lunedì, marzo 10, 2014

Home help

We are managing parenthood, largely by hiring people to help. 14 hours a week of babysitting. It's not terrifically cheap at this point - probably a little more expensive than daycare, after subsidies, from what our neighbours tell us about the apparently really good Montessori place up the street. But I feel like Godzilla is just too young to go out of the house and go all Lord of the Flies with a bunch of other kids.

It'd be different if I worked outside of the home, I guess, but I don't. This way I can hear Godzilla, I can be there if he bumps his head or needs a nurse or cuddle, I can know he's okay all the time . . . yeah, there's a lot of "I" in those sentences. It's also for my sake that I've insisted on him getting care in our home and not in a nursery. Well, fine, officer, you caught me, I like having my own son around. I don't see any reason to put him and myself through the stress of seperation when I'm lucky enough to have a full time job I can do from home while he's having a lark in the next room with the babysitters. That will come with kindergarten, and come soon - a year in August - he can get all socialized then. And this time that I get to have this gorgeous little kid around all the time will never come back again so I'm going to enjoy it. 

And also, I like having chosen the carers, which you can't really do in an institution. The Italian lady who was doing all the hours before is only doing one day a week now, as she's working elsewhere as well. Still, hopefully its doing its job to shore up Godzilla's language - the F-word is still keeping up with the Italian too.

The other 11 hours a week we've got another terrific girl, white as potatoes but lovely, gentle and warm. Both of them are very young and quite inexperienced (and god, does the white girl remind me of myself when I was 19, with the key difference that she's actually quite beautiful, which fills me with curiosity; what would my life have been like if I was beautiful? I really have no confidence it would have been better) but that doesn't matter, because I'm around anyways, so it's not like the house is going to catch fire. So I could hire them based on the warmth of their personalities and how much fun Godzilla has with them, which is a lot. He likes spending time with them - he's thrilled when they get here and sad when they leave.

The world is full of assholes, including in Godzilla's own family, the poor mite . . . he'll get enough of them by default that I'm happy to spare him any in his infancy.