Meteorologist New Mom Melts Hearts With Baby's Live On-Air Help

This new mom and her mini-meteorologist sidekick are warming hearts while delivering a frigid forecast

Being a working mom isn’t for the faint of heart. But being a new working mom fresh off of maternity leave — with bad news to break? You have our thoughts and prayers. But luckily, meteorologist and new mom Rebecca Schuld didn’t need it and cleverly used being the mom of a precious 13-week-old daughter to her advantage: by using her adorable little one to soften the blow as she shared a particularly miserable weather forecast.

Schuld, who reports for CBS Milwaukee affiliate WDJT, brought Fiona on air last week to warm hearts while delivering the chilling news of an upcoming winter storm. Throughout her snowy forecast, Schuld cradled her baby girl — who didn’t make a peep. And along with apologizing for her the mini-meteorologist’s bed head, Schuld noted, “She’s prepared. She’s got one of her good thick blankies here for that cold weather that’s coming up tonight.”

Since Fiona was ready for the cold and seemed unbothered by the impending storm, she was the perfect assistant forecaster for viewers. “I thought she could help me with tonight’s first weather that’s going to be plenty unpleasant, right?” Schuld added.

But Fiona’s adorable cameo wasn’t actually planned. Schuld, who recently returned to work from maternity leave, told Inside Edition that despite the on-air appearance, she’s working from home in her basement. Just minutes before her next weather broadcast, Fiona woke up — which left her in the familiar multitasking, working mom mode.

“I go over to my greenwall. I’m holding her and our producer is like, ‘Oh, your baby, is she gonna make an appearance?’” she told Yahoo Life. “I was very confident she was going to behave because she just took a long nap so I knew she’d be happy. I said, ‘sure!’”

And this gamble paid off. Schuld and Fiona quickly went viral online but not because of an epic meltdown interruption or on-air diaper blowout. Fiona, was completely come and unfazed throughout the entire thing, just as Schuld predicted. It was the realness and cuteness that made this weather duo’s forecast take off.

Schuld later tweeted that she and Fiona were “shining a light on what real life actually looks like, trying to do it all & how Covid has changed the way we conduct work.” Which is a message on pandemic parenting that so many viewers can relate to.

However, that doesn’t mean that in the moment, Schuld didn’t also feel that familiar split of both mom and work guilt. “We’re supposed to put on this certain face,” she explained about her job as a public person. “For a split second, I felt guilty about it and I don’t know why. When I sat and thought about it, it’s like, why am I guilty?”

But Schuld quickly remembered that juggling baby duty and work from home responsibilities is simply real life and our new normal. “This is what everyone else is also doing. They work, their kids are sick, or their kids are crying in the background,” she said. “It’s always a challenge when you have kids in the mix, but that’s what so many of us are doing everyday. So why are we hiding them?”

So instead of putting Fiona down and seamlessly switching back to work mode while suppressing the guilt, Schuld showed her reality to help raise awareness for other working moms. “It was this weird moment where I’m like, wait, why am I guilty? No, this is awesome,” she added. “I am still getting my work done. And, yes, do I have to put a pause on it if there’s something going on with the baby? Sure. But that’s life, right?”

Schuld doesn’t take for granted the flexibility she’s been granted to work from home with her baby and hopes the conversation that her clip with Fiona sparked helps to normalize the concept so it’s offered to more mothers. “This is an absolute privilege,”she said. “If you have kids, you know how hard it is to be away from them. So to get done with maternity leave, and because of COVID, them wanting to keep some of us home, it gave me an opportunity to ease back into work life.”