I went back to work, 20-30 hours/week, after three months of leave at the end of September.

As much as I enjoy my career as an occupational therapist, believing in what I do and getting that growth / cognitive challenge / adult social aspect that comes from working, it was still hard to leave my 2.5 year old and almost 3 month old at home.

One thing that made that mentally doable was my parents flew in and agreed to stay until January, so Kaden could be six months old before going into daycare. That made my heart at ease, though of course the first week especially was still hard.

One thing to also help that transition was to stay committed to going into the outdoors and spending quality time with my kids there.

One easy way to do this is to go to the zoo! Since entrance is free with our membership (an awesome Christmas gift from my parents) I can take them for a few hours in the morning before going to work in the afternoon.

We usually only go to see a few animals because we really take our time to enjoy those animals (I’m currently writing this from Maui on Thanksgiving, spoiler alert, since that’s when I finally have time to write / schedule my posts, and my daughter spent an eternity with just with one snail at the aquarium) .

On this day all we did was walk through the aviary and go to story time. At the aviary Kaya got to feed the birds (they have coin-op feeder) and Kaden got to watch (at three months that’s enough fun! Especially when the birds are bigger than he is!).

Story time was with a very animated story teller with puppets (versus a book).

With getting to pet a real animal as the even better part at the end.

We built a little with blocks before speeding off to make it back in time for me to go to work.