Go read the Disclaimer again. I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Seriously.
I had a post-partum doula for the first few weeks after the birth, because I knew I didn't have enough help lined up to compensate for a C-section. She was wonderful, and I should have hired her for more hours. I asked her for a referral for child care, after I'd called around to nanny brokers and got a sense of the market and decided I wasn't excited about any of the people I'd spoken to.
Our post-partum doula initially had no suggestions, but called a few days later with the name of a friend's part time child care giver: a very nice young man looking for another part time job. He had awe-inspiringly good references and was a true gem. He started helping out a few hours a day, a few days a week, when Teddy was almost three months old. I was around part of the time (gone to martial arts class sometimes), and at that age, the transition was fairly easy.
Unfortunately for us, our caregiver decided to go to college and take a writing class, which meant we no longer had child care during the week. Fortunately, he had friends who also cared for babies and children, and referred another nurturing young man. By this time, I'd figured out that there was no earthly reason not to hire as much help as I could get. I was breastfeeding Teddy every couple of hours anyway; it wasn't like the kid never saw me, and with help, I could actually do something not completely baby-focused (okay, since I spent a chunk of the time working on researching and writing this stuff, still baby-focused).
Since Teddy had already developed a strong attachment to our first caregiver, and since he was still in town on the weekends, we now had child care during the week and on the weekend. And since the new caregiver arrived before five months, Teddy was able to develop a second strong attachment without any particular problems. Now that Teddy is crawling well (just after six months), it would be a lot harder to integrate a new caregiver.
Despite this wealth of assistance, we still have weeks when we have a lot less help than we'd like. For example, at about seven months, our first caregiver was unexpectedly out of state for a family emergency, while our second caregiver was out with a bad cold (which we almost certainly gave him). I learned from a couple of incidents with cancellations with the first caregiver to start cancelling stuff when child care became unavailable. Since Teddy and I were still recovering from that bad cold, my husband stayed home one day with us to help out, and worked a bit from home. That helped a lot. Parents who are home, day in and day out, with no help, deserve medals for courage and for service above and beyond the call of duty.
When we're both around to take care of Teddy, it's still hard to get any projects done, simply because it's hard to get sustained, uninterrupted time. But we can manage to get the basic needs -- meals, a walk, a trip to the store -- taken care of. As Teddy gets older, the outings become easier. For a while, even when an outing went well, he'd throw a fit on the drive home, which tended to make us quite shy about taking him out again for weeks -- or a month or more -- thereafter.
Teddy also gets quite bored with us. He's awful happy to see a different face when child care, or a friend shows up. If you can afford to involve a third, fourth or more people consistently in the care of your baby, I strongly encourage you to do so. Babies can get to know and love more than one person, if given the opportunity.
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created March 19, 2006 Updated March 19, 2006