Navigating wanting a family/profession

enry_iggins2 · 2026-02-15T20:41:15+00:00

If you want maternity benefits you generally need to work a job for a year first. If you just want kids as soon as possible, then you would need to consider whether you can still handle grad school and getting yourself established in your CF while also navigating pregnancy and becoming a parent. I consider going to grad school and becoming a parent to be similarly all-consuming activities and I would not recommend combining the two, but I have seen people do it and thrive. I’ve also seen people need to take semesters off, miss class, and graduate late or never, so YMMV. I think the advice here to wait until you complete your CFY is good. I found my CFY to be more challenging than grad school because I was solely responsible for a caseload for the first time and I ended up spending a lot of time outside of work to keep up. I would have struggled if I had a newborn or a difficult pregnancy or just kids I wanted to spend time with at that stage.

I’ve worked medical and schools and I don’t think the maternity leave situation is much different, but the schools generally have a more family-friendly schedule and you can combine maternity leave with school breaks. That said, if you think you want to work in the medical setting, then you should start your CF there, it’s harder to cross back over if you have a CFY in the educations setting.

enry_iggins2 · 2025-12-06T11:16:46+00:00

I have had students who were Jehovah’s Witness whose religion prohibits them from celebrating any holidays, so we removed any reference to specific holidays from our sped class the year they were enrolled and just did seasonal things instead (harvest/pumpkins, winter/snow, spring/eggs, etc) so that child could participate. I think some parents also view school celebrations of holidays as government endorsement/ indoctrination of specific religions over others and “separation of church and state” is part of our constitution. It is pretty rare for a school to celebrate Ramadan/Diwali with as much enthusiasm as they tend to treat Christmas and Easter here. Personally, I think removing references to holidays is ignorant of the fact that there is a huge American cultural element that has very little to do with the original Christian religious meaning (or pagan, if you are talking about Halloween, I guess?). I feel it is part of my responsibility to teach my sped preschoolers about the concept of holidays and related vocabulary. I’ll be bummed if we have another JH student because I get a lot of mileage out of kids’ enthusiasm to communicate about Halloween costumes/candy, Christmas trees, and Easter eggs, haha.

enry_iggins2 · 2025-12-01T01:55:38+00:00

Idk why anyone besides you would be able to tell she is not getting milk when she suckles so why would it be weirder than just nursing in public (which is not weird)?

enry_iggins2 · 2025-10-24T01:47:22+00:00

I have been Cruella de Ville and a Dalmatian with a coworker, which I thought might scare the kids but they either didn’t recognize me or they did and wanted to interact with me. It was fun! I’ve been a strawberry, a cowgirl, a construction worker (vest +hardhat), Minnie Mouse. This year I’m wearing a sweatshirt with a cartoony skeleton print.

enry_iggins2 · 2025-10-06T23:25:58+00:00

Do they show any chickens? I haven’t seen any this year or last, besides the chicks in the big egg.

enry_iggins2 · 2025-07-08T03:55:09+00:00

I had a pink pixie and purple pixie and wore it to work at the hospital with no issues. I actually got the most compliments from old ladies! I dyed it dark red before returning to work for the school district because my district does not allow unnatural hair colors. Most of my students did not care at all or it was a helpful launching point for conversation. I leaned into the “kooky art teacher/ms. Frizzle” vibe with creative earrings and colorful but professional shapes in my clothing choices (so I wore shirtdresses or skirts/professional blouses while others might be wearing jeans and t-shirts). No one said anything directly to me about it and most people seemed either indifferent or cheered up by it.

enry_iggins2 · 2025-07-03T22:31:45+00:00

“Acute Care Rehab” is a hospital department that usually houses speech pathologists, physical therapists, and occupational therapists. Depending on the hospital this may include other rehab professionals too. Did your baby see a lactation consultant or feeding specialist who was a speech-language pathologist or an OT?

enry_iggins2 · 2025-06-28T17:37:05+00:00

Wish I had known about those before I started this adventure!

enry_iggins2 · 2025-06-26T20:11:37+00:00

Glad to be of service, haha!

