Within moments of turning 3, her personality took a shift to the difficult. It's one of the reasons I've not posted here for ages. That and work sucking up every waking minute not spent with my daughter.
Anyway, to the topic at hand – she's not become malicious or evil or anything, it's just a number of things are now harder. Obstinate. That sums up much of it. She has enough mastery of language to explain what she wants but not enough to be able to be reasoned with.
The troublesome threes have begun.
Other inconveniences are her wilful regressions. She can go to the loo by herself. But, when we're around she doesn't want to. Same with dinner. She can focus and eat a whole meal by herself, but she won't with us. It's like she's learned a skill, mastered it, and found it to be easier to not do it if someone else will do it for you. The only way I can think of solving this is to buy a new house with a different toilet and dining room.
And then she started nursery.
We're doing 3 days a week, 8am-1pm. Getting her up and out for 8am was a scary shift. For all of us. I've managed to get myself to bed by 3am most days since we started this, so that's a plus. But her sleep still hasn't got on track. She's mostly dropped her nap, and often misses her new earlier bed time, which means sleep deprivation might be cause of some of her 3-related personality shifts (she can join the club of overtired mood swings – I founded this local chapter).
Nursery has done a lot of good for her. She's hanging out with other children her age on a regular basis, and loves it. When she leaves nursery at the end of the day, it sometimes turns into hugs-for-everyone time.
It's like she's just discovered that there's this thing called "other people" and you can do things with them. On friday, on the way home from the park she just walked up to a couple at a bus stop, introduced herself and told them she was three. Every time we've been to a park for the past month she picked at least one smaller child, befriended them, and took them all over the playground Come, come, come, let's play!.
She also eats far better at nursery. It's the combination of someone besides us feeding her, her getting stuff we never cook at home, and them having a dedicated member of staff whose job it is to make a variety of foods for a shedload of picky babies and toddlers.
On the other hand, the grammar of some of the staff at nursery is horrendous. While I can find it hard to complain about having east-end accents in a Hackney day care, I'd at least expect better conjugation of "to be". The only think that consoles me is that the girl used "yourself" correctly in conversation the other day, so all must not be lost.
One possible future. A future in which having a family doesn't mean giving up a career.
L and I recently met with a client. We have friends that work at the site, and a couple of them were willing to look after the girl while we did a demo session on our software. After we were done, we picked up the girl, had lunch and got on with the day.
This got me thinking, what if it were always like this?
Imagine childcare being ubiquitous and available on demand. You work from home and need to visit a client? Bring the child with and drop her off at the on-site day care. You need someone to look after your little ones while you're at work? Bring them in with you, leave them in day care and visit them during lunch and breaks. Spend your coffee break with your kid and your coworkers' kids in a little play and chat session.
Imagine if daycare spots weren't precious, closely-guarded resources only available to a select few at a great cost. But if they were cheap and plentiful enough you could just take advantage of it like a cloakroom. (Obviously not treating the children like coats, but the comfort you feel when you hand over a coat knowing full well it will be well looked after and safe and happy when you come back for it). Your child would be around when you were able to look after her and, when you need help, it's there for as short or long periods as you need. It's just there, easy and reliable.
I'm not going to even try to conceive of how this world could come about, let alone how the mechanics would work. It's just now I can picture what childcare in an enlightened world could look like.
We have a new au pair starting on Sunday. As you may recall, the last one just up and disappeared on us essentially saying it wasn't what she expected. A number of interviews later and, to cut a long story short, we've a 20 year old Italian lass coming to live with us on Sunday. Which is good, since we're kind of at the breaking point on being able to get work done.
It's been 3 weeks since the last au pair left. We started the search for someone new. Of the lot, three really stood out. The first was a charming male au pair from UK (a maux pair?). After a Skype interview we made an offer, but he turned us down – in the end, he needed more money than an au pair job could pay. The promise of free accommodation doesn't help if you already live with your parents.
Another potential looked good until the end of the call. Well, first off she'd not be able to stay the entire time we needed, but we could have lived with that id the rest was good. But then she ended the call with Oh, can I bring a friend?
She dodged all the questions of Who? and Can you give us a CV or some details of who this person is that you want to live rent free in our house and have access to all our stuff?
