New Baby & WFH. Is it do-able? Or am I kidding myself?

[expectinglittlebear]

Unfortunately my employer do not offer any enhanced maternity pay and therefore only offer SMP. I am due our first baby in January.

Due to finances, I am only able to take 8 weeks of maternity leave (6 weeks SMP and 2 weeks annual leave tagged on the end). Childcare is also extortionate (and also wouldn't want to leave my baby with anyone that young, bar family), so my employer have offered for me to WFH 4 days a week, and then my mum will be looking after baby the other day so I can go into the office (Husband works full time). I am very grateful for this opportunity to WFH around baby as we wouldn't be able to afford for me to be off work, or pay for childcare. So after my 8 weeks off, I will be back to working full time, while caring for our baby too.

Has anyone else been in a similar situation and gone back to working full time after a short maternity leave, working from home and caring for baby - is it doable or am I completely kidding myself thinking I can work around baby at home full time? For context, I am an office manager and PA, but my job is relatively easy and stress free. It would be the odd zoom call meeting, but other than that just mainly working from a laptop.

As everyone else has said, you're kidding yourself. You cannot work full time, and look after such a tiny baby too.

"BigHuff

Bracing myself to be shouted down here, but. Why isn't it possible?

I have friends who went travelling in a van for a year with a newborn - they had a great time.
I used to follow the blog of a family who were touring the world by bike and living out of tents - the woman had a baby en route and they kept going (they also had two(?) older kids with them)
My old boss (based in US, so no mat leave) gave birth and was back at it 2 days later. She was on calls all day, sometimes at ridiculous hours. (I'm not saying this is healthy or aspirational, just that it is evidently doable.)
In plenty of places it is totally normal for a woman to strap her baby to her front or back and go about her usual business, including going to work a manual job.

It is probably not going to be a whole heap of fun. But I think you can do it.

@Hope478

2 days after I gave birth, me and my daughter were horribly ill in hospital. Would have been "totally normal" to strap my baby to my back and crack on, but unfortunately I was pretty tied up there! As are a lot of women. Are you a man? hmm"

You spent 2 days lazing around in hospital? After only having ONE very poorly baby? When you should have been out bricklaying/herding sheep/writing financial reports?? Outrageous.

I believe the above were my exact words - be sure not to misquote me.

Trying to be practical here. Not sure if this would be possible but how about contacting a local college that runs childcare courses? I would imagine that their students have to do practical placements. Could you maybe offer to have a student to stay with you for a placement, it may involve a week or two or a regular day a week for a period of time. Or maybe a uni student wanting some early years experience? Again, someone doing an ‘early years’ course may have to do a placement or need regular contact with a child. Are you able to offer accommodation for someone studying locally in return for some childcare? This could work out cheaper than a nursery. DRB checks and references would obviously be required.

Hopefully you're not of the 'but childcare takes all of MY wages' school of thought. Childcare is a family expense.

That sounds fine in theory. But if childcare is literally more than one parent is making, it makes zero economic sense for that parent to remain employed while the family pays for childcare. They're taking a loss on the whole thing, and for what?

I have friends who went travelling in a van for a year with a newborn - they had a great time.

There were two of them. Only one of them needed to be driving at any given time. Whichever one wasn't either sleeping or driving was tending to the newborn. That's not at all the same thing.

I used to follow the blog of a family who were touring the world by bike and living out of tents - the woman had a baby en route and they kept going (they also had two(?) older kids with them)

They probably stopped a lot. If their job had depended on them traveling a certain distance per day, this wouldn't have worked.

My old boss (based in US, so no mat leave) gave birth and was back at it 2 days later. She was on calls all day, sometimes at ridiculous hours. (I'm not saying this is healthy or aspirational, just that it is evidently doable.)

Someone else was probably watching the baby for much of that time. If not, being the boss means 1) you can set whatever time you want for calls, and 2) if your baby cries in the background, no one is going to say or do anything about it.

developingchild.harvard.edu/science/key-concepts/serve-and-return/

This is a really powerful experiment but upsetting, as it didn't need to be done - you only need to watch mothers doing what they do and pay proper attention

OP I'm currently doing it, for the second time. HOWEVER I'm working 2 afternoons a week (self employed) not full time! Do you have a spare bedroom? If you can have an au pair or working guest who can be around for 5hrs a day to hold the baby if it happens to be screaming during a meeting or when you need to concentrate, that could make it possible (this is what we're doing). It's definitely not easy though!

Meant to say the baby really doesn't need a bedroom for the first 6 months at least so maybe you can use the bedroom intended for your child?

@headinthecloudsnow

*In the evenings *

Sorry OP, there are no 'evenings' with a baby. It's just a 24/7 shit show.

God yes, this. The ‘evenings’ were not a relaxing time with my newborns, especially the first one. OH and I had to eat our dinner in shifts and I would generally cry a lot and say that I had ruined my life.

