and Zander, who’s 6 months old. Lai’s stepson Ian, 15, is with them every other week, alternating between their Mount Pleasant home and his mother’s place nearby. Lai says Zander is “a healthy, fast-growing, big chunker of a boy.” He wakes up in the wee hours of the morning for feedings, and Zoey wakes up between 6 and 7 a.m., calling for Yoon. “I love being crafty, and Zoey is a little bit too,” she says. “So we try to do activities, from pouring colored water from one container to another to finger painting. Many, many days, we are putting on Moana or a lot of iPad time, especially if Howard and I have calls or important documents or meetings to get out.” Zoey is luckily still taking naps; she might start napping as early as 12:30 p.m. or as late as 3 p.m. The pair have adjusted all of their calls to be taken in the “nap zone.” “Every day feels like such a marathon,” she says. She can’t reliably work on anything. She’s had to use feeding time to her advantage. “When Zander was getting up twice a night, there’s something biological that gets you,” she says. “My eyes would fly open the moment I heard him stirring. I would go and give him a bottle and then I would be like, ‘I have a million things to do: I have to apply for my PPP loan, I have to apply for the D.C. microgrants.’ I’m going to do it between 2 and 4 a.m. because I can’t do it after 9 a.m.” After about five weeks of not having the full attention of her teachers or playtime with her peers, Zoey can be more clingy now, Lai says. It’s been tough to have a serious call while she’s awake and nearby. Lai can do all of her checkin calls with Zander snuggled in her lap, but she recalls one incident that he interrupted. “I was leading a conference call with my team, and I looked down and he was so quiet for a long time, and I saw he had this big poopy diaper blowout and I was like ‘I gotta go guys!’ It was just one of those mom moments that I think I’m not alone in, juggling the disaster that can be functioning as a 100 percent parent and 100 percent business owner and working person at the same time.” Lai says she hasn’t had a chance to be bored or depressed because she’s been kept busy. Everything she does, from sitting down to play LEGOs with Zoey for 45 minutes to staying up in the middle of the night to apply for loans, she’s doing for her children and her employees. As wild as the current situation is, there are nice moments. Lai enjoys making her kids laugh, spending time with her husband, and taking 5 p.m. pre-dinner walks that might not otherwise be happening if they were running around meeting clients and reporters. “So what that I may never see Tiger King? That is not even something that occurs to me,” she says. “I self-medicate with chocolate, like a lot of chocolate. And we get by.” Julia Saladino and her husband juggle time working and parenting their nearly 19-monthold daughter, Adelina, at home. Saladino is a nonprofit attorney who runs a legal email hotline, and her husband is a therapist. They’ve both been working from home since mid-March, and have decided that as long as they are home, they’ll be there with their daughter regardless of her daycare’s status. “Outside of our parental leave, I don’t think it’s ever been like this extended amount of time that we’re all hanging out at the house,” she says.
Lorenzo, Sebastian, and Dominic Valenzuela on FaceTime
Julia Saladino and Adelina Pearson on Zoom The first couple weeks were stressful. Saladino is thankful that her workplace is flexible and understanding. But the pressure of trying to balance everything at once was overwhelming. Since then, she’s figured out more of a working routine. Her husband has the baby in the morning and she has her in the afternoon. It’s tricky, though, in their small Brookland condo, to navigate Adelina’s needs while working. “She’s at the age where she’s obsessed with mom,” Saladino says. “It makes it so that I honestly can’t be in the condo because she’ll lose her mind if I’m not on the floor playing with her. She hunts me and she’ll just be screaming.” Saladino’s solution: She works on a chair right outside the condo front door. Her daughter is fine when Saldino is not accessible, and
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enjoys hanging out with her father, she says. “It’s absurd, but I just have to do that to make it so everyone’s calm.” As she works in the mornings, her husband and daughter go for a run and have breakfast. Around noon, Saladino returns to do lunch and nap time, and spends the afternoon with Adelina. Her husband needs complete privacy while he works. Saladino says she has to run interference to make sure her daughter doesn’t bang on the door as he works in another room. “It’s definitely challenging and not ideal, but we are doing our best to make it work for as long as we need to,” she adds. “In her defense, I’m not usually on my computer if I’m home with her. She’s not used to me being home and not having my attention.” Adelina’s routine has been completely altered,
and it’s happened at an interesting time in her development, says Saladino. Months 14 through 18 were challenging, she says, because Adelina had a lot of emotions but still lacked good communication skills. She was often screaming and throwing herself to the ground, unable to articulate what she wanted. “A little before 18 months, there was a huge explosion with her language,” she says. “It’s been very interesting to be witnessing it so fully because we wouldn't be spending this much time with her if she was in daycare. She’s able to tell us a lot of the things that she needs now. I keep remembering that this is probably so confusing for her, because her brain’s rapidly developing and she’s gaining all these communication skills.” Saladino misses her Trader Joe’s time. Her weekly self-care ritual involved going to the store by herself for a couple hours, just walking around and listening to her podcasts. It’s not realistic to do that anymore. “Whatever you do for your alone time, you probably aren’t doing it now, so that’s really hard,” she says. Living in a world overtaken by a viral pandemic is wearying. But once the worst of it has passed and regular routines return, Saladino says, she can look back on this and be grateful that she got to spend so much time with her daughter. “I’m seeing all this language acquisition; she knows how to ask me for a hug. I feel really fortunate that we’re all together and we’re safe and we’re healthy.” They’re able to eat dinner as a family now that no one needs to leave for and come back from work. They also FaceTime family members with Adelina in tow. “We usually call my nephew who lives in Louisiana,” she says. “He’s like 21 and she loves him. She asks for him every day.” Adelina has been in a music class for several months. They can’t meet in person now, but they’re producing online content. Every evening, Adelina listens to a lullaby.