Paige Hobey - The Working Gals Guide to Babyville: Your Must-Have Manual for Life with Baby

W elcome to that postpartum parallel universe we call Babyville, a land seemingly run by the little people. Think of this book as your insiders travel guidewhether youre gearing up for your newborns grand entrance, looking for strategies to nurture a supersleeper, trying to make the most of your maternity leave, or wondering how to pump at work without feeling like an overpaid dairy cow in cute shoes.

When I started this book, my son Bailey was six months old, and I was up to my ears in the new parent whirlwind youre probably experiencing nowor will be soon. I had perfected the art of appearing coherent on five hours sleep. I was trying to fit mom into my self-image somewhere between adventurous and ambitious. I was fine-tuning my potential new mom friend radar: Pushing a stroller? Check. Has that cheerfully disoriented look of a woman thrilled to be out of the house but unsure what to do next? Check. All systems go. Approach at will and shamelessly use own baby as conversation starter. And after being tormented for weeks, I had recently made a work decision my prebaby self would have considered crazy.

Initially I approached working momhood with a sort of naive optimism. I happily planned to have a baby and, buoyed by maternal fulfillment, transition seamlessly back to my jobcombining work and family life with Zen-like grace. Or something like that. And during those all-consuming first few weeks after my son was born, the plan still felt right. I was both madly in love with him and secretly thrilled I had a job to escape to after maternity leave. I remember one night during a 3:00 A.M. feeding actually fantasizing about being back at work. The computer waiting patiently on my desk. The meetings where nobody cried, pooped, or spit up. My colleagues (such an adult word!) milling about the halls, chatting about world events and philosophy. (I said it was a fantasy.) I was nostalgic for the safety of the known career world.

But as my son grew more interactive and the every-two-hour overnight feedings gradually improved, newborn chaos was replaced by a new sense of coziness. I was getting the hang of this new mom thing, resting enough to feel actual emotions, and successfully leaving the house with baby in tow. My glorious, newfound momlife balance began to feel threatened by an impending work schedule that would clearly disrupt our peaceful world order.

So I did what any mature career gal with hard-hitting problem-solving skills would do: I panicked. I lay awake at night mentally debating work arrangements that would allow more access to my son while still paying the bills. I considered freelancing. I thought about asking to work from home. I contemplated every variation of flextime and part-time scheduling, from half days to job sharing. I woke up at the crack of dawn and scratched out the pros and cons of all my options, devising plans for negotiating with my boss and making minifamily budgets along the edges of the paper. I was a woman obsessed.

And thats when the idea for this book was born. You should really write this stuff down, a friend suggested as I described the myriad work options I was considering. Maybe you could make a magazine article out of it. Or a book, I thought in a freakish moment of postpartum clarity. I sure couldnt find one to help navigate all the challenges of my new mom realityfrom finding a pediatrician to finding quality child care. I had the obligatory stockpile of parenting books, but none offered what I really wantedthose nuggets of wow-that-makes-life-easier parenting wisdom without all the filler. Expert tips for helping my son sleep through the night without the three hundred pages on infant REM cycles. Practical help, like a comprehensive life-with-baby shopping list. And maybe some mom-tested advice more current than my Girlfriend Guides real fashion secret for pregnancy: stirrup pants.

Eventually, my company (an Internet start-up) downsized (theres a shocker) toward the end of my maternity leave, eliminating any hope for flexible work arrangements and sending full-timers workloads into the stratosphere. So, I decided to do the freelancing mom thing with gusto, over time give this book a shot, and see where life led me. Id been managing a team that developed pregnancy and parenting content for the Web, and after I pushed an eight pound, ten ounce person out of my body, a bigger writing project began to seem doable. Since then, my career path, like that of so many new moms, has bobbed and weaved in ways I never would have predicted. I started freelancing using my Internet development experience, then added some marketing and magazine writing. And in between other projects, I tackled this book. I didnt know if Id ever get it published, but I wanted to try.