Early on Tee and I decided that sleep would be our #1 priority as parents. I believe it’s the secret sauce in our family arrangement. Everything is easier with sleep – feeding the baby, maintaining a relationship, going back to work, feeling human. I’ve written about this before but now, 18 months into this parenting […]
Our model for when one parent takes leave
I took 6.5 months of parental leave. I’ve previously shared how valuable it was to have Tee at home for the first two months (leave + WFH). His return to the office was the first test for our equal parenting approach. We didn’t have a game plan but used trial and error to find something […]
Shared feeding: what worked for us
It’s part II of my award-winning series on feeding! You’ve read my manifesto on shared feeding; this is how we’re doing it: Newborn phaseTee gave Buddy a bottle a day from week one. This was usually in the evening, as part of Midwife Cath’s famous ‘BBB’ routine, outlined previously. This meant more sleep but also […]
Shared feeding or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bottle
In my last post I said the newborn phase was where best intentions crashed into biological realities. I think that’s partially true. However there’s scope to shift our rhetoric and practices in one key area: feeding the baby. Here in Sydney, we receive fantastic post-partum support from the public health system. Community nurses are there […]
How we survived the newborn phase
People talk about the newborn phase as the hardest one to share, as parents. Best intentions come up against biological realities. This is how we approached it. Weeks 1-4: survival modeWe were both on leave, allowing us both to go all-in. We gave ourselves clear roles, as we did during pregnancy. I was the Head […]
Doing less child care
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to shrink the pie – how to reduce the overall burden of household labour. In some ways, spending fewer hours on housework and paid work are easy. Those blog posts will write themselves. But child care/ parenting? That’s fraught. In late 2018 NYT published an article […]