No way, when childcare closed in lockdown it was impossible to do much work of value with a 1 year old, let alone a newborn. You won't want to be cramming in work when they're asleep etc either, you'll be exhausted.

Haven’t RTFT but it could possibly work I think. Both mine slept well between feeds. At least 3 hours at a time. So I potentially could have sat and worked on a laptop had I wanted to. But, both mine were FF and from what I’ve seen BF babies tend to feed more, little and often rather than all at once. So that is something to factor in.

Also depends on the job. I am technically full time but realistically my work can be done in 20 hrs per week. So absolutely I could do that and care for a baby if I had to.

People here will clamour to tell you it’s impossible but it really depends on the baby.

I work full time and I look after DC and do school run. It can be done. I took a year maternity off though. If your happy to have no life and catch up when DC are in bed. It is possible. It’s not ideal but you can wing it. Part time would obviously be easier though !

I thought I could do this.. was convinced baby would nap 4-5 hours a day and this is where I’d get the majority of my work done. Unfortunately mine had terrible colic till 12 weeks.

Cried a lot and couldn’t be settled without walking with her in a sling or pram outside. You just couldn’t have been on zoom and expected anyone to hear you over the screaming.

Then as the colic stopped the nap fights began. Mine just doesn’t sleep for more than half an hour blocks and even that is a huge battle. I went back to work at 5.5 months.

I drop her at her grandparents around 9 and pick her up at 4.30 and even then if I have an early call or late one I have to be on mute the whole time. She also still wakes in the night so I’m really tired even though my husband alternated mornings with me.

People are being harsh because they want you to realise how hard it is. I also think your employer is being unrealistic asking you to work from home with a baby. In my experience employers insist you can only wfh if you’re not providing childcare.

When does your employer want a decision? Maybe you can see how you go with baby in the first 8 weeks and take it a week at a time with work. If you try and fail then at least you tried and can look at a new plan.
Will your husband/partner be looking for a tidy house and cooked meal each evening when he gets in? If any down time from the baby in the day is being used for work stuff then he may need to be the main person in charge of the cooking and household stuff, make sure he is aware of this so it doesn't cause any misunderstandings later on.

@Kite22

I still can't get my head round why a small company would pay someone for 40 hours, knowing there are only 20 hours of work. That can't be sustainable, even putting aside what OP is asking about not actually being able to be fully focused on her paid employment for those limited hours.

If they employed someone for two days a week instead of five days a week they could probably afford to pay them enhanced maturnity 😉.

OP have you taken into account that babies (especially if breast fed) can cost very little in the early months? Do you have out goings that can/will be reduced if you were on maturnity? E.g. Not need commuting costs, reduced going out expenses?

I highly recommend you Google "The Brittas Empire" honestly you can't pop a baby in your desk draw.

Sorry I’ve not read all of the responses so forgive me if this has been asked already but when you got pregnant what was your plan for going back to work or not? You say you can’t afford not to work and you can’t afford to pay childcare so what if your employer hadn’t offered you the chance to work from home? What if they offered you 12 months mat leave….you would still have had to pay for childcare after that time presumably?

I think you will find it hard to work with a baby so young.

Imagine a relatively easy job. Say checkout worker in a supermarket. Yes you need to concentrate and you needed new skills but it isn't particularily difficult. Now imagine you do a 16 hour day at that job. Yes you get some breaks every now and again but you don't know how often or how many. Now imagine you have to work this job EVERY DAY. No weekends, no vacation time. Oh and you are on call overnight and some workers get called in 2-4 times a night for months or even longer.

This is what having a baby is like. I won't even go into the physical side of it. Recovery, hormones etc or the emotional side, guilt, worry, loneliness, or the crying for your attention that instantly raises your blood pressure.

If you think you could do the equivalent of 4hours a day on top of this then great.

Honestly I feel for you. I asked a similar question 4 years ago before my eldest was born except it was doing a qualification so part time. I got a similar response to you ok and it was exactly right. I also had a baby right at the top end on the 'good sleeper' scale. Slept 9-5 from 3 months so it wasn't just sleep deprivation. I barely remember the first 6 months or so because I was just in an exhausted daze.

I think it’s possible actually. You might get lucky and have a content baby. My first was like this and slept the day away. Second had colic and bad reflux so would have been harder to manage. Of course it’s not the ideal but you have to do what you have to do and you will be tired but once you are not on non stop zoom calls you could likely manage. I believe there are breast feeding breaks you can claim
In addiction to standard breaks, at least in my place they offer them anyway so might be useful to know.

Hi I usually lurk but I wanted to share my experience of doing this with you. The negative and positive. I'm self employed and with my first in 2019 I thought 8 weeks mat leave would be plenty (especially as I'd taken 2 weeks before the baby arrived) as I was only eligible for Maternity Allowance (came to about £140 a week at the time, here).