All the while she found it odd that we'd object, like we wouldn't find it at the limits of our space living with three adults in this flat, and having a fourth couldn't possibly make any difference.
There we other potentials, but the one we settled on was already in London doing a class. She'd be available for 6 weeks when the class ended, but she was happy to come over for lunch to meet us all. It went well. Much better than her Skype call (which wasn't the best connection anyway).
So this whole time since the last au pair left, the nursery – now the au pair's room – has sat empty and unused. Which is a bit of a pain since we're short on space as it is in our house. but it felt like giving up if we started putting stuff in it again. It will be nice to get it used again and not feel wasted. I'm still hoping that at some point we start to see some benefit of having an au pair, and it'll take some the burden off and let us get some work done.
In summary – less terrified than last time, but more cynical.
This story will be long, so please pack a bag lunch and make yourself comfortable. We'll make a pit stop part-way through in case you need the loo.
I don't talk about work much here, but it's relevant now, so bear with me. I left my job back in October. I got a bit of cash from the redundancy so the wife and I decided to throw caution to the wind and start our own business.
Now for the last four years I was working there I'd been at risk of redundancy something like 4 or 5 times. I lost count, it happened so often. Each time I considered if I were better off leaving or better off staying. Usually it was met with We're buying a flat, we kind of need the income, or We're planning on having a baby, the security of a job, even if I don't like it is a good thing.
It's hard trying to make major life changes when work is in turmoil. It all boils down to Can I afford to do this, and when the source of income is in doubt, everything else which seems clear becomes more dubious. And you end up holding on to maxims like I've a kid on the way, I can't leave, when you should be focussing on things like There's never a good time to have a chid, just get on with it. Jobs come and go and people find ways to get by. If you can't plan beyond the next big unknown you're not going to plan very far.
So… When the redundancy fairy visited me I came up with three options.
I'd just move on to another job somewhere else. With luck, I'd find something I'd like
L would get a job and I'd stay at home being a full-time father. I liked this idea a lot. It was really tempting.
Start a company with L and we'd both work from home, splitting the child care 50%.
We settled on the last one. Which clearly was the hardest of the lot. But, when else would we ever be able to do this? I felt I could not use the baby as an excuse. L and I had been talking for years about going into business together – our skills are nicely complementary and we both have Visions of how to make things Better. And when else would we get the opportunity? Between the redundancy pay and a small business grant I got, it was now or never.
And, besides, no other option would let us both have such an active role in the girl's early life. We'd both be there, even if one of us was locked in an office, the other would be around, and we'd switch the next day.
Since then we've been trying lots of approaches to work. First we tried shifts. In each shift, one of us would work while the other would look after the girl, and when she'd nap or be down for the night, we'd work together. I'd do 4 hours, then L'd do 4, then I'd do 4. Then next day we'd switch.
That didn't really work. If the girl had trouble getting to sleep, it'd bugger the whole schedule. Plus I personally found it was time to switch every time I'd get on a roll. I guess it's the way I work – start off with something simple to get me in the mood, then get to something really hard which requires hours of thought and effort. Which usually would begin around hour 3.
We tried a few other failed options till we settled on switching days. One of us would work 3 days in a workweek and other works 2. Weekends are up for grabs, depending on what we'd planned. Whoever was not working would look after the girl. Except for breastfeeds which all required L. And by this time the girl stopped being able to be settled by anything other than breastfeeding. Which meant that even if L was working she'd lose about 3 or more hours of productivity a day. So all the time we'd planned to be able to work together would just be spent me working instead of her.
Time when we could work together was really productive, but got really rare. We'd occasionally get a sitter in to look after the girl for half a day while we'd work. Which gets expensive after a while, especially since the grant would not cover it as a business expense. This was especially troublesome with client meetings. The girl was young enough at the first few to come along with us without getting in the way, but now she's far too active to sit still for that long without taking one of our full attention. Now, either one us stays at home with her (which is not ideal since L and I sell ourselves best when we can tag team), or we have to arrange childcare.
