Tenable

It's been nearly 8 weeks since my two Untenable posts (Part 1, Part Bacon) and things are so much better- good, even, and occasionally quite great during the week.

The biggest source of change has been the hiring of our new very part-time nanny, Natalie. I will admit outright that I struggled with the idea of having to pay yet another person to take care of my kids because we couldn't. It wasn't a problem with bringing someone new (the right someone new) into our lives. I've said many times before and still truly believe, that the relationships our kids have had with their non-parent caregivers have been a very positive thing for them, and I think the consistency and general structure of daycare has reaped benefits for all of us. No, it was the idea that we work so much that 45 hours a week of outside-the-home care wasn't enough coverage. Hiring someone else was a public admission of that and that was hard.

But it has been WONDERFUL. Here's what finally made me do it: crying on the side of the road, as described in Part Bacon, and having 4 cross-country trips scheduled for the month of August with a husband who works nearly an hour away from home and daycare. And here's what made me okay with it: it doesn't mean we spend less time with our kids, in fact, we spend more, and it makes us both more comfortable with the hours we spend apart. Natalie picks up the kids early, at 4:00, and JP and I still get home around the same time (but we get to leave about 30 mins later because we don't lose the time going to/from daycare). What really matters to us- our time with the kids, our family dinners, our group reading before bed- that has not changed. What has changed is that I can drop the kids off at 7:30 a.m. on a day JP and I both have early calls and know they'll be home again in 8.5 hours rather than 11. I can walk in the door at 6:15 to find all the lights on, the dogs fed, the daycare food containers washed (my personal least favorite task), and dinner warming in the oven (Natalie doesn't cook for us, but I cook extra on the weekends and save the pre-made dishes for her days). Which means that by 6:20 I can be in casual clothes on the floor playing with the kids while dinner finishes up, instead of doing all the above, and that is a really wonderful thing. And there is no way JP could have single-parented it for those 4 weeks I was traveling without Natalie, particularly since traffic is so unpredictable between his workplace and our home.

I think Natalie was a fated addition to our village. I had emailed Landon and Claire's daycare teachers in late July describing our need for help 7-10 hours a week and asked if they had any leads on where we could find such a person. I got an email back from Claire's teacher within a few hours saying she had just the candidate! The lead teacher of the toddler room (who taught Landon) was going back to college full-time and was looking for a very part time job after class. She knew both kids, was obviously comfortable with the daycare pick-up system, and had been with the daycare for 4 years so I didn't really need to do background checks. We had her over to the house and hired her immediately. The arrangement was we'd have her pick up the kids 3 times a week at 4:00 and pay her to stay until 7:00, though we planned to be home closer to 6. I had a bullet point list of tasks I wanted her to do (there's only about 4, but I like both details and lists and I thought it was best to be clear), guidelines for the kids, list of acceptable snacks, contact info, etc. - a fully inclusive Lag Liv kid care packet. We purchased and installed her own set of car seats and gave her a key. Everything ran great for 4 weeks, and we even had her get Claire one day at 2:30 when she wasn't feeling well (paying her extra, of course), and let me tell you, in a town without on-call grandparents, that is a wonderful thing.

Sometime around the first week of September, after I'd gone a whole 7 days without flying somewhere, I started thinking 3 days a week was one too many, but I didn't want to take pay away from Natalie that we had promised and I really didn't want her to feel she needed to look for a different job. So I asked her how the balance of school and work was going and she mentioned school was taking up a bit more time than she anticipated. I asked if her 2 days a week would be better and she jumped on it, so now she's 2 days a week with the option of 3 days when we need it. That works better for us, financially and personally, and she comes every Monday and Wednesday. The addition of another $4,500/year in childcare costs on top of the $25,000/year we already pay daycare sucks, but those late afternoons when I know Natalie already has the kids at home are SO much better. I can finish what I'm working on instead of frantically shutting down my computer and jamming every paper on my desk into my laptop bag, and I can know the kids are at the park or playing outside or reading books on their own couch and it makes me happy. Not as happy as if I were doing those things with them at 4 p.m., but I'm not and I can't, so at least they get to do them. And I'm glad that we still have to do daycare pick-up 2-3 days a week. I enjoy the interaction with the kids' teachers and Landon loves showing us various masterpieces around the classroom. All-in-all it's been an amazing change. On average we only have Natalie in the house about 5 hours a week, but the effect is much greater than that.

So that's my positive update. It's still hard. I still miss being able to call JP in the middle of the day to get him to bring something up to daycare or pick up something from the store. He misses seeing the kids as much as he used to. Mornings can be a bit crazy and days when JP and I both have matching deadlines are rough. But we've adjusted. We do all shopping, cooking, and laundry on the weekends. When the kids nap on Sunday I turn the radio on in the kitchen and bake and clean up a storm. I chop, sort, and date all the fresh lunch components (deli meat, cheese, fruit, veggies) in small tupperware containers, so each night during the week I can just throw in one of everything in the lunch boxes. I've come to really enjoy those Sunday afternoons, with the music on and the post-nap kids and dogs all over the place at my feet. We've been going on walks every night as a family (dogs included), which is nice talking time, and we've pushed the kids bedtimes back to 7:45 to give us time to do it. JP and I still work almost every night at the kitchen table at 8:00. We rarely watch TV anymore and we need to cancel our Netflix account, but last night we cuddled on the couch and read together and it was good. Really good. The first definition of "tenable" is the ability to be maintained and I think that is where we are right now. It goes up and down, but for right now today, for our jobs and general situation and making the best of everything that we can, this is tenable.