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No advice because we haven't crossed this bridge yet, but we do plan to have DH take a turn as primary caregiver. After I return to work he will spend a month at home with LO before she begins daycare. DH is completely competent at caring for her and takes primary care of her for short chunks all the time so I'm not worried about it. In your situation, I'd be much more worried about the fact that you and your DH will never get to spend any time together. Maintaining a strong and healthy marriage is the most important part of parenting IMO. Daycare is indeed expensive but it can't be worth it to never see your spouse.

Friends of ours did this. The mom was able to take 6 months off then went back to work, then dad stayed home with baby. I know it was a little tought te first week but then dad and baby ended up doing great together. I think if your partner is really wants to stay home then hopfully he will be focused on making it work. Has he never been with your LO alone for more then a few hours? I think the hardest thing about your situation will be not having time much with your SO.

Is part time child care an option? Staying home with the kids plus working late....when will he sleep? It sounds unsustainable

While it's not something I would ever want for my marriage; my parents did this for the first two years of my life and my Dad still says to this say that he cherishes those memories and he's so grateful for that time. My mom worked 7-3, my dad worked 4-12.

I'll be honest, their marriage wasn't awesome until my brother and I turned about 10, but there were MANY other issues, it wasn't the lack of seeing each other, that's for sure.

We did something like that. My husband took a three month leave to look after DS when he was five months old. It was awesome. He taught DS to sit and stand, they had a really good time, and DH finally realized how hard it is to take care of a baby every day and appreciated what I'd been doing a lot more.

Throwing a job into the mix is harder of course, and the part about barely seeing each other... so you might want to reassess after a few months, and maybe find at least part time child care so you both don't burn out.

Like PPs, I don't think the issue is can a dad be the primary caregiver because I absolutely think my husband would be awesome at it, but with the shift schedule and you two being ships in the night, you'd all get burnt out. I wouldn't be worried about just him, by guess what, you're also the only caregiver while he's at work and then you go to your job. No family time, no couple time, no tag teaming when the other person needs help. Just doesn't seem sustainable or realistic.

Is it that he doesn't want to pay, he's fearful of someone else watching LO (my friend's husband was a huge worrywart and they did shifts until they had 2 and realized it wouldn't work anymore) or something else?

I went back to work after 8 weeks and DH stayed at home for a month and then he stayed at home when LO was 4 months old through 10 months. DH took night classes so I'd come home from work and he'd need to run out the door. It was hard but it worked. He is so great with LO. They would go to the farmers marker and on walks a lot as well as play all sorts of games at home. DH is a champion with the bottles, feedings, changings, etc. As LO got more mobile and DH had more classwork to do, less at home got down during the day (less cleaning of things other than LO and bottles) but I would try to do that when he was at class at night.

@magnolia: we did/do this! and it's kind of great. sure, there are times when it's tough, but for the most part of our son's babyhood he was with either mom or dad.
I went back to work at 7 weeks. My husband can work from home or bring J with for casual meetings and when he had to drop off paperwork. We did this until J was just over a year old.
When J turned 1.5 DH started working outside of the house. He has a job where he works (roughly) from 2pm to 7pm. I work from 8-4:30. We started J in a home daycare for those overlap hours. Now he's in afternoon preschool. (He's almost 4 now).
While the weekdays could be a little draining - dinner was tough, I mostly made dinner for me and J and DH either ate something on the way home or leftovers, chores were a challenge, "me" time was a myth - I am grateful that our son gets to have all those hours with daddy. Lots of dads don't get that time and I really consider it a blessing that he gets to have that one on one time with him. We also really cherish the time we have as a family since we don't have that many days during the week that the three of us are together. We make sure to plan fun things for weekends.

Feel free to wall me

Maybe you could do a compromise and do part time daycare so that you two could have time together? I feel like this would be a disaster for my marriage. And at some point, your DH will need to get over his fear of other people watching your LO.

But I understand where you're coming from - if I don't agree with my husband's ideas he often pulls the "you don't support me" card. If I was in your shoes I'd tell DH that I think he's going to be awesome with DS, but that we need more time as a family.

I went back to work at 11 months, and my husband was laid off a month later. Our daughter stayed home with him full-time for three months until he got a new job and it was actually waaaaay better than I thought it would be! It was a learning curve at first, but once he got it sorted out they both loved it. He is actually really grateful for the time he had bonding with her.

@Mrs.KMM: I totally agree!

I don't think the problem is going to be that he can't be as capable as you at being a SAHD vs. you being a SAHM, but you also weren't working on top of being a SAHM. That's going to be the tough part, and I feel as if he'll definitely burn out quickly.

Maybe he could start out doing this for a little while, but once LO is a year, you could start day care 2 days/week when he's busiest to give him a break. We started our LO on this schedule with grandparents helping out the other 3 days/week to socialize our LO and it's worked our really well. He went from 2-3 days when he turned 2 and will be going from 3-4 days now that he'll be 3.

My husband is planning to be home, alone with the baby for 3 months after I go back to work and I think it will be great for him. One of our good friends did this and he became so much more confident caring for their daughter which has carried through for years afterward.

I think men are just as capable at caring for children as women (besides the whole breastfeeding thing). You just have to trust him. And while it can be hard to give up control, ultimately he'll figure things out, even if they aren't exactly how you'd do them.

However, I do agree with PP that i'd be concerned about burn-out for both of you. You can certainly give it a go, but it's good to watch and see if things are actually working or if you're both so stressed out that it's not worth it. But you can always give it a couple months and, if it's too hard, try part-time daycare to give you both a break.

I didn't read through all the posts but just wanted to post our "middle-ground". We considered doing what you're planning, our schedules are very flexible and we could have made it work but in the end, but we decided to take a middle ground. DH works from home Monday and takes care of J, I work for home Friday and take care of J. DH leaves for work around 10am and gets home hopefully by 7:30pm, I leave for work around 7:30am and am home at 5:30pm. We have a sitter come for Tue, Wed, and Thur for 8 hours. This means we each have time alone with J and he is only with someone else 24 hours/week and we also get to have our careers, which we both enjoy, not be completely side-tracked. Plus, we have the weekends with both of us and J, and he loves when both of us are with him. We are on our fourth week of this schedule and it is working out pretty well so far. Finding a sitter is a giant PITA but I would think it would be worth it to pay someone for 1-3 days a week in order to have some true family time built in.

ETA: Have you thought about when you'd getting cooking, cleaning, bills, etc done each week? I've taken to basically doing all our cooking on weekends and freezing a lot and we are just barely keeping up with the cleaning to the point that I think we're going to get cleaners to help. It's really hard to cook and clean when you're taking care of a baby and exhausted from working full time

The SAHD part wouldn't concern me. I think it is awesome when dads want to spend that much 1 on 1 time with littles and I know a few part time SAHDs (weird work schedules so they have a few weeks or months off here or there) and it is awesome for everyone. But the SAH + working full time thing seems crazy and unsustainable.

We're sort of doing this. I have a M-F 9-5 job and DH works 10 hour shifts on Saturdays and Sundays. We just started a few weeks ago, but so far so good - obviously it's tough to never have a day when we can all like, go to the zoo together, but we get to see each other in the evenings and I think we each enjoy our parenting time and our work time. DH has been talking about picking up some evening shifts, too, but I want him to wait a couple of months to see how this shakes out before adding anything else to his plate.