Shared Parental Leave and WFH

[ImNotHeartlessHonest]

Hello all!

I'm planning to take SPL with my husband for three months - my son is five months, and I can't wait for it to be my husband's turn to deal with all the naps etc, haha.

However, I'm a bit apprehensive, because we both mostly WFH. This is quite nice for me on Mat Leave as my husband can work flexibly and take our son for the odd 5/10/30/whatever minutes and make it up to his work no problem. My son lights up when he sees him, so it's a handy fix to any upsets. He also has him independently for a few hours at a time in the early mornings and at the weekend.

But there's still plenty of times when only mum will do (in his opinion), and I worry that our son will just be desperate for me if he knows I'm in the house. I'm planning to work in a cafe a couple of mornings a week, but can't do it all day every day.

Plus he's EBF, and I can't fathom how well he'll take a bottle in the night so that my husband picks up that part.

Has anyone done SPL when WFH? How did it go?

My husband and I split ShPL 50:50 so I went back to work at 6 months. My little one was also a bottle refuser, and a complete boob monster. Honestly, working from home (which I tried to do as infrequently as possible due to the issues it caused) was very tricky for me. I basically had to hide upstairs the entire day, as once baby saw me and realised I was in the house it was game over.

Due to being a bottle refuser, husband never took over the night time wakes. But during the day, he used a combination of very runny pureed food made with expressed milk, plus breastmilk icelollies. Baby was a big foodie fortunately, and also quickly settled into a routine of a MEGA feed morning, after work and before bed which seemed to keep them topped up sufficiently!

Edited to add: on the advice of a health visitor, we did manage to get baby to take milk in a sippy cup from around 10 months so I'd suggest trying that if bottle still isn't an option by the time you need it to be!

Thanks for sharing!

Annoyingly I did get my son taking EBM from a bottle briefly after a huge amount of effort because I had an evening out. Only for him to totally and unusually sleep through that evening and not need it! I find expressing tedious, so I've not kept it up, and last time I tried he wasn't interested again.

I might just have to shove my husband out of the house before I come back at lunchtime, because otherwise it feels like I'll be hiding all day! I do have the benefit of flexible working to be fair, so hope to clock off by 4 each day.