Test Case: Our Law Firm Hosted An Office Baby On ‘Bring Your Baby To Work’ Day

I’m at the age where my Facebook feed is full of pictures of babies and kids. People are creating new humans and keeping them alive, and I’m still taking power naps at 7:30 p.m. before a night out at the bar. I also work in downtown Seattle, where there appears to be an unwritten law against allowing children in public. And I live in a city where all the single-family homes are being torn down to build “micro-housing” for bachelor Amazon dudes. People with families move to the suburbs, where they work on crafting their excuses to ditch happy hour early. I literally can go a week or more without seeing a kid in person.

That said, while I don’t want children myself, I think it is very important to foster a work environment in which women can both have jobs and raise a family. Every day it seems like another female lawyer has a baby and has to compromise on her career to protect her family’s quality of life.

Accordingly, last week as a firm owner I approved a “Bring Your Baby to Work Day.” The problem is that our firm has only one baby. More accurately, one of our prized staff members, Whitney, has a four-month-old boy named Carter. However, she assured me that Carter was capable of creating the office-space disruption of several babies.

My goal in the experiment was to investigate our ability as a firm to remain productive with an in-house office baby. Perhaps it would be possible to simply baby-proof our office and have a baby crawling around all day once Carter achieves independent mobility. We have a spare office that he could use, and we could all watch him grow up to be a good little litigator and meet his billable hour requirements.

A secondary goal was for me to spend more time around a baby so they didn’t seem so mysterious. I changed a lot of diapers when my little brother was a rug rat, but now he is a college senior who towers over me. It has been literally two decades since I spent a lot of time with a baby. Now when I am around them I mostly pat their squishy heads and hope they don’t start crying.

Whitney decided before the big day that it would be better for Carter to come for a half day, since she didn’t want him to be too much of a bother. This already highlighted to me that we work in an environment that could be more child-friendly. Also, I wanted to use Carter’s presence as an excuse to blow off work for the whole day.

Whitney showed up Friday morning with enough baby gear to outfit a day care. Carter arrived in a fancy stroller that looked street legal. He was sleeping until I made a bunch of noise when I heard he was at the office. Once he was awake, I wanted to try holding him. It was decidedly not just like riding a bike: Whitney had to shift him into place on my arm to prevent his head from rolling off his body. He took it like a trooper, and also avoided oozing spit-up onto my office couch.

Eventually it was determined that, as the architect of “Bring Your Baby to Work Day,” I should entertain Carter in my office for a while. Whitney put him in a vibrating chair decorated with zoo animals—no, they don’t make it in adult sizes, I checked—and he played with a plastic elephant while I drafted an email to an opposing attorney about parking allocation in a condominium development. Carter was actually not that distracting, other than by virtue of his cuteness. Our office building is surrounded by construction, and his baby babbling was far less disruptive than the sound of jackhammers and cranes I typically hear from outside.

Later, that same attorney called me to discuss a covenant amendment. That was about when Carter started crying because his bottle wasn’t fresh enough, sort of like how my old cat Orca would never eat food that didn’t come fresh out of the bag. The guy didn’t seem to notice the background cacophony—another point in favor of having an office baby.

Eventually the other women in the office got jealous and stole Carter away. When I finished a project I went to find him, and he was sleeping on Whitney’s desk on a big pillow. He’s apparently so used to having his noisy older brothers around that he didn’t notice my law partner Stephan in the next office over, who is known for his loud phone talking and his confusion about why a baby was in the office.

When Whitney’s sister came to pick up Carter, I helped Whitney take all of the things needed to transport and amuse a baby for a half-day down to the parking garage. It was a two-woman job. All of our stuff barely fit in the elevator, and people were predictably perplexed to see a baby in a high-rise downtown office building. We might as well have been parading around a purple unicorn.

The Verdict: Not surprisingly, having a baby at the office was a definite distraction, but mostly because we just wanted to play with the baby. Whitney said she basically had time to send out an email and finish up an online invitation to our firm’s upcoming open house event. I also had trouble getting stuff done while Carter was in my office, but mostly because I wanted to keep checking on him to make sure he was still alive while on my watch.

We were lucky to have a very chill and happy office baby. There was one crying episode during the entire visit, and it was easily solved with food (babies are more like adults than you would think). But Carter’s visit still confirmed that parents are champions for balancing childcare and their jobs. It’s hard to get anything done with a miniature person vibrating in a chair next to you.

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Allison Peryea is a shareholder attorney at Leahy Fjelstad Peryea, a boutique law firm in downtown Seattle that primarily serves community association clients. Her practice focuses on covenant enforcement and dispute resolution. She is a longtime humor writer with a background in journalism and cat ownership. You can reach her by email at [email protected].