Exploring Career Transitions with Ahlia Kitwana

Published Dec 1, 2020, 10:00 AM

Laura and Sarah open up this episode by talking about some big news -- Laura is moving (though not very far!). She discusses how they made their decision while Sarah shares her family's plans to remain renters indefinitely. Then, Laura welcomes guest Ahlia Kitwana, founder of Little Black Buddha, a new company that helps people through career transitions. Ahlia is also a mom of three and an engineer. She discusses how she's combined work and life (including her appearance in I Know How She Does It!), what nudged her to go out on her own, and her advice for others contemplating a similar move. In the Q&A, a listener writes in with a common dilemma - whether to go back to work post-baby even when childcare costs rival her salary.


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Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah hart Unger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode one hundred and seventy four. I'll be interviewing a Leah Kitwana, who is an engineer turned entrepreneur. So fascinating career story there with some advice for other people who are looking to go out on their own. We've been making various big changes I let people know on the blog. My big news is we just bought a house, which seems like a lot of people are doing with COVID. It turns out the real estate market has been a high of late, as everyone is playing musical houses, deciding that wherever they've been stuck for the past nine months has somehow inadequate and moving to a different place in our cases that we had an extra kid versus how much space we have. But you guys aren't moving anywhere anytime soon, right, Sarah, No, although we could, yes, exactly. I want you to talk more about your exciting house purchase and your plans for renovation, and I'm super excited for you, but I admit I'm not jealous. We continue to be renters ever since January of twenty nineteen, I guess, and we sold our house took a while in December of twenty nineteen, so now this is our first full year we've spent not having to deal with any kind of home ownership financial responsibilities, mental responsibilities, and it's been really lovely. I have to say, when you crunch the numbers, unless you plan on staying somewhere a very very long time, there's not as much financial advantage to owning as most people assume that there is. Of course, that does vary based on the location where you are and market appreciation, and if you happen to luck out and buy into a market then then explodes, then you're right. You could prove me completely wrong with certain examples, but I know in our case, we had two houses that we owned before, and neither of them were beneficial from a financial standpoint, So that's where we come from. And I guess I just want to mention that we are really enjoying the rental lifestyle and have no plans to change that, because I do feel like we are outliers in that regard, and maybe we'll have to do like a renting owning I don't know, some kind of a real estate themed full episode at some point, because there is a lot to unpack here. But meanwhile, you're on the opposite side of the spectrum, and I feel like you're more normal because I'm hearing a lot of moves and I'm actually like enjoying looking at people's renovation plans and tell everybody about, well, number one, what motivated the move, what's going to be great about your new place? And then maybe a little taste of some of the renovation decisions you guys are making. Oh gosh, there are so many renovation decisions. We've been spending all kinds of time over there and meeting with contractors and figuring out what we're going to do. But you know, basically, our I mean, our house is not small our current one. But on the other hand, we have a lot of people, and so the baby is sleeping in the closet, Dashber and Sam are sharing a room. You know, we could make it work. We'd contemplated renovating the attic also to add bedrooms, but as we were thinking about doing that, we're like, well, let's, you know, look and see what's on the market, because that would have been a very expensive and you know, unhappy project too. It's like workmen in our house for three months or something. So we were looking, and a couple of years ago, an interesting old house had come on the market near us that needed a ton of work, and we hadn't gone for it, and somebody else bought it and put it back on the market with renovations for quite a bit more. And somebody did, in fact buy it. We're like, oh, that's interesting, you know, like not that we want to flip this house, but just that you can often get a reasonable deal on old homes because people are just so wigged out by the renovation process. And since we had been through the kitchen and master bathroom renovation process two two and a half years ago, it seemed like we could probably handle it. So we know, we were looking at a lot of different houses. We looked at some brand new construction, we looked at older houses. This this house, you know, it's a project, but we could not have bought it new, and in fact, it's just not this kind of house is just not available new that it's a large it's got lovely sort of older you know, millwork and stone. It's on a good amount of land, like we have a large yard, and it's on a a private road so it's a lot quieter than where we are now. So there's just all sorts of things that you know, you you wouldn't be able to get this in a new construction, So to get it, we have to get it in an older house that needs to be renovated. So that's just basically what we're doing. We're going to put in a new kitchen, redo the master