On Childcare

More important than finding the energy to clear out the junk storage room that will become a nursery are two things that take up a lot of my mental energy, but very little productive energy- buying a car, and figuring out childcare. For the former, I think I am going to have to accept the limitations of my lack of knowledge, interest, and transportation options to evaluate many different cars, and just Uber to a CarMax, pick whatever used Honda is closest to my max budget, and drive it home. This is not very savvy, but I am not very savvy about used cars, so there's that.


Unlike cars, childcare is right up my information-gathering alley. The main issue is that childcare is devastatingly expensive in this area, more so than other expensive cities. I am on the Board of the daycare at my job, and had spent time researching daycare options prior to getting pregnant, so I was already familiar with pricing and options in the area. And, daycare for two would run us about $35,000 to $40,000 a year, which is just...totally out of reach. It baffles me how so many of my co-workers can afford to have two of their kids in our work daycare. However, if we did want to go the daycare route, we could likely find more affordable options in PG County or far out in Montgomery County, but that would mean a driving commute every day, and likely tripling the amount of time it takes me to get to and from work, given that I'd be in traffic getting to my office from the daycare out in the burbs. I am not seeing this as a viable option. Given the choice of that scenario, or selling our house and having one of us stay home and take care of them, or even trying to find another job and moving to a different, cheaper city, I might choose one of the latter two options. I know a lot of people in the DC area drive in from the suburbs every day, and drive to pick up their children at various locations, but it just sounds hellish. The traffic here is outrageous. We chose our house and location because we did not want to spend (any) hours in a car every day. If we do have to spend hours in a car every day, the whole equation changes, and the house/location is no longer a good idea.


Anyway, the most ideal option would be a nanny, but that is also financially out of reach. A nanny share is out because with two, we are the share. And so I have landed on planning to hire an au pair, since it is the only option we can afford. (I use the term afford loosely.) An au pair comes on a cultural exchange visa through the State Department, lives in your house, and gets paid a stipend. I like the idea of live-in care so I wouldn't have to get the twinnies ready or do any drop-offs or pick-ups. I also like the possibility for language immersion, and the cultural exchange aspect of the program. However, there are a lot of potential drawbacks. Au pairs can only legally work up to 45 hours a week, which is not full-time care if you consider that working 40 hours a week +lunch hour + commute takes at least 50 hours. They are usually not experienced child care professionals- they are generally young girls who want to live in the U.S. for a while, have some fun, and improve their English. They can't do non-childcare related housework, unlike a nanny. And there are auxiliary, non-required but good idea expenses- adding them to your cell phone plan and car insurance, or giving them an Uber allowance.


In researching this, I have talked to a lot of families who have used au pairs, particularly families with multiples, and most people have had good experiences. We went to an information session at a neighbor's house, who is a single mom with twin girl toddlers and a Thai au pair, and she seems very happy with the program. (And her twinnies, with their matching tiny pigtails, were so cute.) And the families who haven't been happy with a particular au pair have been able to switch to a different one without too much hassle, and still say they would continue to use the program. So, overall, I am hopeful that this could work out. But there is a lot of upfront legwork that we need to do to make it happen. Like, choose one of the many seemingly undifferentiated agencies to hire through, review applications, schedule Skype interviews, consider and write down our family guidelines and household rules to have a better chance of finding a good fit, and then fly out a stranger, move her into our house, and help her learn how to take care of twin babies. And all of this is supposed to start about 4 months before you want the person to arrive- right about the time I will be a frantic new mom to two tiny babies.


Sometimes I get frustrated about how hard this all is, but then I fall back on the ultimate clichés, and they really do help- as long as they are healthy and thriving right now, and are healthy and thriving when we bring them home, these are all lucky problems to have. (But really, a lot could be done to make this easier.)

Four unrelated paragraphs

It's cold now, and the nice new coats I bought for myself on clearance last winter don't fit. This seems appropriate. I hate buying things and hadn't bought a new coat in about a decade. So of course when I take the plunge, something happens to make it so I can't wear it. But maybe the lesson is you should buy things and your future self will thank you for it in two years? Or maybe the lesson is to buy something the day you need it and use it immediately? In case it is the latter, I just ordered a hideous but on sale maternity coat from Old Navy on the same day that I thought of it. Decisive!


