Today I’m taking you behind the scenes of my 4-month maternity leave with my second baby as a business owner! We’re going to talk about what my leave was like from a business perspective (what I still was doing, how I unplugged from work, how my business did financially in those 4 months, and more), and on a personal level (what it was like going from 1 to 2 kids, c-section recovery, how we had “4 weekend days a week” while I was on leave, potty training my toddler with a newborn, going on a beach vacation with a 2-month-old, postpartum emotions, and more).
As you can tell, we’re going to cover a lot today but I’m excited to share with you all what it was really like behind-the-scenes of my maternity leave!
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First things first, I started my leave slightly before my due date! I quit having meetings for work about 2 weeks before my due date, which felt really good to me this time! With Colin’s birth, I started my leave 2 weeks before my due date, then he was a week late. That felt too early, and I was stir-crazy and ended up getting back into working before he was born.
I like the way I did it this time. A week before was enough time to not really work except like an hour a day or so and mainly was focusing on last-minute pre-baby things and family bonding time! I did so many fun one-on-one things with Colin right before going into labor. If you’re interested in listening to Ethan’s birth story, you can hear more about the pre-baby time here.
I Did Not Struggle To Unplug From Work This Time
With Colin in his newborn season, I really struggled to unplug at first and that did not happen with Ethan. With Colin, it felt like I was trying to go from “100 to 0”, and it just didn’t work. With Ethan, I actually felt like I craved the unpluggedness this go around, and I doubt anyone really noticed because people notice us less than we think! But I posted a lot less than normal and wasn’t showing up on social media really much at all on my leave.
I mainly felt like I wanted family time and wanted to step AWAY. And that felt so good. When Colin was born, I also ended up stepping away really well eventually, but at least in that first 1-2 weeks postpartum, I was still sharing sooo much on social media about new mom life. I even randomly ran a Labor Day sale when he was like 3 days old.
Recovering from a C-section
This time, I was able to check out from work a lot more quickly. That might have been in part from having had a c-section and a harder post-birth recovery. With Colin, my labor was insanely hard and long, but recovery was really chill. With Ethan, labor was shorter, ended in a c-section and recovery was way harder.
For anyone wondering, C-section recovery was so intense for me at first, but then got easier quickly. I’m not going to lie, I had some deep moments of feeling absolutely defeated over how hard it felt in the first 10 days postpartum. I remember at the hospital in the postpartum unit the nurse had me do a short lap up and down the hall just walking crazy slow while holding onto Adam as a “test” before leaving, and I did it, but it really was so hard. I couldn’t do things like sit up on my own from laying down, walk up and down stairs, roll over comfortably, walk comfortably for any distance, or even hold Colin or anything heavy. I couldn’t drive. I was on pain medications. My stomach and intestines were feeling really weird. It was a lot.
And I did have moments of “I’ll never be normal feeling again”, which proved to NOT be true, but that’s how it felt in the moment. Plus, processing my birth story was really hard at first, as the c-section was such a shock and not what I had planned. However, in hindsight, I’m so grateful for the experience. And if you listened to Ethan's birth story, you’ll hear that in it!
You can listen to Colin’s birth story here, or Ethan’s birth story here for more details.
When I was planning my postpartum period and thinking about what it would look like before Ethan was born, I decided I wanted to do the 5-5-5 Rule.
There are different versions of this, but mine was 5 days in bed, 5 days around the bed, 5 days around the house. My doula, before knowing I’d have a c-section, had encouraged me and Adam in one of our last doula meetings to go for this! And I was all like “Yes, Adam! I want to do that. I want to really rest and soak up newborn snuggle time and recover slowly”.
I went back to doing normal things quickly with Colin, and I liked the idea of letting someone else do the laundry and unload the dishes and I just rest.
So then I had a c-section and the 5-5-5 rule became less of a “luxury” and more of a NEED. Like, I was at home and told not to go up and down our stairs more than 1x a day because it would be hard on my body. Bending over and picking things up was a major no. I couldn’t unload dishes, do laundry, or organize new baby things.
And I will say, something about NOT BEING ABLE TO, triggered me, and on maybe 6 days postpartum, I got soooo upset about not being able to do anything and cried and cried about it. Adam reminded me that I wanted this type of rest. I can still picture us sitting in our bedroom with me crying trying to go downstairs. We had family there who wanted to help and he wanted to help, and my body needs it, so just relax and remember that I did want to rest.
This little pep talk truly changed things for me and I was able to lean into the 5-5-5 thing well after that.
