Making the Sausage

Although almost everything related to my new teaching job is unbloggable, I will blog from time to time write about how I juggle the kids and the job.  It may come back to haunt me.  Maybe I’ll lose some respect in the classroom.  Maybe my colleagues will think I’m too overwhelmed for the position and can me.  But raising awareness is a good thing, so I’m going to go for it. 

First of all, this school has been unbelievably great about scheduling my classes and meetings around the school schedule.  I am so incredibly lucky on that front.

My luck has slowly been improving on the home front.  Despite the fantastic flexibility of the college, I still need childcare.  I am teaching a full load, my husband is never around, I have one kid still in nursery school and the other gets out at 3:30.  The fact that one kid has special needs makes things much more complicated – he can’t handle regular childcare on his own and he has to be taken to private speech lessons on one afternoon. 

Jonah only needs two afternoons in aftercare at his school, because I teach until 3:40 on Tuesdays and Fridays.  When I called his school a few months ago to set that up, I was surprised to find out there was a waiting list.  I arranged for my mom to watch him on those afternoons, but a spot miraculously opened up last week. There was a mad scramble to get in the paperwork, but he should be starting this Friday. 

Ian is in a morning, special education pre-school five mornings a week.  I had to find a place for him for the three afternoons that I am teaching.  I started him at a daycare center last summer to get him ready for this.  It was a disaster.  His special needs were too much of a challenge for the poorly-paid staff.  He needs some hand holding, and they don’t have enough people in the room.  I was limited to this particular daycare, because I needed the school bus to take him from his morning program to the daycare, and the bus wouldn’t venture out of town property.  Finally, a month ago, the director of the daycare said that they were going to either kick Ian out or we had to pay for an aide for him.  We coughed up the money.  And now it’s going great.  However, all this is terribly expensive, so we have to limit it to two days.  On Fridays, my mom will pick him up from school and wait for the babysitter to show up.  She’ll watch him from 12:00 to 4:00 for $12 an hour.  In the fall, he’ll be in a full time program of some sort and there will be much less hassles.

I’ll prepare for classes on the weekends.  Mom will do the sick days.

Are you tired yet?

The next challenge is that the kids get two weeks off this semester.  Those two weeks don’t correspond with the one week I get off.  If Steve uses his vacation time and watches the kids those weeks, then we won’t get a family vacation this summer.   Still have to figure out that one. 

Comments

[jen]

wow. I am in awe. Thank goodness for you Mom...she gets double brownie points. And then people wonder why women just throw in the towel and quit their jobs. This is a great post.

[Doug]

German schools? They end at about noon. We are so not looking forward to that when the little ones stop being so little.
Daycare is completely closed 20 days out of the year; kindergarten (equivalent to Pre-K in the US) in some cases 30; nor are these the same days.
The story that everything is fine, dandy and state-supported in Europe? Just a story.

[jen]

One thing we do in my family is some serious babysitting swapping. We have some friends whose two oldest kids are roughly the same age as our kids. And so we swap with them all the time. Big swaps, too. Like, I'll take your kids every day for a week in exchange for you taking my kid for two hours every Tuesday for the whole semester. The mom in our swapping couple owns her own business and uses some of this swap time to cover her hours in the store.

If you think about that two-week semester break, there are probably lots of parents in the same boat as you. Swap with them and you might get your vacation time commitment down to a week.

[maddy]

Best of luck with your juggling. I have a lot of colleagues who work it out, so I know it can be done (esp if you have family in the area). I switched from full time to occasional teaching because I just didn't want to juggle anymore. For our family, it was a relief to end the full-time go-round. But I did it for a long time and most of my friends are still doing it. My dept. was not a very family-friendly one. Glad your college is supportive!

[Ancarett]

This sounds so familiar. We were in the catch-22 where, when the kids were small, I was the only one with an income because Mike went back to school for a second, more marketable (hah!) degree. So I was working full-time and consulting on top of that, but we could still really only justify 3 days/week of daycare until eldest started school (then her after-school care costs dropped enough I could put autistic youngest into a great daycare full-time).

I don't remember much of those years, quite literally. I was chronically sleep-deprived from trying to do preps and mark with no sleep. I was resentful of my job(s) and my family and everything else. Thank goodness these stages don't last forever cause I wouldn't know how I could do what you're doing anymore.

Wishing you good luck with your juggling act. Just keep reminding yourself that this, too, will pass.

[bj]

Doug's pointing out that Europe & children isn't a monolithic entity, aren't you? I hear that things are good in the Netherlands (i.e. easy availabliilty of part time daycare/preschool).

I started to post my juggling story, but I realized that compared to all of you, it starts with a simple decision: full-time day care. There's still a lot of juggling, because of sick days, snow days (urgh, we've had sooo many this year that it feels like we've entered an alternate universe. honestly, it doesn't usually snow in the pacific northwest). My juggling is accomplished by flexibility (which is a problem in the long run, because it cuts down on the hours I need to get the non-deadline stuff done) and the help of my parents (who formally watch my kids a lot of the skipping time).

