Counting down with curries

Two weeks left before I go on maternity leave!  You would think that the work starts to ease off at this point, but instead I am finding people bombarding me with questions as they want to make the most of my knowledge before I disappear for a few months!

I have an all-day meeting with my team next Monday to go through the year-end checklist to make sure they are confident of all the steps they will need to follow while I am away.  I have been making final adjustments to the plans today in the light of a meeting I had yesterday with the finance director and the partner in charge of partner affairs to discuss how we account for releases from post-tax reserves set aside after the sale of a building last year to cover pre-tax expenditure on the new building this year.

After the meeting yesterday I went out to lunch with the partner I report into – curry because that’s what I’ve been craving recently - to make sure she’s aware that I want to be kept in the loop while on maternity leave and am very happy to have people ring me on my mobile – after all, if I don’t want to be disturbed I can just make sure it’s turned off.   We also talked about my career in general and what I want to do when I get back.  There isn’t really much guidance about how to manage your maternity leave because obviously different people feel differently about how much they want to keep in touch , but I’ve found that generally work colleagues are very reluctant to ‘intrude’ upon your time off, so as I want to stay in touch I make a point of being quite clear about this up front, even to the extent of booking ‘catch-up phonecalls’ at intervals throughout my leave.

On Tuesday I am working from home as the mid-wife is calling to go through my birth-plan.  Now that I have wireless broadband, and a desk set up in the nursery where I can hide from my other kids, it’s proved to be quite easy to work from home!  I just divert my office phone to my mobile and some people don’t even realise I’m not in the office.  On Wednesday I am meeting with the auditors to see if there is any work they can do in advance of the year-end before I go on leave.

In my final week I am running a lunch&learn session for the wider finance community on what we do in my area, attending the Parents Network Changing Direction seminar, having a leaving lunch – curry again! – and cheering on some dragon-boat racing that is the finance community’s summer social this year.