I ended up with quite bad PND and PNOCD because the people I worked with didn't understand how demanding it was to WFH with a baby and expected me to keep up with my previous workload, reply to emails as fast, etc, I felt all this pressure to keep earning, and I was being pulled in two directions (work and baby) and terrified of losing my income. I was setting my own hours and mostly working after DH took the baby to bed at 9pm but there were aspects of my job I just couldn't do at all due to baby brain/exhaustion (I wasn't even finding time to eat food some days).

I was recovering from a rough C section and had no family nearby to help care for the baby, and I was breastfeeding (and he had undiagnosed tongue tie and very bad reflux). These all played a part in how hard it was.

My best advice to you would be to see if you can find a way to take the financial hit to have even one more month on SMP. By 3 months, you'll have recovered a lot better, you'll have got into your groove a bit more with the baby, and you'll be familiar with their sleeping/feeding patterns etc.

By three and a half months PP, I was able to do long-distance drives from Ireland to the UK and attend business conferences (with my baby) and take in info and network, along with getting back to some semblance of normality. Work wasn't as smooth as pre-baby, of course, and the drives required a lie-flat carseat and lots of stops for feeds. A whole lot changes in both you and your baby between 8 weeks and 4 months, and in my opinion every extra week you can give yourself between then will set you up for a smoother return to work and smoother first year as a parent.

I'm about to have baby 2 (am 38 weeks pregnant), and I've organized a load of my work in advance to try and mitigate things a bit this time, along with freezing a load of batch cooks of my fave dinners, so PM me if you want to keep in touch for mutual support. I'm planning on going easier on myself and doing the bare minimum work to keep my business afloat this time because there were so many plates to spin. I hope that doesn't sound too negative because it's possible but really, really hard and I didn't manage it very well last time.

Before anyone on this thread demands why did I have a baby at a bad time, I want to point out it took 7 years to conceive my first (5 MCs) and we didn't expect to get PG on first try with our second.

@SenselessUbiquity

Doing physical things with a baby in a sling is completely different from brain working. Especially at a computer. If your baby is looking at your face and getting nothing back because you are glazed over focusing on the screen, you aren't giving the baby what it needs to form neural connections. This isn't to say that a baby in a sling requires constant performative parenting and full beam attention, but there is something very important, emotional and social, going on when the baby is with you - and the other people you are with - which the baby can't engage with if you are engaging with online text. BAbies get fractious and difficult when their mothers try to do this, because they are lacking. BAbies are often relaxed in social situations and their mothers think "why can't he be like this when I am trying to get something done?" - and the reason is because she is socially aware of him at the same time as everyone else and he knows this and is getting what he needs. If you try to wfh, online office work, with a baby, she will scream as her development needs more from you and otehrs than that. You can get childcare to deliver that, or you can respond to her needs and be incredibly strung out trying to work instead of sleep around this.

This.

There is more to caring for a new born than nappies and bottles!

Yes it's totally doable - get a sling, leave a boob out - you're set. It's hard work though, seriously took it out of me.

Absolutely not possible from my experience. First baby didn't sleep from the start and was up all night. Was like being hit by a truck. Second baby was much better and more chilled but still couldn't have worked - my brain wasn't working.

Tried to wfh with no childcare with a 1 year old during the lockdown and it was impossible. I just didn't have the energy or concentration for both.

İ think your safest bet would be to take the statutory maternity pay and find something to do that only takes two hours a day, to bring in extra cash. There's loads of ideas on old threads here or you could start a new one.

Ah, I feel for you. I did it and I honestly don’t know how I kept it up for two years…grabbing hours here and there at nap time, catching a call while waving toys in the air, working late LATE into the night. Yes it’s possible but it’s horrible. I don’t recommend it at all. You’ll be at burn out point constantly. If you’ve got other options, take them. You won’t regret it

I don’t really understand what your plan was with having a baby though? Could you just never afford childcare? What will you do when the baby is mobile and needs constant attention?

I don’t understand how this can work.

I’m so sorry you have to go back to work so early. There’s no way I could’ve done it. I was exhausted and had no brain capacity for work stuff at all

OP - Gosh you are getting it hard and fast on here!
I note that you say that your job is not particularly demanding and that your employer is supportive. I also assume that you are working for a small company and that it is better to work with you to accommodate you rather than replace you.

Making a success of working full time with a new baby depends on you, your baby and your job. How many hours a day to you actually consider to be heads down, intensive activity? I found I had to work smarter. I did what I had to do first and ploughed through that. The other stuff that is not time dependent or urgent I did in the evening. My DS slept really well so I was lucky.

If this thread is stressing you out ( and so many people telling you (wrongly) that it is impossible will that!), have you looked at some other alternatives? A colleague of mine had twins and she found a nanny who looked after 2 school age children, so she used the nanny when those children were in school. Another friend employed a local mum with kiddies at school for 4-5 hours per day (both came to their homes).