suite, we're making some of these very there's some tiny rooms that we're combining to make into a playroom. And then yeah, then the non fun stuff like it needs a new roof, so it needs a new HVAC sys. Yeah, so all this stuff is like the un sexy part of home ownership. But you know, you do have to put that stuff in. But it's true that if you already have teams, because you mentioned to our listeners, you're not moving very far so same school district. And I'm assuming a lot of your contractor teams and such contacts that you've already made from your prior renovation you can reuse or we're using a different one. But this is probably not and I want to nobody ever, I don't know, they don't go back to usually, although I really like this, this new team that we've got in place. But yeah, it's it's exciting and and it'll be a lot of work over the next six months or so, but then hopefully we'll be in and there for you know, our house for a long long time and treated as more of a I don't know, the family compound or something. That's what I wrote to you, Is this your forever home? Because I actually, like, I don't really have a family commune compound dream, but I know it's very very common to have one. Yeah, And I mean I could see families coming, you know, my five children coming back with their families and having this you know place that's got the big yard, that's you know, got space for them is you know, appealing, and we weren't going to buy. Uh. We we had thought at various first because we would go to this one beach town every summer and we're like, oh, well, should we you know, get a place there, like me, no, No, we don't want to do that, Like we don't want to be on the landlord side of things, for instance, you know, renting it out and then if you're not there, like I don't feel like spending three months there every year or something, which is what you'd have to do to kind of make it worthwhile. So we weren't going to do that. So we're like, well, okay, let's focus more on the core home and make that nice and then you know, not just go wherever in terms of vacation. So yeah, it's exciting. It's a lot of work, but it's exciting. I love it. Well. I am excited to listen to the segment. I admit, as it's airing, I haven't listened to it yet, but I will get to listen to it live because this is one of the rare interviews that Laura has recorded without me. We may be doing a little bit more of this in the months to come. Just because we find that the flow of interview with two people tends to work really nicely. It's conversational, and then we should get the treat of listening to each other's content as it airs, which is good. All right, So here we go. Well, Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Aliyah Kitwana to the program. Sarah could not be here she's doing residency interviews day, but I am excited about this. So Alia, can you introduce yourself to our listeners? Hi, my name is Aliyah Kitwana. I am the owner and founder of Little Black Buddha, which is a career services and software development company. And you have three kids, right I do. I have a twelve year old, a nine year old and a four year old, so two girls and a little boy. Yeah, And Aliyah has a background in engineering. Correct that you're the real engineering math person here. Why don't you talk about how you how you got into that originally? That is a good question in high school. I think it goes back to high school. I was I was good at science and math, and I was basically guided or geared towards engineering. It was it was a viable path for me, and there was a lot of scholarship money, and there still is for anybody who has young women or people of color who are looking to go into any stem careers because it's very underrepresented by women and by people of color. It was part scholarship money, part I like get myself to another level in life, and I just happened to have the aptitude to pull it off. And then what was your career in that, because I know you've worked for a couple of big engineering related companies where you mostly straight on the engineering side. You did some project management too, So yeah, Actually my career trajectory was very, very nonlinear, and I'm guessing that is the case with a lot of people. So I study electrical engineering in school, and that was my first job out of school, was electrical engineering. But they stuck me in a lab doing some sort of testing, running a machine and you know, collecting data. But there was like, there was no windows. It was dark, brutal. People like it. It became more and more miserable as time went on. I eventually quit that job and I moved to New York and I waited tables for a little bit, and I eventually ended up teaching high school math for a couple of years. That worked out for a while until we had a family. We started a family. Then I went back to engineering because it was a lot more flexible with the hours. I didn't have to be a work at eight o'clock every day, and that meant a lot to me. It still does mean a lot to me to have like make my own hours. That The second time I went back into engineering, I did reliability engineering, and that is in a nutshell, it's like it's failure analysis. So I would look at a system design and figure out or try to figure out what is the most likely way it will fail and work with the designers to mitigate the failure or if there's any single point failures, or work in design mechanisms to mitigate those failures. And that was a lot better suited for me because I got to work with different engineering competencies and other people on the team. So I was not in a dark room with a computer and an Excel file. I mean, you know, Excel is still