I wish I had a close family to swap with -- that sounds nearly ideal to me, because it builds bigger families. In my world, it doesn't happen because of the difficulties in finding what will seem to be "equal" swaps, distances, and child-compatibility (since the relationships haven't already been built, the children drive the decision).

Our kids do well in full-time daycare (it's not 7-7 full time, because of the grandparent backup), and don't have any special needs, though.

bj

[laura]

Wow, these stories are great. Really shows how much people depend on a variety of supports to care for their kids. Daycare and schools are insufficient. What do people do who don't have family or friends around? There are definitely assumptions that things are better in Europe, so I appreciate your feedback, Doug.

My mute kid has made things much more difficult. I would't feel good about swapping with another family, because he can be difficult. Also, everybody has such complicated lives with afterschool events. Lots of driving around. My sister lives 20 minutes away and theoretically we could do more kid sharing, but we don't. Our kids get home from school at the same time, but in different towns. And all the after school stuff makes it doubly impossible.

[curious monolith]

I actually just came into my office from a faculty discussion on work-life balance and am now reading this post, and the truth is just that this stuff is really incredibly hard.

I gradually moved from a 3-day a week, to a 4-day a week, to a 5-day a week preschool and then after-school daycare for my kids. They are happy there playing with their friends, and it gives me something akin to an actual work week (not counting the dentist appointments, ice skating lessons, drama rehearsals, working in the kids' classrooms, etc. that still require all kinds of juggling during the week). I felt guilty each time I extended the daycare hours, but I don't feel not guilty about it anymore.

It's the vacation weeks (and the summer!) that are definitely the hardest to figure out, though.

Does your university have a decent on-campus preschool?

[bj]

Laura's comment about swapping being hard because of after school activities made me think about how much of this we do to ourselves. Back in the day, my mom used to pick activities based on what the neighborhood kids were doing. If my sister lived in town, I think I would make her enroll her kid in the same activities as mine (yeah, right, like she'd do that, but I could try).

The special needs stuff just changes the whole game, though. With my kids, I absolutely know that I don't need to worry that a bunch of different environments are OK for them. Yeah, a particular place might be more or less crowded, or something like that, but they can cope, and I want them to learn to cope. I see myself falling into the trap of overparenting when I start to sweat those details. But I can easily see that wouldn't be the case for every child.

bj
PS: The question wasn't to me, but yes, my U has a on-campus daycare. But, it has 23 slots for preschoolers, and 8 for infants, and that's in a R1 university with something like 12 thousand employees. There's a huge unmet need.

[Laura]

I would do the same activities with my sister's kids, 'cept I think my boys might protest taking tap class with her girls. Her oldest one is practicing for a talent contest which involves pom-poms and things.

My campus doesn't have a daycare. I understand that they used to, but they dropped it, because they felt that the surrounding community had enough places for their faculty. More likely it was a budget thing.

I put together a long list of emergency numbers today. I have to think through every worst case scenario. What happens if I have to drive very slowly because of snow and I'm late getting to the bus stop? I have to rely on the stay at home mothers to take my kid into their kitchen until I get home. So, I have their numbers. What happens if Ian starts barfing at school? Mom gets him. What happens if Mom isn't home? My sister can get him. What happens if my sister isn't home or is picking up her kid from school? Um, I don't know.

[Timothy Burke]

I think the thing that saved us was this wonderful, beautiful older woman who does babysitting around here--we found out about her through colleagues, and she's really just an astonishing person. Plus the flexibility of my working hours, plus that Melissa moved to a 3/4 time schedule in her last job after Emma turned 1 1/2 and then later moved to a position here at the college that's part-time. So between that all, we've been able to really have a situation that made us comfortable--Emma not in too much daycare at too early an age, a goodly amount of time at home with us or our babysitter, etc. Had she had special needs, this probably still would have done the trick for us; with a second, things might have gotten much dodgier in money and time terms, though. Summer is not a problem for us unless I have to go away and do research, and at this point in my life, I do not want to do the "solo fieldworker in the archives" thing anyway--if I go somewhere for more than two weeks, we'll find a way for us all to go.

But looking at all that, notice just how much it depends on a fairly unusual set of conditionalities in our family life--there really aren't many people even within professional families who could line up all of those conditions easily.

[Doug]

Doug's pointing out that Europe & children isn't a monolithic entity, aren't you? I hear that things are good in the Netherlands (i.e. easy availabliilty of part time daycare/preschool).

Far from monolithic, even within individual countries or even regions thereof. One of the interesting long-term questions is whether day-care and other public policies in France are the reason that's the only country in most of Europe that's even approaching replacement fertility, or whether immigration is making the difference.

One of the more egregious things here in our specific corner of Yurp is the massive shortfall in the market for day-care. The public facility in one of the central districts has 70 slots, and something like 700 annual applications. But there aren't enough private facilities to make up the difference. The university, a major public university, opened its first day-care facility for kids of professors and staff roughly two years ago amid some fanfare.

It has less than 20 slots. And the place closes by 3pm. Sadly, I am not kidding.

For our two, we do a mix of going in to work very early and very late, plus someone who comes to the house, plus semi-public day care. I've been self-employed, which generally adds to the flexibility, and my better half is in charge of her own project, which, apart from some busy travel seasons, also adds to the flexibility.