Ann vs. Jason

By: Ann

I know I haven’t posted in ages, but my life has been consumed with work and Athena care.  By the time she goes down for bed, I’m usually beat myself.  I’m writing this during my lunch break at work.

This week is my second week back at work.  Things are going as good as they can be at work.  I was missed very much by my MAs due to usual work drama.  Things are basically back to how they should run, now that I’m back…as I’ve been told by my coworkers.

The transition from maternity leave to work has been a little rocky for me.  I’ve been told it gets easier.  I’m just counting on that to happen any day now.  When you have a child that’s so precious, it’s hard to tear yourself away.  I’m okay going to work in the mornings as long as she doesn’t wake up before I leave for work.  Otherwise, I’m faced with the task of trying to pull it together before I get to work.

Physically, I’m 95% better.  I still have pains when doing anything more than walking or while doing abdominal exercises.  I will be seeing a physiatrist on Monday to fix this problem.  On the positive side, I have managed to lose more than my pre-pregnancy weight. Yeah for lactation!

I’ve been told that she would “cry all day long” in my absence.  She’s been doing pretty good with Jason, with the exception of not taking adequate naps during the day, which she did 90% of the time with me.  No one’s placing blame, but I just think she knows she can get away with that more with Jason than with me.

The week after next she starts daycare.  I’ve been pretty okay with leaving her with Jason, but I think the real test of my emotions will be leaving her with the daycare.  It’s pretty hard putting all of your trust in a stranger to take care of your child.  I’m sure Athena will handle it way better than I will.

Thankfully, we’ve been pretty busy at work with all of the well child checks and colds and such, so I haven’t had that much time to boo-hoo at work.  Which would be really embarrassing.  I do have lots of pictures of Athena posted all over my office to keep me going throughout the day.  I’m so thankful that I got a chance to spend so much time with her; however, I do believe that the U.S. should adopt a similar plan of maternity leave as other countries in Europe, i.e. Germany, where they receive a whole year.  We just have to make due with what we have with this economy, though, which are 2 stable jobs and one wonderful baby.

By Jason

One of the strangest things about coming to work for Google has been the fact that I can’t really tell people what I do at work.  That includes friends and family.  The work my team does is visible, in a way, to thousands of people every day but if we’re doing a good job they don’t even know it.

So when friends and family (i.e. you all reading this here blog) ask me about my job I end up saying a lot of vague, general stuff.  I feel bad, like I’m being evasive.  The best description I could come up with for Grandma was that I was the “Janitor of the Internet.”

So today, I’m happy to say I can actually share something with you all:  I wrote a post on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.  There you can read about the sorts of things that I think about all day.

A few other quick updates:

• Ann and I had our third anniversary on Wednesday.  We walked over to the Garden Fresh Vegetarian Restaurant for dinner.  Our trip to Monterey and Carmel counts as our big anniversary celebration.

• We currently have 560 votes in our baby name poll.  Some of the more interesting write-ins include Zora, Neeti, Ea, and Saskia for girls and Pelayo, Kaden, Nintendo, and Agitation for boys.

• I changed the way comments are set up so it’s easier for you to comment on the blog.  Just type away. If you read our updates via email just click on the headline at the top to go to the site and comment.  We have to approve everything before it will appear, and I have some automatic anti-spam stuff in place too (see my Google blog post).

By Jason

I probably shouldn’t post this – my brother is already convinced that all we do at Google is eat all day.  On Thursday my team had an offsite at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, which is a pretty cool old-timey amusement park.  We made a stop there a few months ago with Ryan and Jessi but everything was closed at the time.

In a sense it was bad timing, since I have been very busy at work lately and could have used the hours to do something productive…  on the other hand, it was probably good timing to get a break and have some fun with co-workers.

Here’s a video of our ride on the Giant Dipper, an old wooden roller coaster:

Link to video. Special thanks to Reid for recording and posting it.

We promise to write more about the baby shower soon. In the mean time, I’ve been uploading old papers and notes on my professional blog, so feel free to poke around the archives and see what I was thinking about as long as ten years ago. I’m considering putting up some interesting old emails here as well, like from my first days at college or the trip with Todd and Martin to Argentina.