like a happy place for me. But El is great. Let's let's all shout out to itself. But I do like as just as who I am, I like to interact with people too. Yeah, well, in the good news is engineering you can do both, right, I mean there's so many different ways, and you've experienced, I mean between being you know, in the dark room, but then also a math teacher. You're with all kinds of people all the time, and then you know group lead of engineering projects and stuff. I mean, that's that's a totally different form of it too, and so that's probably good for people to hear. It's not all the dark room now, It's definitely not all that are coron long time listeners slash readers may recall that Aliyah had a short appearance in my book. I know how she does it during her time. You know, she lives in upstate New York. You recorded your timelog during a very, very snowy week. Do you happen to remember that? I do. I remember, like it was like there were snowstorms and all, and back then those were the worst things that could happen. Right now you have a pandemic and you're like, okay, now now I have the year. But yeah, I recall that that was, and now that I documented that, I feel like that happens at least once or twice a year, whereby you know, there's a big snowstorm and somebody sick and you have to go and get them from school or everybody's home from school. You know, like your plans change there, there's still very dynamic year to year in a normal year. In this year, month to month, it's been everything so different. Yeah, well, what was funny about that week? I made a couple of things, but one one is I love how people figure out how to keep working. Like there was a situation where, you know, like the snow is coming down rapidly, you and your husband are trying to figure out like where are the you know, kids are going to be for the day, where you guys are going to be for the day. And then here you are all ready to go for like the conference call at one o'clock in the afternoon. You've like made everything go to have that work, and then like nobody else signs on. So it's like you had made it all work to be there. It's like everyone else can't figure it out. Aliah is on it. Yeah, yeah, yep. But then the other cool thing we we had talked about with this is you realized that you had a very productive window kind of in the late afternoon. Has has that always been the case for you is is it sort of like you get into your gear kind of you know, four o'clock to five o'clock. Was that just that point in time? I think it was that point in time. The one my one consistent like like work window where I like really get a lot done is usually early morning now, and it's always been that way for because it's like four to six and I have a family. Maybe it still is there, but I just don't have as many opportunities to use that window of time because it's like, Okay, that's homework time, it's making dinner time, and you know, a couple of days a week I do use that window, but it's usually like more for like meetings or networking events. Yeah, I mean we discussed how inconvenient that was as a productive time for working mom. That's you know, if you get your groove at four o'clock. Well, unfortunately that's you know, but there were still ways to get it like once or twice a week, right right, you know, you can't get it every night. We're going to take a quick ad break and then we'll be back to hear about how Aliyah decided to change into a different form of career. So I am back with Aliyah Kitwana, who has had a long career in engineering, project management, you know, teaching, and so you're doing all this and among the things you talked about in the past is like starting a side hustle. Did you wind up doing the side hustle or j you decide to just go completely into changing something new. Why don't you talk about that? Yeah, I more or less went completely into well, no, let me let me go back, because this has been like, this has been years in the making. Initially Little Black Buddha, which is my company, Uh, it was just I don't want to say, Jess, but it was it was a blog and that was something that I could do on the side while I worked full time as an engineer. And at some point actually the blog came after it. So there was like this, this this pivotal moment in my career where I discovered that what they were now I didn't It wasn't just a discovery, but what they were asking me to do it was not aligned with my moral compass. It was it felt it didn't feel good anymore. And so it was like it was at that point that I knew that I couldn't do the job that I was being asked to do anymore, and for me, that set off kind of an existential crisis. I don't think they would make a movie about it, per se, but it felt like it was not a good situation. You know. It was like one of those situations where you cry on your way to work. And I wanted to get out, but I didn't know how, and I and I started like looking for new jobs, and eventually I landed on, you know, starting the blog and then realizing that I could turn the blog into something that could generate money. He eventually grew into a business, and I was able to walk away from the job that made me cry. Well that's good. You never want to stick with a job that is making somebody cry. So your business focuses on helping people in transitions, but you still actually have that software component of it too. How don't you explain how how the two work together. I'll start with how I help people. So I helped people through their own career transitions, and I was basically my own, my first customer. It took me years to figure it out, to kind of like figure out what I wanted to do, what was right for