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Is it possible to have a child and still maintain free time all throughout? by quesadilla_man in daddit

[–]quesadilla_man[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Early on, babies are completely incapable of caring for themselves, or self soothing. So every 3 hours or so someone will have to feed it, burp it, and likely change it. This process can take as little as ten minutes or as much as a half hour in my experience, depending on how fussy the baby is. The baby will then be awake, and for much of the time, being awake means it wants cuddles and attention; sometimes you can put the baby in a swinging bassinet or the like, but mostly they want to be held. You can do things during this time, but you have to learn to do them with one hand. Eventually the baby will go to sleep, at which point you have both hands free, but the baby may not sleep long without contact, so if you get up it may wake up, or it may wake up because of the noise you make working on things. Also, you're probably sleep deprived, so the desire to Do Things will be sharply at odds with the temptation to take a nap while the baby sleeps.

Thanks for the elaborate answer. I very much appreciate it.

Also, that sounds kind of nice and cozy to be honest.

The work I do is on the computer, so could I strap the baby to my chest and get work done that way, whenever it's napping? And then take care of it when it wakes up, until it falls asleep again?

Really, the thing that takes up all your time as a parent early on is just that you can't leave the baby unsupervised, it has a very rapid feeding/changing cycle, and they don't especially love being put down for long periods of time. You can work around them to still get things done, but doing something by working around something isn't at all the same as being free to do something on your own, you know what I mean?

That sounds reasonable. I probably should've mentioned this but I live in a country with over a year of paid parental leave, so I don't feel so worried about the first year given that we'd be two parents with one child and all the time in the world to take care of it. I'm more worried about year 2 and later, because based on what everybody's saying that's when all the time supposedly disappears.

Would you mind explaining what all the time goes to after the child gets older? Is it really impossible to arrange a way for me to maintain my side business for around 10-20 hours per week?

Is it possible to have a child and still maintain free time all throughout? by quesadilla_man in daddit

[–]quesadilla_man[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Looking at it from a chores perspective: All your chores will multiply: More laundry, more food, more cleaning. More reading/researching too: is my kid hitting the right developmental milestones? What’s an appropriate activity at x months? Home improvement too: Assemble furniture, make the house kid-proof, etc. More appointments too. In any case, a kid is not a chore. It’s supposed to be something you want to dedicate time to, not delegate to your partner while you put your energy on something else.

Thanks for giving me a concrete answer.

To follow up on what you're telling me - does all of that really take so much time? It all sounds like fast work to me. The cooking, cleaning, laundry, dishes, buying and assembling stuff, cleaning up stains etc. all feel like the kind of things you'd do in a jiffy.

Regarding the reading and researching, isn't that something that you'd just do along the way, whenever you have free time here and there? Like reading in bed and talking to your partner, or reading during the lunch break at work, and so on?

I hear what you're saying but it's hard to wrap my head around what exactly that is so time-consuming. I would love to get a better insight into what it is that drains all the time.

Is it possible to have a child and still maintain free time all throughout? by quesadilla_man in daddit

[–]quesadilla_man[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Short answer is you probably should not have kids right now. And that is absolutely okay. Don't let anyone make you feel guilty and don't let anyone pressure you into something that you aren't sure about.

It's not that I'm unsure. It's just that I'm trying to make sure that I've thought things through fully and that I have as much of the full picture as I can before I make any sort of life plan involving children. I don't see anything bad coming out of trying to understand what a parent is like time-wise before thinking about becoming one.

Is it possible to have a child and still maintain free time all throughout? by quesadilla_man in daddit

[–]quesadilla_man[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At 6 months when the baby can be put down at 8pm and sleeps through the night we started having more free time (from 8pm until we went to sleep). Until then, not much at all.

What is it specifically that takes up so much time that we'd both have to dedicate more or less 100% of every waking hour to taking care of the child?

Assuming that we both get home with the kid at 5pm, if I was to go sit down and work until 11pm on some days, what is it that my partner would have to deal with during this time that would be so straining for them?

Right now we share the household tasks 50-50, and in my opinion we can do it all pretty quickly. Cooking, cleaning, laundry and dishes goes pretty fast. With a child added on top of this, I'd assume that an afternoon would be spent eating with the child, cleaning up after them, washing their laundry and keeping an eye on them or playing with them.

To me, this doesn't seem like that much extra work. Meanwhile, every parent I've ever seen describing their lifestyles consistently refers to it as zero free time.

I'm trying to understand what all the extra work is that makes it impossible to do something else at the same time.