Last week I went to New Orleans on a 3 days business trip. Just when I was about to depart Michael Stipe (the lead singer of R.E.M) posted his personal guide to New Orleans on Gwyneth Paltrow’s blog. I checked out a few of his digs, but overall it did not correspond to me at all. So here is my “guide for a business trip to New Orleans”.
Pregnant friends ask me what I find most useful to have on hand for babies. As I am a minimalist I think this list may be of service to those who’d like to keep it simple… though, even then it’s a handful (see my earlier post on keeping things tidy).
I have made it through two children with no automatic swing or rocker, no big clunky plastic toys, no wipes or bottle warmers, no sterilizers…. In my experience in the first year, children want to interact with adults and play outdoors - everything else, is just a prop!
Full disclosure: my husband maintains this list, he’s totally on top of what we need, and what we don’t!
Now that baby is starting to roll around and will soon crawl, we have set up a play area in our living room for her to be busy and active while we do our big people stuff (cook, eat, read books, talk, play piano). The key to letting colorful, sometimes awful plastic stuff into your social space is to have a rapid clean up routine. I’m a big fan of nice baskets, woven or fabric, which I scatter across the house to make sure that there is always a place to put toys away.
If you live in San Francisco, you can buy my favorite cloth baskets (left picture) at Lotus Bleu in Hayes Valley. The woven baskets come from West Africa: I bought mine in Oakland.
Recently a pregnant friend asked me what I would recommend she does when she returns to work. Considering the endless days and nights I have spent musing over my childcare budget and needs, I thought I should write a blog post on this puzzle: how do you find childcare for your professional and personal needs?
First let me reiterate the question: professional and personal needs. Very quickly I realized that having someone watch my child(ren) only when I work was a receipe for disaster: even if I didn’t have a job, I’d need a break once in a while, and so do you. For me, this means 50 to 55 hours of childcare per week. Approximately 35 hours for work, another 6 for three evenings per week (we are at home too, we just don’t have to do it all on our own on the days where we return exhausted from a big office day), our weekly date night (5 hours), and anywhere from 5 to 10 hours of time to myself, to exercise, read, walk, or focus on one child only.
Obviously, 55 hours is a lot of time (and money). So here are ways I’ve found to make it work for us, and our caregivers:
I’ve been told that when people disagree with you, they are more likely to comment on our your blog. This is proving to be true!
1) we are experimenting this summer by having a live-in “nanny” for one month, who happens to be our cousin and is helping me go back to work. I deliberately did this to put a little “give” into our life and have some breathing room. We can’t do this long term, because our flat does not have an extra bedroom, but if it did, i would consider hiring an au pair. In the USA, an au pair costs $320 per week (you also pay her room and board), and can work up to 45 hours. This is considerably cheaper than any other childcare alternative for working parents.
2) Though we won’t have an au-pair this fall, I have learned something from the past few weeks. So, when our cousin leaves and our babysitter/nanny starts work, I am planning to ask him/her to stay till 7:30 three nights a week - on the nights when I have the longest days at work.
3) My husband and i try to be home at 6:00 every night; this means we usually pick up our work again at 9:00, after kids are asleep and we have had dinner.
4) When in France, everything is shifted out by 1 hour at least, cause that is how everyone else does it.
5) So i did not mean to come off as “know-it-all”, “bottomless pocket”, “oh so organized”. I am just being very candid about one thing that seems to be working.
6) Also, I think I’m getting the sense from sharing all this candidly that I am just a more anxious parent than many of you must be. I don’t like doing bedtime routine all by myself, it stresses me out. But if I liked it, I wouldn’t be looking for ways to change the dynamic.
In any case, thanks for your comments
It’s 5:30 pm and all hell breaks loose - parents are coming home from work (yes, in California we do make it home by then!), kids are tired, nanny wants to get out of there, dinner is not ready and everyone feels the pressure to catch up and “spend time” with everyone else. THIS IS NOT A LIFE! And this post is about how you can avoid most of the witching hour and truly enjoy these hours with your children.
If you work, chances are that 5 to 7 pm are your most reliable hours with your family. Colleagues aren’t sending out emails or asking for schedule changes, bags don’t have to be packed, phones aren’t ringing. Unfortunately, these hours can be very stressful if you don’t have a modicum of flow: i.e. if you are running from task to task without harmony, or time to breathe.
In our house, there’s always been set activities we try to perform each night (bath, dinner, books, bedtime for kids; dinner and conversation and relaxing for adults), but only recently have they started flowing together nicely. I attribute this entirely to a specific schedule we developed together and the acknowledgment that we need a third adult to help out. So our nanny now works till 7:30 pm.
I am certain you have heard people mention that the trouble with having children late in life is that you are comfortably settled in your adult routine and BANG babies come and shake it all up. Whereas in the good old days…
I’m not sure what I think about this argument, because someone in her thirties doesn’t seem so old to me, and I can’t imagine that it was much easier to have children in your twenties. In both cases you had plenty of time to develop a sense of self and your own set of needs. I tend to think that whenever you have children you are somewhat abruptly shaken out of your shell and have to redefine a self that includes devotion to little ones. In my experience, the best way for this is to practice what I call SMART SELFISHNESS.
A smart selfish individual is one who fits his needs into an otherwise busy family and career schedule. By doing so, the individual maintains a healthy sense of self and is thus able to commit to loved ones, and to a job for a lifetime, as opposed to burning out. Unlike a truly selfish person, the smart selfish person fits her needs into strategic openings in the family or professional schedule, generally going with the flow. Here are a few ways I’ve been smart selfish in the past few months.
Those of us who must travel for work, leisure, or to visit relatives enter a new dimension when we have children: airplanes and jet lag WITH children. If you found travel to be rough before you had kids, you are going to need to re-frame your thoughts on this topic, or you will end up house-bound, for fear that you can’t survive without your routine or your gear.
I go to France twice a year (16 hours door to door, 9 hour time difference) and Florida at least once a year (12 hours door to door, 6 hour time difference), and I’m something of a travel expert. In my old life, I used to pack 5 days before I took off and follow a strict jet lag diet before, during and right after air travel to avoid crankiness and illness. Today, these skills have been transformed to accommodate three other people and to keep alive our desire to leave our house! Here are a few tips on how to get through the first years of family travel.
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