to deal with, but I quickly got overwhelmed by the amount of incoming messages I just didn’t have the time to deal with. At the time I was lucky if I could check email for 15 minutes each day, yet people would still expect an immediate response (despite my out of office autoresponse). After I realized that I couldn’t fully disconnect, I decided to just extend my maternity leave. If I can’t get as much time with him during the week as I would like, I will just stay home longer. Right now the plan is to go back full time in May.

Now

Now that we are two months in, I’m slowly starting to get back to work more. I’m still not really taking on client or vendor meetings, I’m trying to differ all that to my staff and just participate in my weekly staff meetings. John of course is back to work full time, but he takes Kit for a few hours each week so I can run errands or get a little bit of work done. I can’t imagine trying to do this without our amazing technology tools. Thank goodness for email, Slack and Dropbox! I can work from home when I want and just check-in in person once a week.

Check out the darling pictures of Kit below: