Achieving work-life-baby balance
Ye Cong's bundle of joy marked his arrival in the midst of the WFH period, making it more challenging to adapt to new routines. In spite of the pandemic, he eventually managed to achieve work-life-baby balance.
As a software engineer, working from home has never been a problem for me. I sit in front of a computer, coding – it doesn’t matter if the computer is in the office or at home. This was before Mark arrived.
Mark is my first child who was born right in the middle of the circle breaker (CB) – on 22nd June 2020. Due to CB, it was hard to find a helper and to apply for visas for our parents. With no avenue for extra help, my wife and I had to take care of Mark ourselves. Like the experience of all first-time parents, the first four months was chaotic.
Mark napped for about 1 hour every 2 hours in the day and in the night, he would sleep from 7pm to 7am the next day. When Mark was awake, my wife and I took care of him together. Needless to say, my work routine had to be adjusted to follow Mark’s sleeping pattern. In the daytime, I tried to arrange meetings when Mark was napping and worked on small tasks in those fragmented time slots. Tasks that require uninterrupted efforts like coding or writing could only begin at 7pm up till 11pm.
The most difficult time was when he was between 4 and 6 months. Mark was growing quickly and his daily patterns was changing as rapidly. After 4 months, he only had two naps in the day lasting about one and a half hour. With more time spent on taking care of the baby in the daytime, this inevitably led to longer working hours in the night. Work began between 7pm and 1am after Mark slept.
As my wife wanted to go back to full-time work, we decided to send Mark to an infant care centre after 6 months. Since then, I now have a nearly normal daily routine. In the morning, I start with a morning run with Mark in his stroller to his infant care centre, and run back to start my day. In the afternoon, I pick Mark up from the infant care centre at 5pm, play with him and feed him. After that, Mark takes a shower and goes to bed at about 7pm. Scheduling could get tricky when both my wife and I need to attend meetings at the same time. Either one of us will then need to reschedule our meeting so that someone could take care of Mark.
This is about as normal as it can get, for now.
Beside the normal routine, Mark may create some “incidents” to my daily routine too. I have a gaming keyboard with colourful lights, which Mark really likes. At times, he may sneak into the study during working hours and demand to play with my keyboard. I have to switch my keyboard to protect my work while Mark enjoys playing with his “toy”.
It was a tough journey, but I am glad we made it. Mark is a happy and healthy baby and the journey continues...
Cong Ye is a computer graphics software engineer in Cooling Singapore, with a range of experience across academia and industry. He is interested in computer graphics technology in rendering, animation and game engine architecture, particularly the intersection between research and industry to solve real-world problems.