Because the truth is, you have the rest of your motherhood journey to do the dishes, go up and down the stairs 100000 times a day carrying a toddler and newborn, being responsible for laundry and dinner and grocery shopping, so JUST TAKE THE BREAK!
Read more: Juggling Too Much? 4 Keys To Maintaining Your Sanity As A Mom And Business Owner With Ashley Freehan
Things I Did That Helped With My Recovery
Here are a few things that helped with my recovery:
- Diaphragmatic breathing early on (here’s a free guide for how to do it!)
- Lauren Fitter Exercise Videos on YouTube
- Wearing my belly wrap and walking for 10 minutes outside
- Lots of family help in those early days
- Lots of snuggle and TV time in the early days with both boys!
As I’m recording this now, I’m 4 months postpartum, and I feel GREAT. In the gym, I can do what I could do pre-pregnancy. My body feels good/normal. The only thing is that my incision site/scar feels really weird still. It feels like sandpaper. I’ve been told sometimes it takes years to actually get feeling back in that area (and that’s how it seems like I’m heading). The scar was also really emotional for me at first and I felt sensitive about it, but now I feel good about it. It’s also much lower than you’d think.
The Newborn Phase
Every child is so different, but for us, the newborn phase of those first 3ish months with Ethan was a breeze compared to with Colin. He SLEPT SO EASILY! It was bizarre to us, because Colin never slept well as a baby, really not well until like a year and a half old. And we did NOTHING SPECIAL. Ethan was just a sleepy new baby. You can do all the sleep stuff or none of the sleep stuff, some babies just sleep more easily than others!
I also think some things felt easier because your capacity expands! We are more skilled as a parent after doing it once already, compared to when Colin was a baby, everything was so new and sometimes scary! Things like going out solo with a baby felt challenging, whereas now it feels easier going out with just one of them, but going out with TWO feels tough!
Adam took three weeks completely off work. If you didn’t know he’s a therapist, so taking off is harder, because your clients need to keep seeing you. It’s also worth noting that, similar to me in my business, Adam also only works part-time. So he works Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as a therapist, and then we are home as a family Tuesday and Thursday.
Family Life on Maternity Leave
Adam said we have “4 weekend days a week” while I was on leave. And honestly, we’ve kept some of that still as I’ve come back. We spent Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday together as much as possible. It was blissful, and hard, but truly felt like two additional weekend days.
Especially when Ethan was little and sleeping so easily everywhere, we’d go out of the house every morning for his first nap either out to breakfast or just to a park. I feel so grateful for all of those days!
Even now as Ethan is 4 ½ months, we are all still spending a lot of Tuesday and Thursday together. Like when I outlined this, yesterday was a Tuesday and we all went out to breakfast together from 8 am - 10 am and just had family time. Then, Adam and I did divide and conquer the rest of the day to get some work done.
When Adam went back to work (and Colin went to preschool), I got to enjoy:
- Watching SVU in the middle of the day while holding him for a nap on the sofa
- Reading lots of books (both nap-holding and just reading)
- Co-sleeping naps with him
- Long walks with him in the stroller for his naps
- For those first 3 months, I would take Ethan to our bed after his 4 am feed
I’m grateful I had that 1:1 time with him, and if I could do it over again, I’d do it even longer. I share this because I want to encourage you to EMBRACE this time. There’s a lot of busyness with a newborn but there were a lot of slow, special moments too.
When you’re a business owner, you always have to do something on maternity leave.
This is true of some other jobs as well. But especially when you’re running a business. You hear some business owners share that they didn’t even get to take a leave because of this fact!
As you heard last week, I planned my maternity leave. I worked hard to make it happen, and it was super important to me to take significant time off and also slowly get back to things. So, I got a leave! But there’s still some work (even if it wasn’t much).
What it looked like for me:
- For the first month, I would check Slack most days, but wasn’t busting out my laptop
- Tuesdays were the days I had to do a little something for the podcast. I’d have to post about it and send/approve the email to go out to my list
- After that first nothingness month, I did some things like recording two podcast episodes and managing some projects that team members were doing (like redesigning all the freebies)
But overall, I unplugged really well I think. My autoresponder on my email always helped keep me content! I can’t recommend that enough on leave because with some of the emails I’d get, I felt the impulse to “handle” quickly, but then my autoresponder took care of it for me, at least for the time being! Knowing Stacey was in the inbox helped me a lot too! But there were also opportunities I missed because of being out of the office.