me, what was not right? For me what wouldn't work. And in going through that years of evolution, I started to come with a framework that would help, that I thought could help other people who were going through similar transitions or changes and just lacked clarity and that they knew that where they were is like this is not it anymore, but I just don't know what would work for me anymore. And and so like in going through like those that that several year long process, I pulled out like the pieces that I thought could work for other people and consistently work for other people. So I use that in the in the coaching that I do. Uh. And then I took that and I was like, well, you know, we could put this into a software package and help a lot more people if we if we can program it and get the algorithms right, and you know all that that text stuff ground there. Yeah, but of course the software makes it scalable in a way. And then you know, just you know, calling up Alia and saying help me does not right exactly exactly. And And why don't you we were talking earlier about this, but why don't you explain for our listeners what what's the significance of the little black Buddha. How does how does that play into your philosophy of of this this company. So so the philosophy in the company, the coaching, and even in the software that I'm I'm doing is that it is like it's a guide, so like I'll guide you to the answer, but the answer is really already inside you in Little Black Buddha itself, like it stems from the Buddhist belief that everybody has an inner Buddha and and to make it more palatable or within reach for everybody. It's just you know that everybody has this inner divine person or inner God, and it's a matter of knowing how how to like hear it. It's there. But so now now all of us can listen we're here it or know how to access it. The tools in the coaching that I do helps people to access it, even though it's not a direct access. I don't like have people go and meditate for a week or you know, fun is that might be everyone leave me alone through it, right, none of that. But it does I do as people like it's a mirror, right, Like I show them a mirror, like this is all that you have to work with, which is typically a lot, It's just that some people don't always realize that. Well, what if, you know, if you were going to give our listeners an example of something we could do to start listening to our own inner buddha as we're trying to figure out, you know, life in our transitions. Like, what's what's one practical thing we could do? Typically, the first thing I start with is is just a value assessment, just getting really clear on what your values are right now. And so there's a difference between like the aspirational values and like what is really going on in your life right now. Like you can say like a value quality family time, but if you only have dinner once a week in at that dinner, everybody is like really just checking CNN or Facebook or you know, like nobody's tuned into dinner, then then you have to question if quality family time is really a thing for me. I think I said earlier too, is that like flexibility and autonomy are super high on my list of values, and so that has to be part of any work that I do for your listeners. I would advise just doing a quick value assessment, or not even a quick but like a more in depth value assessment and get clear on what is important to them and what are the non negotiables, and like, if there's anything in your life that is like out of alignment with those values, then then you should maybe question that and say, like is there something I can adjust there or is there something that's like really just like harming some aspect of my life and my ability to move forward. And if if there is like a block, then then start thinking about moving that block or going around it. Yeah. Always challenging, though you've walked through it, as you said, I mean it was a I mean, was it a really challenging process for you? It strikes me that, you know, having been in sort of more structured environments for many years, then going out on your own must have been emotionally challenging. Yeah, And just to be clear, like I like officially went out on my own September twenty nineteen, so that was really just six months before the pandemic happened. It was it was very challenging, and you know, like as an entrepreneur, it's not I think sometimes like on Instagram or in the media, they try to make it look like it's like gilamorous and you're like this overnight success. And typically overnight successes take ten years to get there. And when you're an entrepreneur, you do everything. So I had to like I had to learn how to market, I had to learn how to sell and just continue to be uncomfortable and grow and that that's how you move forward. Yeah, not having the structure was challenging and is challenging still. I try to give myself structure, but I also have to be flexible, just because kids in school and all that STUFFE well, we all do these days with them hanging out ready to help them to the home office at any mom. So let's talk about your day to day life right now, Like what does what does a day look like for you these days? Okay, I don't I don't know how this will land, but I like I do so, Like on a weekday, I wake up typically between four and five in a morning. