My wife has been pretty accommodating for any nerdery I want to engage in for taking care of the kids. The only project she really put her foot down on (and probably correctly so) was about building a crib myself. She figured there were a lot of safety standards about materials, size, bar spacing, etc. that were best left to the professionals.
I don't know your woodworking experience, but I don't think building a crib is dangerous at all. The safety standards are pretty straightforward and they are very clearly spelled out. And for me at least, no mass manufactured piece of furniture is even close to a minimum quality that I'd build myself.
On the other hand, a crib is a particularly annoying piece of furniture to build. First, it has to be able to break down, so that is an engineering challenge if you don't have experience with that. Second, it is a particularly monotonous thing to build, especially if you go with spindles all the way around. Cutting, sanding, assembling and finishing ~50-60 spindles is a lot of very boring work. So you may have dodged a bullet on that one.
Where my partner usually steps in is not safety, but time.
It is great if you're able to build some things yourself. But the kid and in particular your partner need your hands on deck, not on the workbench for days on, just to end up with an unfinished crib.
And there are so many other, more important things to do that cannot be outsourced that easily.
And once the first kid is in the house, expect interruptions. Oh, kid has a "mild reaction" to a certain vaccination? Forget sleep, forget "stuff that needs to be done", survive while keeping the basics in order.
And with more than one kid expect to be on call for every minute you are home. Nothing can go by uninterrupted if you have small kid and a toddler and only four hands.
I envy everyone that has a different experience. Grandparents/relatives help a lot. COVID-19 does not.
Projects suddenly need to be small or non-critical.
I put off building the crib until my son was 4 months old expecting to be able to finish it in 2-3 weeks. It took over 8 weeks and by the time it was done it was at least 1-2 weeks overdue. And a lot of the work was done between 10pm - 2am when everybody was asleep, which took away from my sleep!
I'm still glad I built it (now that it's done!), but yes, outsourcing it certainly would have been the correct choice.
One fun exception I had was building a climbing frame in our garden, with a swing and slide. Took literally days, had to reorder parts, go shopping for tools.
But, it was just before lockdown, and even playgrounds were closed where we live, so in the long run it was a life-saver.
It helped that I did it when the granny came to visit...
I generally agree, but only because there’s no time for a big project like that with an infant around
But not everyone uses a crib right away — we do a combination of bassinet and co-sleeping with our ~4mo. Probably time to still build that crib if woodworking is your down time
Edit: though my wife would never have gone for an idea like that, she got the nesting bug pretty hard
I use the just-in-time method of building things. I was spending the time before he was born building the changing tables and dressers for all his clothing.
My wife built a beautiful wooden crib (despite no previous experience with finer carpentry, mortise and tenon joinery, etc.) and it's worked out wonderfully. I think she based it off of this: https://mattcremona.com/uncategorized/walnut-and-maple-crib