A cool thing about my business is that you can do so many things easily from your PHONE, anywhere. So while I only got out my laptop for like an hour or so per week (after the first month of never touching it), I would reply to my team members on Slack or post on social media, look over an email that came through and things like that… all on my PHONE! I even did things like making a reel or writing a podcast outline while holding Ethan for a nap in the nursery.
Read more: Real Talk: It’s Ok to Not Always Be Growing Your Business
How My Business Did Financially During Maternity Leave
My business didn’t make any less money while I was on maternity leave. March, April, and May were actually all higher than those same months in 2023 when I was working normally. Crazy right? Some of the months were even doubled the revenue.
On top of that, the profits were excellent too. Since I was not working, my expenses were down some because I paused some of my subscriptions I wouldn’t be using like Zoom and Calendly, and I didn’t have any big projects going on with contractors or any special new expenses.
Some of that going “good” was because of the work I did right before my leave. I do think if you keep your business in a perpetual state of out-of-office, you’ll see things go down long-term, but even now as I’m back form leave, I’m still seeing strong financial numbers.
It’s also worth noting on the business front, unplugged from work does NOT mean I didn’t know what was going on, that things weren’t still happening, or that I was not coming up with new business ideas. I started on outlines for podcasts, had new website copy ideas for my new site, came up with a new course idea, and had so many interesting new dreams and visions for my business while I was gone. It was really cool.
Read more: 7 Ways To Use Your Money To Get More Time Back In Your Life (Trading Your MONEY For Your TIME!)
Other Things That Happened During Maternity Leave
Our Beach Trip During Maternity Leave
We originally started talking about a family trip this year as something to do in the fall, because we can’t do that with a new baby, right?! Then one night it hit me that this was the BEST TIME to go because I was on maternity leave, Ethan was as easy as he was ever going to be, Adam was back to work but had more flexibility, and it was early summer before beaches got crowded, so we did it.
We actually went from the idea to booking a house to stay in within 3 weeks. That trip was truly incredible and just so fun. It was Colin’s first time at the beach, and he loved it. We stayed in a beautiful house in Watercolor in Seaside. We stayed up late after the kids were down and would have drinks on the porch or swim in our own private pool. We went to the pool a lot and ate great food!
Ethan, because he was a newborn still, was awesome at sleeping on the go in the stroller or car seat or being held. And as I think about that trip, if we did the same trip now it would feel so much harder because naps with Ethan are so much harder and so is night sleep.
Potty Training
A few weeks later, we decided to do potty training with Colin! He was so ready, but we had held off on it because we didn’t want to do it right before the huge change of becoming a big brother. It was hard with a newborn and toddler but also was the right timing and nice that I was on maternity leave. The first 3 days felt really intense, but then it got a lot easier. We did the “Oh crap potty training” method and loved it.
We also found and hired a part-time nanny while I was on leave, so getting that all figured out was something that needed to happen before I came back full-time. I’ll talk about that more next week!
What Surprised Me The Most
First, I was surprised by how much more confident I felt as a mom this second time. Second, I was surprised by how sweet Colin is and how great he adjusted to being a big brother (to be fair - we read lots of books to help him). Two of my favorite books we read him were My New Baby, Best Ever Big Brother, and Waiting for Baby.
I also feel like you appreciate the newborn baby stage more because you visually SEE how fast time passes by looking at your toddler daily and being like… what… in 2 years or 3 years or whatever, they’ll be SO BIG!
This time, we still had a meal train and made freezer meals! That was so helpful the first time and honestly was maybe even more helpful the second go around!
Hard Moments During Maternity Leave
I’ve mainly focused on the positive here because it has been mostly positive. I absolutely love being a mom, but yes, there have been hard things in this postpartum season.
I’ve had some postpartum anxiety at times, and I don’t really wanna get deep into any of that, but I want to mention it so that if that is YOUR EXPERIENCE, you know you’re not alone! I’ve seen with friends that postpartum depression and anxiety tend to be more common with second and third kids than the first time through because your life is more overwhelming! I’ve had plenty of moments of overwhelm in this adjustment period, and the anxiety wasn’t happening for me in the newborn stage. It's more prevalent right now when he’s four months old and people just expect life should be back to normal, but you still feel like you’re adjusting a ton. Your hormones are still shifting so much!
That’s all for the behind-the-scenes of this maternity leave! Next week, I’ll share what back to work is looking like for me and what my new normal will be. I’ll also share:
- How coming back has been slow
- Finding a nanny
- Why I’m doing childcare the way I am
- Projects I’m working on first
- How I’m accepting less work time
Links Mentioned:
Listen to episode 276 where I shared how I planned for my maternity leave
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