I'm a father of a (as of yesterday) one-year-old.
It's good that you have that support network. We moved to the other side of the world to be close to my wife's family. But it's only been the past few months or so when our daughter as been comfortable with anyone besides her mother. My wife even has to use the bathroom with the door open. I don't think this is particularly unusual, but if you let your relatives spend a lot of time with the baby, your baby will be more comfortable with them sooner, and they can help more. Though if you are like we were, it's hard to let people intrude into the new little family you just worked so hard to make.
And the schedule. Work out your schedule. It's too easy to say "Oh, I'll do dishes right now, I can write some tomorrow!" day after day after....
This is a good point. I struggle with deciding what I'm supposed to sacrifice for writing time. Time with my wife? Time with the baby? Time helping with the housework? Time working? (most tempting choice, but least likely) But I think sometimes you have put writing on the same level as those things, and not do something necessary so that you can get out a page or two. However, you should probably just give yourself a pass while you have an infant, otherwise you'll just stress yourself out with how little you're writing.
What we do:
While my wife puts the baby to bed at around 8:00, I do the dishes and toss all the toys in the toy baskets. When the baby's asleep, my wife has about two hours before she goes to bed that she spends blogging. Of course, I spend that time
drinking beer and watching TV writing.
Weekends are tough because,after a week of work, I'm primed to stay home and
drink beer and watch TV write. But Wife has been cooped up all week and she wants to go out. So we go out. But on the days when we do stay home, I've offered to watch the baby for a few hours, and let her go do her thing. Because she is a nice person, she has reciprocated, so we take breaks. It's funny how we used to spend all day lying in bed watching Battlestar Galactica, and now just thirty minutes alone at Starbucks is heaven.
When our kid was about 9 months I found that, while she wouldn't tolerate being in the house with just me, I could plop her in the stroller and wheel her around for hours. I brought along babysnacks, and she napped when she felt like it. She didn't smile, but she didn't cry, either.
The baby can play by herself, and we've babesafed the living room, so we don't have to be staring at her every second. This used to give us time with the computer (laptops in the living room), but recently, our daughter, no doubt due to her unusually high intelligence, has taken an interest in computers, so we can't open one in her presence or she will whine and cry until we give her a chance to break it.
I just remind myself that J.K. Rowling was a
single mother when she wrote Harry Potter.