Thank you so much to the NCGG leadership and speakers for teeing up a year full of knowledge and learning; and thank you to many of you for sharing how you share thanks and gratitude around the holidays. My approach this past year (an e-card) felt drab, so I appreciated the boost of inspiration. 

I’m writing to ask for insights and tips on planning for parental leave. I’ll be celebrating four years of running my practice in February, and meanwhile my spouse and I are expecting to give birth to our third child in June. As a small business owner and client relationship manager, I am thinking through numerous questions regarding my own leave. (The practice currently does not have employees, though we work with 7-10 partners/subcontractors). For those of you who took family leave, or were proximate to a small business owner who has, I would love to hear insights on the following questions: 

• Did you take leave and how did you structure it? 
• What advanced planning did you do (or wish you had done) for your current projects? 
• What advanced planning/work did you do (or wish you had done) to keep up on business development/marketing? How did you work to ensure you’d return and would have work?  
• Acknowledging that one’s health is a private matter and comfort/interest levels vary in terms of sharing health news, what did you share with your clients about your leave? 
• What other plans did you put in place to ensure the health of the business, of your relationships, and of yourself?
• Did you implement any self-management boundaries to ensure you actually took leave (other than, you know, not functioning because of lack of sleep)?
• What did you learn? What do you wish you’d known, especially as a small business owner?