Paternity leave

I started paternity leave today. No baby yet, so now we have an unspecified countdown to the birth and a 4 week countdown til I'm back in the office.

Last time, with R, I started my leave on the due date and took 4 weeks off. My plan this time was to start on the day L went into labour, so I would get maximum time with the newborn. Turns out, that was impractical. Since the baby did not come over the bank holiday weekend, I went back to work on Tuesday. I won't say it was a mistake, but I did find between the monitoring and inducing and actually getting work done, I was spread too thin to be useful. So I tied up all the loose ends I couldn't resolve last week and said goodbye to everyone. And that was that. All that's left is to figure out how to turn off notifications on the various work apps on my phone.

Labour hasn't started yet. We've had 3 sessions of 20 minute monitoring in hospital (which, for some reason takes 4 or 5 hours end-to-end) and two sweeps. The waiting game we're going through now is how long can we go before we go for stronger intervention? And how long until we've can't do the planned home birth and have to do full-on labour ward?

On the other hand, this child seems much more interactive in the womb than R was. She would push and kick as usual, but this one seems to do things like responding to rubbing legs by moving feet. Perhaps we're just better able to recognise body parts through the uterus, but it does make it more like there's a real baby in there.