That carried on for a while until L got a hard deadline for her thesis corrections. After waiting for like a year for comments she finally got the details she needed to do the corrections. This came with a two month deadline. there's no way she could do that, raise a child and run a business. So we panicked and decided this was a problem we could throw money at, despite not having any income yet. We'd put the girl into childcare.
Daycare is impressively expensive. It'd be a huge chunk of money over just the two months we needed. L discovered that getting an au pair would be much cheaper and more convenient. L had been an au pair for a bit once upon a time, so she was more comfortable with the idea than I. Over the space of the next few days we searched for and found a decent match. So we'd committed ourselves to a couple of months of feeding and housing (and paying) a 24-year-old from Austria in exchange for her looking after our daughter.
What followed was a couple of weeks mad clearing out the nursery and turning it something fit for being a grown-up's bedroom. Plus there was the moving the girl and her cot into our room, and tidying the whole flat so we'd not embarrass ourselves.
The au pair arrived on Sunday. We met her at a train station and took her home. She's settled in pretty well so far. I was initially anxious… well… terrified, but it's working out ok. I feels a lot like having a house guest. Except one I never met before that I don't mind asking to look after my child. It's a situation I never expected to find myself in and I guess I'm just taking it in my usual whatever happens happens, get on with it manner.
Starting Wednesday the Tories are decimating the childcare voucher benefit. Today it is £243 per month a parent can get tax free. Come Wed it will be £124 a month. Anyone already part of a work childcare voucher scheme can get the £243 rate for as long as they have children under 16. Anyone with their first child born on 6 April 2011 or later will be stuck with the lower rate forever.
I'm not quite sure I would go as far as to call this grossly unfair, I would say that it's annoying as hell. Yet another benefit that disappears from under me while my forthcoming child gestates. I can imagine, years later saying While you were in the womb, the Tories deprived you of literally thousands of pounds of benefits, all the while raising the cost of education thousands of pounds. And all this occurred in between when you were conceived and when you were born. It seems like Tories only want people to get off to a good start if it's inherited.
The timing of all this is amazing. They could at least have a 9 month delay so that people who were intentionally breeding would at least get a chance to know what they were getting into. Anyone who actually bothered to sit down and do the maths and found that, yes, they can afford to have a child is now thoroughly screwed.
I've been slowly making my way through the reams of information they gave us at our first antenatal appointment. In six different places they describe what to expect on your first antenatal appointment. I was unable to find any of that online beforehand… there's some kind of irony in that somewhere. Not sure where, but the end result is that now we know what to expect from here on out — which is a good thing.
In a few of the booklets there are lists of everything which can go wrong with the pregnancy. I understand why it's there, but it is rather disconcerting. I find myself thinking, "well, what would I do?" to each of the various things that can go wrong. I also find myself getting paranoid about things that I can control. "Is there too much vitamin A in dinner? We had spinach last night, can I put a carrot in dinner tonight? Is there too much A in garden peas?. I even asked the midwife about it, and she told me not to worry as long as I don't cook liver, but somehow that hasn't set my mind at ease.
There's a thing called a Bounty Bag, which, as far as I can tell, is targeted advertising with information mostly cut-and-pasted from the NHS documents. Okay, I do it a disservice, since there is actually new material in there, but the majority of information is redundant. Which means in the 300 pages of documents, I probably only have to read like 50 pages of content — but I've no idea which 50 pages. Reading randomly seems to satisfy the engineer in me. I find things like Avoid sheep! which would have never occurred to me to do (mostly from the lack of live sheep in London), but I'm certainly going to do now.
Which most of the material seems reasonably professionally put together, I find much of it leaves out any mention of partners. One mothering magazine I read in the waiting room only mentioned men once in an article on postnatal nookie. I was hoping the article on going back to work, which claimed to give every possible option, would mention options for how to share the childcare load between two people. Not a mention — it was all about either staying at home, or working and getting full time childcare.
Most of the Bounty Bag material is the same, with little mention of men, and almost all photos just mums with babies — which is who they are trying to sell too, so I should not be surprised.
The NHS material does a better, more complete job of it, which I appreciate. But, to be honest, what I'd like is a Useful Things a Partner Can Do During Gestation booklet. I suspect that's not going to be coming my way anytime soon. Though any advice in the comments on this blog would be appreciated.
