On childcare

Are these the happiest boys you've ever seen? Am I the luckiest mommy in the world to get to have two days of a normal person's work week to play with these guys, and three other days to do my work and feel productive and fruitful at the same time? I am very pleased with my arrangement, and very grateful that it has worked out the way it has, but this week has been one of transitions and as such I have done some thinking about childcare. I have three thoughts in particular.

• Sam and I have secured our own care for Tuesdays, deciding finding someone capable of taking two kids was way more work than just going our separate ways for those days, and continuing the swap on the others. So on Monday, she asked me if her new Tuesday nanny could tag along with me and the boys, since she hadn't spent any time with Ki yet and there was no time to introduce them more gradually, since the old nanny quit on such short notice. I said why not, I always welcome an extra set of hands. Sam decided that our old tactic of the young privileged white girl nanny didn't work out so well, so this time around she went with Adriana, from what she considered to be a more reliable demographic, the older not-privileged Hispanic matron nanny. We had fun communicating in Spanglish all day. We took the boys to the park and played in the sandpit for a while, with a bunch of other toddlers and their Hispanic nannies.  Another nanny started asking Adriana in Spanish about Jack and Ki, how old they were, were they brothers, etc, and I listened in, realizing it was kind of like eavesdropping but doing it anyway. Meanwhile, Jack decided the sand was fun to scoop up and throw into the air so that it showered back down on him, and the more I kept trying to shield his eyes and brush it out of his hair, the more he delighted in doing it. Adriana noticed this and commented, "Está bañándose en la arena"-- that he was bathing himself in the sand-- and I laughed, "I know, right?" And the other nanny she'd been talking to caught her breath and asked Adriana, almost horrified, "Entiende español?"-- she understands spanish?? (Not she speaks spanish, but she understands spanish, which I guess is fair enough, because technically I wasn't speaking it.) I felt like I was crashing their party. It was kind of awkward and oddly empowering at the same time. I wondered where all the stay at home moms were. Do they go to a different park? Do they not go to the park? Are there no stay at home moms around here?


• Another day, another park, another bunch of immigrant nannies and little white children running around. These ladies were a rowdy Chinese bunch, and someone was telling a story that was clearly hilarious but I had no idea what was going on, since I couldn't crash their language barrier this time. What was distressing to me was that there was a little girl in a stroller, facing away from the group, howling, as the women carried on in their merriment. Her crying was not a "I am a high-maintenance ornery child who is in time-out and needs to be left alone" kind of crying but more of a "I feel completely abandoned, why won't somebody pick me up?" kind of crying. I was pushing the boys on the swing, but could not stop looking over at the poor child, who continued wailing without stopping for five or ten more minutes, until whatever story was being told was over or had paused for intermission, and one of the older women, still laughing hysterically, and wiping the tears from her eyes, finally got up off her butt and picked the poor child up. I shuddered to realize that this is what somebody was paying probably $16 an hour for. Isn't it strange that we live in a world where we pass our most precious things in the world off to a mere stranger without even batting an eye? I'm not saying we should all stay home with our babies, but it seems really unfair that this is supposed to be the suitable alternative. Something is broken in our culture.


• And now we get to the part where I get to gush about how lucky I am. I have two people I really truly trust to look after my baby, not just that I trust but that I actually look forward to Jack getting to spend time with because I think they offer him things that I can't. Rebeccah had her first day with Jack this week and when I picked him up he was just elated from his exciting day. She has chickens and he had been out there watching them and pointing and grunting at them all afternoon. We need to get chickens. I sat down to talk about money with her that day, because we still hadn't ironed out the details, and I was concerned about how it was going to work because I know that finances and friends can lead to sticky situations. But when I tentatively trotted out what we had sort of budgeted for this, she told me, "Okay, here's the thing. I don't want you to pay me. I work better when it's not for money, and we always wind up donating whatever I earn anyway, so I want you to take whatever you were going to pay me and give it away to someone or something that needs it." !!!!!!!!!! Can I put a few more exclamation points in, just to underscore how much that blew me away? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I was speechless. Jack's one day a week with Rebeccah is now going to fund headstart programs or parks or our Church (which seems appropriate, since that's where we met Rebeccah). Our childcare is actually going to make the world a better place. How many people can say that? How is it that we have such amazing people in our lives? Sometimes I think we are just charmed.

So that's what I have to say about childcare. The good, the bad, and the mildly amusing.