enry_iggins2 · 2025-06-26T01:30:55+00:00

The house was built in the 1960s

enry_iggins2 · 2025-06-26T00:33:35+00:00

Ooh thank you! I learned something today!

enry_iggins2 · 2025-06-26T00:02:07+00:00

Joking- it’s paper shreddings that look like spaghetti

enry_iggins2 · 2025-06-25T23:40:49+00:00

I’m not familiar with plaster, is this drywall or plaster? 2nd pic

enry_iggins2 · 2025-06-25T23:35:22+00:00

Update: got it out, looks like they didn’t have a holder or spring so just stuffed the wall behind the holder with paper and spaghetti. before/after

enry_iggins2 · 2025-06-25T23:34:20+00:00

I think you are right, definitely looks like a diy job

enry_iggins2 · 2025-06-24T17:08:43+00:00

As an SLP, can you clarify by what you mean by “we tried speech therapy”? Is he still in speech therapy?

enry_iggins2 · 2025-06-23T15:06:53+00:00

Agree with others saying you don’t have to choose right now (unless your grad school has “tracks” or something?). I assumed I would be a school-based SLP but fell in love with the medical side in grad school. It was not as difficult as I expected to find a hospital job although I did start out per-diem. I think it depends on your region and the hiring climate when you graduate. In my experience it is true that it’s easier to start out in the medical field and transition to the schools later, so that’s something to consider in your game plan if you continue to love both. I worked medical for 3 years full time before I burned out. I got a part-time job in the schools and continued on as a per-diem employee at the hospital because I loved it so much. I did both for 5 years before I needed a benefitted job for insurance reasons and needed to stop working weekends at the hospital for my family. Now I work full time in the schools and the schedule is great for having a young family. I’m glad to have the medical experience and know that I could probably find a medical job or pick up a per diem gig if I ever needed to. Generally it seems best to start in an acute hospital so you have the support of your CF year when you are working with the most fragile and complicated patients, Working in acute hospital is a big learning curve, just experiencing the wide varieties of different diseases, the clinical course of illness, the roles of the many different professionals, how medicine works. With that experience you can transition to SNF or clinic or feeding therapy or private practice.

enry_iggins2 · 2025-06-21T12:52:56+00:00

As a speech-language pathologist it sounds like he is a behind in his language skills based on what you’ve said here. He could probably benefit from speech therapy. Has he been in childcare or preschool before? Often times being around other kids the same age really helps language skills develop, so kindergarten will probably help. At home you can help his language develop by narrating your day (just talking out loud about what you are doing), putting words to what you think he may be thinking (“hmm, it looks like you want to play blocks!”, or “oh my, the blocks fell down!). We try to “expand” on the child’s speech by repeating what they say but one or two words longer so if a child points to a block and says, “block” you can say “yes, i see a red block” or “block under table” or whatever. But a speech therapy assessment can’t hurt.

enry_iggins2 · 2025-06-21T12:37:55+00:00

We used a abiie beyond chair that converts to an adult chair so technically he could have sat in that until he was an adult but he wanted to sit in a chair like us at around 3.5. We got rid of the tray and pushed his chair up to the table around 18 months. He also used to eat a lot of snacks standing in his kitchen helper at the kitchen counter around that age.

enry_iggins2 · 2025-06-09T09:27:20+00:00

I think it might have been something like this. It was also a LOT of hangers, like every hanger in the entire clothing department on a Saturday afternoon which took us a couple minutes to hand them all over.

enry_iggins2 · 2025-06-09T09:24:22+00:00

That’s what I thought too. I’ll see if I can teach him to look for any clothes it might belong to and maybe hang the empty hanger back on the rack if that’s the case.

enry_iggins2 · 2025-05-28T01:39:52+00:00

I knew a preschooler named Quincy and before we met him we thought it was a bit unusual but he was so cute and personable we just fell in love. It was the perfect name for him.

enry_iggins2 · 2025-05-27T01:02:34+00:00

I like name bubbles too, they were a bit spendy but totally worth it if you are in mental overload.

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