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I know, it's like it's so weird, but you you and Sarah I never do that on purpose, but okay, yes, early have purpose and I do. I have a morning routine where I, you know, I drink coffee and it's the only time the house is silent, so I like, you know, embrace the silence. Sometimes I journal, sometimes I meditate, and then I can usually get in like one one to two hours of solid work and then then then I get the kids up and we try to have like a set routine for them every day. The four year old actually goes to preschool now, and yeah, that's really changed our world. Yeah, we only started like one or two months ago. So up until then, we've been trying to make it work at home in it and wasn't. So we get him dressed and off to school. Either I take him or my husband takes him. And the youngest. Everybody has a different schedule. So the nine year old, her school is from twelve thirty to three thirty every day. Yeah, it's weird, but she so she's responsible for walking the dog, so she still has to get up every day and you know, to her morning routine and then walk the dog. Some days I walk with her because she she just likes having me around still, so I'm like, okay, I'm gonna cash in on that she refuses to talk to you. That sounds great right now that I have a twelve year old, I know it's not gonna last forever. Yeah, exactly. So a couple of days a week, I do walk the dog with her, and then getting the twelve year old out of bed is also challenging. So her schedule is like on Monday and Tuesday she has a synchronous schedule, and then Wednesday is they were supposed to not have school, but they really do. And then and Thursday and Friday is asynchronous and they still have set meetings. But getting her out of bed on the days like any day is challenging. Making sure everybody says their their little chores or what they need to do to start their day is also a struggle. Anyways, for that hour or two when I get everybody going, that's full on mom time. Yeah, and then and then I can usually come downstairs and more or less work until about four or five o'clock. And work looks different every day. So some days, you know, like I'm doing an interview today, and there's a lot of networking events throughout the day, so there's not a lot of like focused work that I get to do. I did some this morning before everybody woke up, and on Mondays I block out completely, so there's no I don't have any meetings. I do like either content or you know, I like work on like actual product development type work. So I do try to block out periods of time or whole days where I just don't I don't talk to anybody. So I'm not in a dark hole per se, but I just it's like now I recognize the brilliance the dark all by myself. Yeah, so there's a balance there. And I do have I'm a part of an incubator now too, so I do have office space. And I would say I go in like once a week for a half day, but that's usually to make sure I have a reliable internet or some other like I have a big interview or meeting or something like that. Very cool. And what time if you're waking up between four and five? What time does the day end for me? I turned into a pumpkin at about eight o'clock. You managed to get your kids out? Like does your twelve year old actually go to sleep by house? After me? Yeah? Yeah, I mean I don't fall I usually fall asleep between like nine and ten. But like as far as anything like useful, nothing happens after a Yeah, like I can read a book or you know, get the bed kids to bed. But that's about it. That's about it. It sounds good. Yeah, well this is really cool to you know, hear about your new business and how you've managed to transition. Do you have any sort of advice for people who are thinking about making a big transition, just anything that have been helpful to you as you were contemplating doing this. Oh well, so two things. Well, actually it's the same thing. Just don't do it alone. One of the best things I did this year was, you know, I became a part of a lot of different roundtables and mastermind groups and learning and talking with other entrepreneurs like has changed my world. And for the first couple of months I tried to do everything on my own and figure it out. You know, I would call people and ask questions. But having more of a structured place to meet with people who are experiencing the same thing as you is a big plus. So I would recommend not doing it on your own. I talked to some women who you know, like they've done they've read all the books and they listen to podcasts and like you can and that's what I did for years, right, so and uh, and I would recommend like do that and get some help to investing yourself and get some help to very good advice. Well, we always end with a love of the week, and this is something that is making our life really cool right now. People who read my blog know that I have been. I just bought a house. I'm undertaking a huge home renovation. So I've been enjoying looking at both howse and the various like kitchens of Instagram, bathrooms of Instagram. Really that was the thing, you know, porches of Instagram. Like there are cats with all these names, and so I'm like looking at all of them, which has been you know, fun, probably waste a lot of time, but I you know, I'm pondering what the thing will look at. So I guess kitchens of Instagram will be my my love of the week. So what have you been finding enjoyable this this past week. Yes, I have been. I've been listening to the Outlander series awesome audible. I mean it's not but that's a project that's going to take it. That's that's been my distraction. And you know it's not high. Well I don't. I don't want to say it's not high, but it's it's it's been my distraction. That's good. That's good. Yeah, I can contract you for like, I think, like one hundred and twenty hours. The one book I'm on is like forty something hours. It's that like I said, that's that's a project but for a long time. Well, Alia, thank you so much for