Family Leave, Part 2

I’m about to finish up the second part of my government/corporate-sponsored family leave and I wanted to write a post on my experience and some lessons learned. Maybe it’ll help other new parents, but at the very least it’ll be a brain dump for my future self 😉.

Context

This is my first child and she just turned 9 months a few days ago. My wife and I staggered our time off work so that we could buy as much time as possible to figure out child care plans and that mostly meant that we switched off being on our own for most of each day. Child care (nanny, babysitting, daycare) turned out to not be what we wanted for a number of reasons, the two chief reasons being prohibitive costs in the SF Bay Area and relucatance to hand over our LO (“little one” - I just learned) to anyone other than family. The baby’s grandparents even pitched in to help us for several months (so grateful!) because our work couldn’t provide enough time off to figure out the situation. But they don’t live near us so this wasn’t a long term solution either. So, in the end I am wrapping up my leave for the few weeks leading up to my wife quitting work for awhile. I could go on a rant about Bay Area cost of living, too - but I’ll be honest that we don’t have to live up here and it is a choice.

Rough Timing

The timing for taking over as my child’s caretaker was a bit rough, but of course there are many parents who have it far tougher. As I mentioned earlier, she had spent a few months being juggled between grandparents and their houses. The first week I took over, we were bringing her back to her actual home - our apartment. She had seemlingly forgot all about her crib, her room was unfamiliar, she was at the developmental stage of increased separation anxiety, and learning object permanence. So we were basically back to nights of fits of crying, reminiscent of her 4-month sleep training. We took the approach of patting her in the crib when she would be upset and only picking her up when her crying became hysterical. We had to move back into her room and sleep in there the first couple nights to ease the anxiety, but then we moved back into our own bed and would just go back into her room to reassure her that we still existed out of her line of sight.

It was going well until she had a crazy tantrum on a warm night. My wife and I went back and forth on whether we should start letting her “cry it out” (the yes-tears method). It went on for quite a while and we became concerned and started to go through the checklist of things that could be wrong. Changed the diaper, gave her a bottle snack, rocked her some more, made sure all the lights were off, added a night light, but nothing could stop tantrum. She was in a full onesie and it was a bit of a warm night. We thought she might have been overdressed so I went in to change her outfit. Turned out she was blazing hot to the touch and had come down with a high fever. We had to give her does of Tylenol to get her through the night. The next morning (Sunday), her fever was still high when her last dose had worn off. No doctors available to take appointments, so the hospital hotline suggested either schedule a phone appointment with a nurse or go into the ER. We went into the ER right after that and spent half the day there getting her on fluids and having tests done. Turned out she had caught pneumonia and needed to be put on antibiotics for the next 10 days.

This was all in the first of my three weeks! So what had I learned thus far? Do your best to keep as much consistency as possible. If you’ve already taught a younger infant to sleep in a crib, try not to disrupt that. Separation anxiety and object permanence are developmental stages that come later and will feel like a step backward, so it helps a lot if all other variables remain the same. When dealing with fussy sleepers, pick a strategy (of which there are many) but be aware of signs that something is indeed wrong and/or dangerous (high temperature, fever, breathing patterns, etc.) versus normal stuff (crying to a certain extent). Pneumonia is apparently one of the more common illnesses in infants and young children, but a first time parent like me just didn’t think of the possibility.

Smarter Purchases

I’ve always thought of myself as an intelligent shopper. I love toys, gadgets, products, and buying things in general. I typically do a lot of research on what I buy and put thought into how I’ll use it as a high priority. A quirk of mine, though, is that I tend to be a perfectionist as to the things I hold onto and that often means iterating through stuff like keyboards or USB sticks until I find the right one.

