Google provides generous parental leave, and I’ve been able to take three months to spend at home with my newborn. I even have some more time I can take once my wife returns to work! For residents of the Land of the Free, it’s a lovely glimpse into having a social support net and worker protection. Could you imagine?

And let me tell you, not working for three months was really nice. My newborn arrived a bit early, so the start of my leave was frantic - one Friday evening my wife said she was feeling off, we went to a hospital, and by the next morning my kiddo was born. I didn’t get much chance to wrap things up at work, but with the newborn here I didn’t particularly care. Three months into my leave, I still don’t care, and it’s nice. I’m sure I won’t be able to keep not caring for long once I’m back at work though.

My kiddo spent the first week in NICU (for those of you without much trauma in life - that’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit), and once the danger had passed, it was a positive experience. The nurses were knowledgeable, and it was nice having “world’s best paid babysitters” keeping an eye on my baby 24/7. While my wife was recovering I spent most of the time with the kiddo - and turns out having a kiddo comes with a lot of downtime. I booted up my trusty Nintendo Switch, loaded Skyrim for the umpteenth time, and spent hours day and night gaming away while my kiddo was asleep on my chest. Man, newborns sleep a lot.

The kiddo started gaining weight, and we were ready to be discharged. Before being sent home we even managed to sneak away to a restaurant and celebrate our little victory! It’s been a long and perilous journey for our family, and it was a lovely opportunity to connect while the NICU nurses kept our tiny one safe. Although we were sent home without adult supervision, how dare they?! NICU bootcamp was tremendously helpful, and after the first couple of sleepless nights, we started figuring things out. That’s when this whole leave started feeling like a retirement preview, in a good way.

I wouldn’t consider myself a workaholic. I generally try to keep my work to under 40 hours a week, and I make sure to disconnect from work. I tend to give my work 110% while I am at work, which does tend to have a negative effect on me when things don’t go my way - that’s when my hours slip, and my ability to fully disconnect crumbles. I’m only human after all.

American workers don't take nearly enough vacation

And I don’t take nearly enough vacation. I have generous vacation days (although nothing compared to how much our European colleagues get), but I think the American corporate culture has a hold on me. There’s a major sense of FOMO, and it feels like there’s never a good time to disconnect. There’s a lot of pressure to continue working towards the next milestone, next project, next promotion - “I’ll take time off after that”. And I just never do.

My wife and I manage occasional trips, but anything longer than a week is rare and stands out, and I often get nudged by corp systems “Take your vacation days or they’ll disappear” (ugh, why don’t you pay me the difference instead?).

All that to say, in nearly 15 years I’ve been in the workforce, I’ve never been off work for this long. And as someone who’s been glorifying early retirement and saving away for a rainy day for a decade now, this leave started to feel like an early retirement trial run. And I loved it!

Now, back to bringing our baby home: after settling into life, I started having lots of free time. It was a different kind of free time - there was lots of it, but none of it was on my schedule. If my partner felt generous, I might get nearly a full day to myself, or an hour every other hour, or no time at all. But it wasn’t too bad, and it didn’t take long to adjust to the frantic schedule. I spent much time gaming, often when wearing my kiddo - baby wearing is the best: hands are free, but we both are getting the cuddles.

I’ve spent much time building adorable villages and towns in Foundation, ran around as a little crow in Death’s Door, smote enemies of humankind in Total War: Warhammer, kicked off another playthrough of Dread Delusion, and casually tortured the unfortunate inhabitants of Rimworld.

Having a newborn taught me a lot about resilience. I can get interrupted any time. Some days my kiddo’s having a great day - sleeping like a baby (did you know that babies are very noisy sleepers?), playful, and all around a delight. And some days my potato would wake up, fart angrily, and choose a path of violence. The day has a tendency to disappear when that happens. I just learn to accept when things happen - it’s a quality I had in my early twenties, but it’s a part of me I lost as I’ve gotten older, more comfortable, more set in my ways, and more used to things going exactly my way (I’m sure you picked up on that). Well you can’t negotiate with a baby, they’re like a little terrorist in that way.

After nearly a month of non-stop gaming, I decided to get my affairs in order. I scanned a built-up stack of documents, kicked off trust paperwork I’ve been sitting on for months, did my taxes, organized my Vimwiki, cleaned out my inbox, spring cleaned the house, went through needed repairs… It was nice to get everything in order, but the time just started to get away from me. All the chores just started feeling like… a job? Ugh.

A retired colleague of mine once said that in retirement it’s very easy to lose yourself in chores and busywork. In these three months of my mini-retirement, and I saw myself fall into that trap - there’s always something to do - something to clean, something to organize, and something to do. I find myself easily getting obsessed with things, so if I decide to tag and date all my scanned documents, I can wave the next four days goodbye.

After my organization kick, I started getting back into hobbies. Now to you these hobbies might just look like another chore, but I truly enjoy those things - I might be just a little bit boring. I cleaned up my blog and got back into writing. I got our household financial projections and budgets in order. I finally went back to my neighborhood jiu jitsu dojo - oh how I missed the community (and exercise, of course)!

Then I started playing around with setting up a home server. I don’t get to code much at my job these days, being a manager and all. All my interactions with technology are either through documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and meetings - oh-so-many-meetings. While I really enjoy that I get to do much more than I could by myself (leveraging the power of half a dozen engineers, that is), none of it feels as satisfying - I didn’t really build this cool thing with my own hands, and my contributions are gently spread out here and there.

So, I spent a few weeks setting up a local home server - refreshing my knowledge of networking, getting familiar with Docker, tinkering with software and firmware. I even got to tinker with AI tooling. Being a know-it-all software engineer, I played around with early AI models last year, and they were terrible. Well, the same former colleague wrote an opinion piece on how much better AI models have gotten. And boy-oh-boy was he right. I had to play a lot of catch-up, but it was interesting (albeit weird) discovering how to get debugging help from an AI chatbot.

For the first time in years, I got to directly engage with fun tech, and I got to use my hands (on a keyboard) to make something that, despite all odds, works. I’ve forgotten how much I like tinkering with stuff, and how much bossing people around and being the organizational connective tissue is a step away from that. I’ve pretty much forgotten why I started in tech to begin with.

And that’s where I am now. Three months into taking time off to care for my newborn, ending up with lots of time for self-discovery, hobbies, and chores. Working through this period would’ve been a nightmare (yeah, my schedule wasn’t really my own), and I’m grateful for the opportunity to spend time at home.

Well, not working is amazing. Not for a minute did I find myself bored. Yes, having a little one to take care of definitely helps to keep me busy, but, courtesy of my loving wife, I’ve had a lot of time to myself. And it’s been amazing. No shit, Sherlock, did I just discover that not working is better than working? You wouldn’t believe how common the toxic notion of “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t have my career” is in the industry. It’s nuts. And it’s nice to know in practice it doesn’t apply to me, at least in this three month mini-retirement stretch. Or maybe I’m just burnt out at my job, who knows.

I recognize that things will change - once my newborn becomes a toddler I won’t have the same type of free time, and I’d have to figure out ways to incorporate my toddler into my interests - or my interests into my toddler. But I’m excited for that chapter.