joining us. If our listeners want to go check out your business, where can they go? Where can they connect with you? Okay? So I am currently doing a crowdfund campaign for the software that I'm developing, and they can learn more about the product and the campaign at LBB as in Little Black Vodha dot Fyi board slash path and your website itself is Little Bye Buddha dot Comudda dot com. All right, well please check it out. And Alia, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, Well, that was fun listening to Eliah. So we're back with our Q and A. I guess I can uh read it. This is what we call the classic best of both worlds questions, some version of which we get a lot get sent into the blogs. I in fact wrote a blog post about similar topic recently, so go ahead and read it. So this listener has a little boy who is two and a three month old baby girl. For the past two years, they've done a nanny share with another family, which was great, but they started having differences of opinions and she learned recently that the other family is going to go to a daycare situation. She says, they love the nanny they have and we let her know that we'd like to discuss taking her on full time. When the nanny share it dissolved the challenge. She says that if she isn't willing to take a pay cut, our family could be paying for me to go to work. I know this is a short amount of time in the grand scheme of life, but it is still hard to swallow. I know I would struggle with daycare, so there's a good reason to choose a nanny. We could look for another nanny's share situation or look for a different nanny, but we're not sure the grass would be greener because it's very hard to find good, quality caregivers that you like. She says. She's also been having discussions with her husband about staying home with the two kids, and I'm torn on the idea. She's a director of marketing at a company. She likes her job. They're good to me. There's flexibility, but the expectation is to be in the office as much as possible. She says, I know that leaving could set me back on my future earnings and skills. However, it's hard to miss out on so much time with my kids when I won't be able to contribute financially to our lives. Of course, you know, with a three month old baby. She's also like a week back from maternity leave, so there's a lot of big emotions here. I'm reading into this too. So anyway, Sarah, she says, what is your person on the situation? She says, I think I know what you're going to answer, but I want to know for sure. So funny, Well, first I wanted to just take a moment and mention the idea of a nanny share. It's not something we've talked about much on this podcast. I think it makes total sense when you have one baby, perhaps and you have a really close friend or nearby neighbor that just has one baby. But I can imagine that as kids get older and schedules get more complicated, I'd be surprised to hear there's that many situations that end up working out long long term, just because as multiple people add more kids to the mix than all of a sudden, you're asking the me and nanny to potentially manage two households and four kids, and pretty soon you've basically created an in home daycare. And I just i'd be curious if you're a listener who's had a nanny share work long term let us know, because I think that is a setup that we haven't really discussed as much on this pot I also want to know that the legal question whose employee is she? Right? Because I, you know, I am going to presume here that people are paying their nannies on the books legally following all employment laws, which means that somebody needs the employment identification number and needs to be doing the paperwork, and that is the person or the entity. If you create an entity who has like the disability insurance policy on that, if your state requires that, all those sorts of things. So if you have a nanny share, who is that, like, right? Which which family is that? Or do you create a you know, a legal you know LLC that then employs the person. I don't know. That is really confusing, and then you'd have to with the other person. Yeah, it's almost like you're starting a small company and then the other person pays you, and then is that income? Like, my god, you're right the tax implications of that are. That's why I've always been curious about, Like, when people are recommending the nanny share, I'm like, so are you able to do that legally? I mean maybe, I'm sure somebody must be able to and they figured it out, but I actually have no idea what it is. So maybe our listeners can tell us. All right, that was a little digression there. Okay, maybe we could have an accountant guest expel that says how this how this works? Yes, okay, that was a huge digression. I will read my take that I wrote down and then you can reverse which I liked. I guess you know. I always say the answer goes beyond money, and you have to remember that part of this is not just a dollars and cents calculation. It's what do you want to do with the next few years of your life? Like we always have to remember, like the tagline life is finite, life is short. So if you want to work, then you should find out a way to do that. And if you really want to stay home and you enjoy that, then I think that if it's financially feasible for your family, you could figure out a way to do that. So I think, like the deepest question is like what do you truly want in your heart for me? And I know this is like sort of like unpopular to admit sometimes because we're all supposed to love the idea of staying home with our babies for hours and hours and days on end. But you can tell by the way I'm describing it that that