How a Postpartum Personal Assistant Helped Me Through the Newborn Trenches

I was supposed to write this months ago. That might tell you a little something about where I'm at in life. I'm a mom of a 10-month-old. I work from home, along with my husband, and we don't have childcare. It's been the most rewarding time of my life — and the most challenging. It's laundry several times a week, having to learn new terms like "baby-led weaning," the inescapable smell of spit-up, sleep training, teething rashes, tiny bristle brushes for tiny bottle parts, and the best fucking sound in the world, baby giggles. When I became a mom, I learned the true meaning of, "It takes a village." But our modern lives and social configurations don't always make that easy. Like many millennials, however, my village is scattered and often existing virtually. My family is thousands of miles away from where I live, in Los Angeles, and while I have a tight-knit community of friends here, I say with love that professional nannies, they are not. Plus, I recognize that everyone has their own stresses and bustling schedules. So, when my maternity leave began to dwindle several months ago, I started to panic. The initial postpartum adrenaline was fading, the so-called newborn bubble had burst, and I started to doubt that I would be able to balance a full workload with the constant demands of tending to an infant. That's when I heard about Sundays. Sundays is an executive-assistant service primarily aimed at working parents. Founded by Ashley Chang, a former tech-startup product manager, Sundays touts itself as being "built for parents who refuse to choose" between career and family. There are a variety of packages based on one's unique needs, but with packages starting at $250 a month, Sundays is hoping to democratize the kind of detailed assistance typically afforded by bigger bosses with, truthfully, bigger wallets. I spoke with Chang on a Thursday afternoon in November to learn more about Sundays. I was four months postpartum at the time and I can't quite remember if I was late to the call but I'd be willing to bet I was. I know for sure that I felt frazzled, but Chang soon put me at ease. She was a new mom, too. Her son was only a few months older than my daughter, and as fate would have it, they even share the same name. I decided to try the Fourth Trimester Package. Priced at $750, which can be paid upfront or in installments, it comes with 15 hours of personalized assistance to be used within three months. Sundays assistants can help with anything from sifting through newborn paperwork to coordinating meal trains and researching childcare — anything to help ease those first few months after welcoming a child. Though I was past the fourth trimester, technically speaking, I needed all the help I could get as I approached my return to work. The morning of my first meeting with my Sundays assistant, Jamie, I wasn't exactly my most focused: my baby had just woken up early from her nap, and I was having to tend to her while also catching Jamie up on the organized chaos of my new existence. Prior to our chat, however, I had filled out a questionnaire, which helped synthesize our family's most urgent needs: daycare research, some prep for our first family trip taking place in a few months, and help scheduling a consistent house cleaner since keeping the home tidy had fallen far down the list of priorities. Despite my diminished attention span, Jamie was steady, upbeat, and reassuring. She was the phrase "I got it," personified. And though that introductory call was only 30 minutes, we quickly bonded over childrearing and our shared love of cats. In the weeks that followed, Jamie would routinely check in to share updates. We also had a shared Google Drive where she'd upload any docs with her latest findings. As a fairly type-A person, this system was soothing. Within a week, we had scheduled our first house cleaning, and not long after, Jamie shared a list of what we needed to know before our first trip with the baby, including stroller bags to consider and whether to check our stroller at the gate or ticket counter. Throughout the entire process, Jamie would also remind me of the other tasks she might be able to help with: creating grocery lists, ordering household essentials, organizing a digital file system to keep track of all our newborn documents. This is in addition to more personal needs too, like ordering holiday gifts or coordinating a date night. Over the course of a few months, Jamie became part of our village. With her help, my to-do list no longer felt like this Sisyphean endeavor. The newborn trenches felt a little brighter and, well, back to being a bubble for a little while longer. 49477540 Kelsey Garcia (she/her) is the lifestyle director at PS, where she oversees coverage across Balance and Health & Fitness. Kelsey is passionate about travel, wellness trends, and evolving parenting styles. Before joining the PS team as an editorial assistant in 2015, she interned at Elle and Harper's Bazaar, among other publications.