The baby turned ten months old last week.
She is happy and curious. She stands independently and can toddle while clutching someone’s fingers. Her siblings love to take her little hands and walk her around, and it especially warms my heart to see the little human chain of three toddling slowly. The older kids seem as enchanted by her development as I am. I wonder if watching a baby learn to walk ever gets old?
She is starting to get into things, and loves to unload – laundry baskets of folded clothes, drawers of measuring cups, recycling bins of paper and empty containers. The bathroom trash bin. Yeah, that last one grosses me out a little bit. The other day, when my back was turned, she went into our CSA box, found a peach and devoured it, leaving a clean little pit on the floor. It made her so happy and I was somewhat delighted and proud of her ability to forage. With the other two kids, I installed cabinet locks at this age, but I haven’t done that this time around. I think I’m just wondering if I can get through this phase without the extra work…. (We do keep under the sink locked, though.)
She eats fruit endlessly and nurses constantly. I think she might be teething. She hates being in the high chair longer than it takes to stave off hunger.
The Husband is the only one who can put her to bed. But she sleeps mostly through the night -meaning 6:00am now, sometimes 6:30am. (Through the night used to mean 5am. It’s funny how relative it feels. Like how last month five hours of straight sleep felt substantial!) This last week there have been a few night wakings, but perhaps, again, related to teething.
I’ve been thinking about where each of the other kids were at ten months, and how each of our kids have had such different experiences with childcare, mostly because of the different work/life situation we had each time. Someone once commented told me that even when you say children grow up in the same household, it’s not really true because a family’s situation changes and every child is at any given age, in fact, growing up in a different household than their siblings had at that age.
The oldest was in an in home daycare starting at 11 weeks old, transitioning to a larger daycare center when she was about a year and half old. Through all that, I was still travelling for work, and she periodically had a patchwork of care when she travelled with us. Usually in Colorado my husband would be able to telework and he came out too. Or one of my parents would come. We also found a daycare in Colorado that had drop in days which we used and there were a handful of sitters. She also spent a couple weeks in California with my parents and went to a daycare by them. It was definitely stressful to figure it all out.
The middle child was just starting daycare at ten months old. Before that, my parents watched him, flying in from California to help when I was working. There was one period when we hired a sitter for a couple weeks, the one time I took him on a gig out of town. Just this past year, when he was 2.5 he started at a larger daycare, but that only lasted seven months before COVID sent him home. We declined to re-enroll him when his child care center opened back up.
And the baby… well I’m not sure when she will get to see daycare. So far, my parents watched her while I was working, and we hired nannies for the few weeks that we didn’t have coverage from my parents.
What to do with our children is foremost in a lot of people’s minds these days and there is no real good solution. In a way, I’m glad that being unemployed has taken away the need to do the risk calculus of sending a three year old to daycare. The financial math of day care costs is so much easier to figure out than trying to weigh what our personal risk tolerance is with the need to work. I’m sure that in the long term being unemployed is going to more detrimental than safely sending our kids back to school, but I feel oddly lucky that the financial choice is easier to make than the health and safety choice as I see other parents grapple with the choice.