it's fun for me. For a couple of months during maternity leave, it was not something that I I mean, yes, I'm bittersweet to have to deal with pumping and leaving my baby, but at the same time, at the end of my maternity leaves, I was typically ready to get back to the adult contact contact that I have during the day and kind of the intellectual stimulation and just the fun parts of my job. And I wouldn't have been particularly happy staying home and taking on all of the household running and childcare duties. I guess I could have, but that just wasn't what I wanted. And I know, like again, in our society, it can be really hard to admit that out loud. But then if you end up forcing yourself to do that and you're not happy, then it's probably not going to be good for anyone anyway, your children included, if you're miserable. So I think that, you know, the biggest calculation. I know Laura's going to go through some like financial reasons to potentially go back to work in terms of income loss, But I think the bigger question is like what do you want? And if you want to stay home, that's okay too. Like you know, maybe that's like you really miss that and you love those baby years and you want to maximize the time spent at home, and you're a driven person. You listen to best of both worlds. I bet you could catch up later on, and we have many stories of people who do. But if you want to go back to work, then that is also completely okay. I'm giving you permission to admit that out loud and go for it. Yeah. I mean this is also, like I said, she is like literally one week back from eternity leave, and I think, you know, if we go back and listen to, for instance, Sarah one week back from maternity leave, there's a lot of you know, the pumping, the craziness that like getting out the door in the morning. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard, and so I would say, possibly you want to be careful about making huge decisions in that moment. So one thing you could say is, I'm not doing anything long term. I'm going to say six months, six to twelve months, will just try being back at work, see how it goes. If I feel like my income is not posed, you know, poised to rise at all, I feel like I'm not advancing I you know, am not excited about being back, then sure, you know, make the decision to stay home with your kids. That's wonderful. If you, on the other hand, are like, oh, well, now that I'm past those hard early pumping days, now that I'm sleeping better, you know, I'm back excited about my job again. Well, then now you know that's great. You know, I think financially, if your family could afford for you to stay home, then they can also probably afford for you to work, even if it is for a year or two a little bit of a loss. The question of whether your nanny wants to take a pay cut, like, no, she does not want to take a paycut. Like would you like, do you want to take a pick? No, you don't, so like and especially with a new baby, because then you're asking her to deal with poddler slash baby, and that is a very hard combination. So I agree, no pay cut would be appropriate unless somehow her hours are significantly slash. But it doesn't sound like they would be if you were going back. Yeah, no, So I mean, I think that's that's kind of off the table. But you know, it is true that when you take time out of the workforce, you shouldn't look at the calculation just at one point in time either. And I did a blog post about this recently, that because even if you aren't earning much or maybe slightly negative for a year or two, you get compounded growth in your income. Most people do as they stay in the workforce, as they develop their skills, as they develop their connections, as they get promoted, as they switch jobs. That's actually a way that people do, in fact see their income rise significantly. Like if you're staying in the same job, yeah, you're probably not getting cubage raises per year, but when you switch jobs, you can, or if you leap through certain hoops for being promoted, you can see your income rise substantially. And that is very hard to do. If you leave the workforce. The other thing is a lot of people have trouble coming back at the same place that they left because of various reasons. I mean, a, you have a gap of six, seven, eight years on your resume, so many of your connections may not be there. There are skills you may need to come back to. You may also find it hard to accept what working means full time at that point because the family has become used to you being this solution to any scheduling issues, like if a child needs to be picked up at school, well, of course it's you, because you're not working for pay right now, and so your your spouse will expect that, and all of a sudden, if it's not you, like everyone's like, ah, this is crazy, Like how are we going to make this work? And so I know a lot of people have a really, really hard time with making that transition. Now. As a ambitious, wonderful best of birth both worlds listener, I'm sure she could. So again, it all really comes down to what do you want to do, And I'd suggest trying it for a couple of months at least and seeing how it goes, and then and then you can make your decision. I would say try it for a couple of months past the pumping, yes, okay, yeah, you know it's and then hey, it may be all better at that point. All right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been interviewing Aliah Kitwana about her engineering and entrepreneurial journey and we will be back next week with more on making work in life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on a Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.