My husband and I had an exciting summer, starting with welcoming our first baby into the world! We took the last 4 months off to take care of her and now we’re back from our parental leave.
Since we work for ourselves, producing our weekly dinosaur podcast, we ended up working a lot of extra hours in the months leading up to her birth to make sure our podcast was still going while we were taking—the much needed—time off.
Becoming a parent is life changing, and amazing. We’re still figuring out how to work while taking care of a baby (nap times are hard!) but I’m so glad we were able to take those first few months to get to know our amazing little girl and adjust to this wonderful new life.
It was not easy. I made a quick presentation outlining what exactly we did to keep our podcast running for those 4 months. The gist is:
- We had to be extremely organized
- We recorded and scheduled everything in advance
- We automated and streamlined as much as possible
- We started working with vendors
- We let everyone know well ahead of time that we would be taking some time off
We also had to learn to say “no” sometimes. As someone who sees potential in every opportunity, this was a difficult lesson to learn.
Some things worked better than others. Turns out, it’s difficult to create extra content and promote it well just before and after giving birth (Jurassic World: Dominion was awesome but we weren’t able to do all the stuff we would have liked to do around the movie—though we did host a really fun livestream with a very talented artist and one of our favorite people who has worked on the Jurassic movies).
It was hard not to stress out during all the COVID waves while pregnant, especially since we had to be extra careful because this was an IVF pregnancy. Luckily for me, my husband is a rock, and the best partner I could ever ask for. He took care of a lot of the baby prep (there are so many car seats and cribs to choose from, and lots of figuring out how to make the house ready for a baby). We made time to go on regular walks together, and cook meals together. We made sure to be there for each other.
Our efforts paid off. We made some episodes that I’m really proud of, and we saw an increase in our number of listeners. Our dinosaur community is wonderful, and now we’re ready and eager to dive back in.
So much exciting dinosaur news happened. By my count, we had at least 65 news items to catch up on, including many new dinosaur discoveries. It’s taking us a few episodes to cover it all, but in case you’re interested, here are a few items we recently covered:
- A giant sauropod (is “giant” superfluous in this case? guess it depends on if you’re comparing to dwarf sauropods) skeleton found in a garden in Portugal
- The discovery of the carnivorous dinosaur Meraxes gigas helps show why dinosaurs like T. rex had such (proportionally) small arms
- Newly discovered thyreophoran, the Cretaceous-era armored dinosaur Jakapil kaniukura, is the first of its kind found in South America
- A Deinonychus and Gorgosaurus skeleton sold for millions of dollars each
- So many cool new museum exhibits, including Glen McIntosh’s art at Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology
