Molly asked on Twitter this morning how people who had small kids kept up with professional development, triggered by her post about being so tired caring for a small baby that it is hard to keep up, It’s all a bit hard right now.

Been there. I waited until my first child was sleeping through the night before we had our second. My children are five years apart…

My dirty little secret is that, instead of having any kind of professional development plan, I just hung out on the net and played .. BUT it turned out to be the best tech strategy I could have had.

Totally ignoring libraryland, I did two things that actually made me a very useful tech user for libraries when I came back to work.

The first was to be part of the “Fabulous February Mommies” group on ParentsPlace over at InfoVillage. This was a bulletin board for ALL mums worldwide who were expecting babies in February 1998. Plus were on the internet . And able to navigate and understand daily postings. There were maybe 30 of us. 30!!! Through my involvement in this community I understood how to “do” social networking – the asynchronous posting; finding a voice that both felt like me and suited the site and the purpose; not freaking out as the group “formed, stormed and normed” over the issue of how to get a baby to sleep through the night.

At that time it was so weird to have friends that you only knew on the internet – let alone supportive and wise friends who filled a place in your life that real life ones could not – that I simply could not discuss this part of my life with people offline. Yet, when social media really made leeway I already knew how to dive in and swim the waters. I was years ahead of people who had been studiously “professionally developing” by learning the advanced search screens of vendor-sold database products, which is what I guiltily felt I really should be doing if I took my profession seriously.

The second thing I did was to play the Sims.  A lot. I found out how to navigate within a 3D world with a mouse, how to control camera angles to see different parts of a 3D world, what an inventory was, how to build … SO… back at work along comes Second Life into libraryland… or libraryland went into Second Life. Whichever way it was,  my idle and ill-spent mummy-brained hours when the baby was feeding actually gave me a literacy that allowed me to get up to speed faster than almost any other activity could have.

This was serendipity, I know … but what I am trying to say is that what you do while you are having a career break may not matter as much as you think it does. It may be that what you are doing is giving you far greater skills and literacy for some of what is to come than if you stayed in a workplace and relied on training hours to get you all trained up. It could be that following your passion or just doing what you can to put one fuzzy-brained foot in front of the other (to mix metaphors) is exactly the best thing to do to give you an edge when you are ready to jump back into librarianing.