I vacillate between forgetting I am pregnant for long stretches of the day, and then remembering it by returning to a state of panic. I am very thankful they seem to be growing and thriving, but I'm now 22 weeks and I think I look about 28-30 weeks. When I think about the past few weeks, I mostly remember a lot of tears. I cry in general because I am overly emotional from what I presume are excess hormones, I cry because I'm scared of carrying, delivering, and making sure the twins don't die, and I cry because I hate the president-elect so very much. Often, non-hormonal me steps outside my body and judges hormonal me and tells her to stop crying, but it doesn't help. It gives me hiccups.


I was told that a neighbor who is due two months after me already has the nursery set up. Ugh, just ugh. I never got the second trimester surge of energy or "nesting" instinct that was supposed to help me with these things. My only strong urges are to eat and sleep. When I do feel a surge of productivity, I do things like upgrade life and health insurance policies, sign up for infant CPR classes, and research pediatricians. I do not order and assemble cribs or paint fanciful phrases onto the wall.


In the past, I have not felt that the phrase "time is money" has applied to me. My hours were my hours, my salary was my salary, my time off covered all of my needs (and then some!) and I wasn't doing anything lucrative in my free time. It's very nice to feel this way. Now, I am still salaried, but every hour I work is tracked- if I leave one hour early, I take leave, if I work an extra hour, I get an extra hour of leave. And, facing the prospect of a significant amount of time-off without pay, I do feel like any time not spent working is time spent not getting paid: every hour I don't work now is one fewer hour of pay while on leave. I am trying to work extra hours, but (1) I am tired and (2) I use up those hours for my very frequent doctors appointments. I also translate all extra money into units of my unpaid leave: one long airbnb weekend=one day of my take home pay while on unpaid leave.

Travel and Baby Gender

I'm in Denver this week, while Jason works at his organization's annual conference. I am on vacation, touring the city and taking day trips out to see mountain scenery. I am enjoying this but I am TIRED. I have pretty low energy levels in general these days, and have to be careful of how much physical activity I schedule on any given day. If I do too much, I can barely get out of bed the next day. And being at higher altitude is not helping. I can walk around Denver pretty easily, but yesterday, in Breckenridge, which is twice the elevation of the Mile High City, I could barely climb a flight of stairs without getting totally winded. I like to be relatively active on vacations, walk a lot, and see lots of things. So I'm a little frustrated, especially in a place like Colorado, where what there is to see is outdoorsy/nature focused. At least we have a nice hotel room courtesy of Jason's office, where I am spending a lot of time recuperating. As an aside, while this is a very nice, I really don't like to stay in downtown hotels in cities. It's really hard to get a feel for the actual experience of city residents. I will take an airbnb in the city's equivalent to DC's Capitol Hill any day.

Also, I miss Sal.

Baby gender! It's a boy and a girl. We were hoping to have at least one girl, so we got what we wanted. I understand why people don't want to find out the sex ahead of time, because you shouldn't have different expectations for your baby based on gender, and you can't make assumptions about their personalities based on it either. And it's easy to do that, so it's just better not to know. I do believe all of those things. However, when they are babies, and don't have any real preferences of their own, I can impose my own preferences on them temporarily, and my own preferences are that pink and bows and sparkly things are much more fun. I don't really believe that pink and princesses and fairy tales are damaging things. I was immersed in all of that, and even in elementary school, still had very strong feminist opinions. Plus, whatever else these kiddos do in life, they are going to smash the patriarchy. Not that I have overly high expectations for them or anything.

I was hoping that finding out the genders would start to make this whole thing feel more real, but it still feels like a dream. Also, if we didn't find out, we'd have to be prepared with four names and middle names! Girls names are just much easier for me. I don't really have any boy names that I feel strongly about at the moment. I floated the idea of Phoenix to Jason, because it would represent both the University of Chicago and Harry Potter, but he is vehemently opposed. Ha!