The problem with this mindset is that baby products are mostly relatively cheap, eventually disposable (simply for sanitary reasons), seemingly cleverly designed (and subsequently eyecatching), marketed toward highly frustrated parents looking to throw money at immediate solutions, with a picky end-user (the baby) who may just simply reject the product for unknown reasons. So you basically end up with a lot of crap. 5 different brands of bottles, toys that your baby just couldn’t care less about, a crib that has bars that your baby loves to hang onto when it’s really time to sleep, pacifiers that won’t stay in her mouth. A crate of Costco baby wipes that annoy you to no end because they don’t separate well when you have two wriggling feet in one hand hovering over a pile of poop! You want to switch to Huggies, but now you have 2000 Kirkland ones that you have to use up.

So yes, if you’re not desperately low on income then you can throw money on these simple things and solve your immediate first-world problems (I acknowledge that I am fortunate in this regard), but to others in a similar position I highly advise to not go crazy with this unless you simply don’t care about your home turning into a hoarder’s den or worse, just creating more eventual landfill scrap. Buy the smallest number of things you can, and never buy in bulk until you are absolutely sure you are happy with the product. Consider the timing of these purchases - don’t buy a bunch of 3-6M size jackets or full onesies if your baby is going to be that age in the middle of a hot summer. Accept all hand-me-downs because they are basically a free trial of brands and types of products that you can also pass on when you don’t need them anymore.

Daily Routines and Preparation

I mentioned earlier that this was Part 2 of my family leave. My baby just turned 9 months and Part 1 was when she was 4-5 months old. The last time I took care of her alone for a month, she could barely roll over, wasn’t mobile, only needed to be entertained with simple toys, and took 3 naps where she could easily be lulled to sleep with a bottle and some mellow carrying. Her naps were pretty consistent, she was (I thought) totally sleep-trained, and I could do other things whilst. Also, the weather was great - nice 65-72 degrees every day.

This time was completely different. We got her back home in between at a stage where she seemed to be too active for 3 naps some days and too cranky for only 2 naps other days. She could army-scoot quite fast, could pull herself up to a supported-stand. She would easily get bored of every toy I started this period with. She’d seemingly even get bored of just me in general if I played with her for too long. She’d wake up from her naps too early all the time. And conversely to Part 1, this was early summer and out of nowhere, we got hit with a mini-heatwave of about 4 days of +100 degree heat. Our home’s A/C never really worked well and I never bothered to get it fixed when we didn’t need it that badly.

A lot of challenges here to overcome but I had to come up with a focused objective, a mission, to get myself through this: have things stabilized before my wife takes over. I wanted to get the baby on a schedule that was decently consistent so that when she further develops we can make smaller adjustments as necessary without too much needing to change suddenly. So if my problem was that all of the above was just complete chaos that I had to get through, then I learned that I needed an objective as a solution. I don’t even have answers to all those little problems yet - my last week isn’t even over yet! But having this mission definitely does help. I’m looking for patterns: are two naps working more often than 3? Does she indeed go to bed any easier when she gets the generally recommended 4 hours of naps total throughout the day? Are bottles, before or after, making solid-food meals go smoother? Our days together definitely go smoother when I limit the amount of stimulus toward the baby; we don’t go out in the car more than once a day and not every day, I keep her play areas more spartan instead of just throwing all the toys out all over the floor like I did initially, and I rotate which toys she plays with day-to-day. I spend her nap times prepping for the next time she’s awake by washing her bottles and bowls and cleaning up her play space. Do as many chores as I can before just relaxing on YouTube.

Final Takeaway

The last thing I want to point out is that, along with Part 1 of my family leave, I learned how hard it is to care for a child with a partner at work all day or even part of the day. Especially an infant, although I always hear the joke that a parent with an older child will always say “you haven’t seen anything yet - just wait till they can X!” I respect anyone that raises their child alone, all day long, every day because it’s a lot of damn work and you if you can get anything else done (cleaning house, cooking, running a side business) then props to you! I also feel better about my wife’s and my decision to pass on paid child care. It would be far too easy to pick the wrong person for the job who merely just needs to get through the day without our child’s best interests at heart, or a daycare that has far too many children and too few staff to give an infant the required amount of attention.

And to co-workers and employers out there: family leave !== vacation!