My husband has a common cold and I have

Yes — a sick-but-mobile husband can safely be the one alone with your five-month-old tomorrow. What makes it safe is not that the cold goes away; it is a low-exposure routine, a named backup who can take over within minutes, and a written red-flag list he can act on without you.

Where you are now: canceling everything, or pretending he is well, both leave him unprotected. The third option is what follows.

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1. Tonight, in about 20 minutes — better than either of the things you tried

A. The 5-minute handover card (one photo on his phone, screenshot-friendly)

• Feed times today and how many wet nappies are normal.
• Where the nappies, wipes, cot, burp cloths and thermometer are.
• The backup person's name and phone, in the top corner.
• The red-flag list from section 3, screenshotted under it.

B. The exposure routine (the whole point)

• Mask on for every close-care moment: lifts, feeds, burping, nappy changes. Off to drink, eat and sleep.
• Hands washed with soap after every sneeze, cough or nose-blow, and before touching the baby, the bottles, the teats or the food.
• Coughs and sneezes into the crook of the elbow or a tissue straight into a bin — no wiping on hands, no "just this once".
• No kissing on the face or the hands. Kisses go to the feet or through the mask.
• His cup, plate and spoon stay his. He does not eat from the baby's bowl or drink from her bottle.
• Fresh air in the baby's room and the room he naps in; no smoking, vaping or wood-fire smoke near her.

C. Kitchen and food already at home

• Bottles, teats and feeding equipment washed as you normally do — the routine doesn't change because he's sick, it just gets done with washed hands.
• His own meals simple and made by him: rice, eggs, soup, fruit, whatever's already in the cupboard. He's the caregiver and the patient at once, so dinner is not a project.
• One drink bottle with a lid filled and within his reach, so he isn't running to the kitchen holding her.

D. Back up the plan, not just the plan

• Ask one healthy adult — the grandparent or the sibling nearby — for a phone window tomorrow: "if I call, can you be here in twenty minutes?" Agree the window out loud before you go. That is the whole commitment you need from them.

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2. Avoid list — tonight and tomorrow

• No cough or cold medicine for the baby. These are not recommended for young children and do not help a baby her age.
• No honey for the baby, at any amount, at any age under one.
• No leftover antibiotics — yours, his, the neighbours'. No second fever medicine "to alternate". No online prescription medicines, no mystery powders, no herbal syrup someone dropped off.
• No dose calculated by you for the baby or for him. If either needs a medicine, it follows the prescriber or the label on the bottle in their hand, or a pharmacist's call.
• His own medicines stay exactly as prescribed — nothing doubled for the cold, nothing stopped, nothing added.
• No using his adult medicine on the baby, in any form, including "just a tiny bit" of cough syrup.
• No kissing, cuddling on the chest, or holding her against his bare chest while he's coughing. Cuddling is fine with the mask on and hands washed.
• No visitors with a cold, no day-care drop-in, no smoke around the baby.
• Don't have him head out "just for an hour" while holding her — that's the moment to call the backup adult instead.

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3. Red flags — when to stop the home plan and get help

The baby — call your local emergency number now:

• Working hard to breathe, ribs or collarbone sucking in between breaths, grunting, or breathing very fast.
• Lips or fingertips going blue or grey, or a pause in her breathing.
• She stops feeding or cannot finish feeds — the most important one at five months.
• Floppy, unusually sleepy, hard to wake, or irritable in a way you cannot settle.
• A rash that does not fade when you press a clear glass against it.
• Green or bile-coloured vomit.

The baby — same-day clinician, not tomorrow:

• Any fever, or her body feeling hot or unusually cold. At her age take the temperature seriously and don't wait to see if it climbs.
• A runny nose or cough in a young baby is never, on its own, "just a cold".
• Coughing fits that end in a gasp or a blue spell, or a cough that makes feeding hard.
• Wet nappies dropping well below her normal count.

Him — call your local emergency number now:

• Chest pain or pressure, or breathlessness at rest.
• Confusion, drowsiness, or being hard to wake.
• A bad headache with a stiff neck.
• A rash that doesn't fade under a glass, or a temperature over 40 °C or under 35 °C.
• Coughing up more than a streak of blood.

None of these are things you manage at home. Call, then keep her warm, keep her airway open, stay with her, and follow what the dispatcher says.

The boundary: I'm not a clinician and nothing here diagnoses either of you. Anything on these lists is a clinician's call — a same-day appointment for her, or an emergency number for him. What this page can do is get you both through tomorrow safely, and know the exact second to stop managing it at home.

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4. What "good" looks like in the next 24 hours

Not "nobody catches anything" — no routine can promise that. Success is:

• He is still her primary carer tomorrow, and your plans happened.
• Her feeds and nappy count look like her normal days.
• She feeds comfortably, settles between feeds, and wakes bright.
• He has the handover card in his pocket, the backup adult's number, and knows the three baby flags by heart.
• He's eaten and drunk something today, and isn't the one running on empty.

If any of the first three slips, that isn't a failure of the plan — it's the plan working, because it tells you when to bring the backup person in early.

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Not covered here: whether his cold needs a medicine, whether she needs any medicine, or which clinic you should use — those are for your prescriber or pharmacist, not for a chat.

One thing I'd like to know: can your backup adult actually be at the house within about twenty minutes tomorrow, or is it phone-only? That one answer changes whether the morning plan is "he does it alone" or "you're on the sofa from 9 until lunch", and it's the only thing I need to firm up the decision tree.