Shannon Ingraham felt shell-shocked when she started working from home.
“We went from having full-time child care at day care to becoming the full-time child care ourselves,” said the department administrator in the FAS Office of Finance. “I knew we would be busy trying to balance working from home and my wife’s schedule [she is a physician who is still seeing patients]. My strategy was to buy every toy Leo had enjoyed at day care while my wife tried to focus on the new work schedule.”
Leo just turned 1, an occasion that prompted Ingraham to also buy him a tuxedo. She describes young Leonardo Insogna as a happy guy who likes to eat puff snacks, watch for the Federal Express truck, and talk gibberish. And a few weeks ago, he repaid her generosity with a kind of largess of his own.
“I thought he would take his first steps at day care,” she said. “He had been taking a step and falling, but then one morning I took him into the living room during a work meeting, and he just started walking toward me! I squealed as loudly as possible and then took out my phone to capture the moment. There are a lot of grandparents who want to see that.”
Ingraham was thrilled with Leo’s achievement, though it did come with a price: Now she has to scramble to childproof the house.
“I have to hover now because he wants to walk everywhere. He has his hands in the air waddling around,” she said. “It’s nerve-wracking.”