That first month is a real challenge, so congrats on making it this far.

I had a similar sort of feeling, that first few months (what I’ve seen called “the fourth trimester” and what I personally refer to as “the phase where they’re basically a potato”) is a bit repetitive and they don’t really have the capacity to engage. But it’s well worth the wait; months 4-12 are really exciting and filled with firsts.

We’re at about 24 months and it’s simultaneously been the most fun and most challenging. Little guy is really taking to the verbal skills, and he’s starting to repeat full sentences (including daddy’s traffic-inspired “look at this fucking guy”) and express complex thoughts and desires. Many of those desires involve potential grievous injury, hence the difficult part, but it’s overall a lot of a fun.

I’m a staff engineer with a toddler and went through (am going through?) a similar thing. At the end of the day, I’m just tired and want to veg, not necessarily try to learn something new about programming. There were a few things that helped me though:

1. The biggest thing was just to recalibrate my expectations. I talked with other dev parents who all said that, until the kids are able to play a bit more independently (eg 6 or so), you just have to accept that your self enrichment time is going to be limited.
2. For my off hours learning, I stick to mainly portable skills. Ways of thinking about technical debt, etc. Things that are both widely applicable, and can be learned more passively.
3. I try to carve out time to learn during work hours. I’m lucky in that the company I work for allows for a lot of independence, so my team actually instituted an “investment day” where we work on whatever we want, with the only goal being that you should try to do something that you’ll learn from.