The nanny February 17, 2009

Amelia will spend 4 hours with our nanny share nanny, Janet, today: from 8 am to noon.  Both Tom and I drove in to drop her off at the nanny share house in South Austin, but we left a 7 am and hit nearly no traffic, so we got there way early.  I took Amelia and drove her around the neighborhood for 30 minutes and Tom went on to work.  Amelia was really good in the car – even though she woke up repeatedly from my rush hour stops and starts, she didn’t cry at all.
Janet is a nice older woman who retired from a job at an accounting firm quite a few years ago and discovered that she wanted something to do, so she decided to take care of babies.  She had 5 kids of her own and has cared for Seville, the other baby in the nanny share, from when she was 3 months old until now, when she is 7 months old.  Seville is a sweet girl, just getting into crawling now, and her mom is very nice as well.

It’s a lot less expensive to do a nanny share, I’ve learned, than hire a full-time nanny to come to our house, which we could never afford even if we were both working full time.  And this way, Amelia gets cared for by one person reliably, and that one person only has one other child to care for.  We’re only doing part-time, 8 to noon 5 days a week, with the thought that this way whoever is working from home can actually get a little work done in the morning.  Of course, whoever is working from the office will be late to work (dropping off at 8 in South Austin translates into arriving at work around 8:30 or 8:45 on a GOOD day of Austin traffic).

Our current plan is that whoever’s working from the office in the morning takes Amelia into town and drops her off with Janet.  Then whoever’s working from home drives into town and picks her up at noon.  We can manage the cost of the nanny share if Tom can pick up another 10 hours of work a week, which should be easy enough as they’ve still got him running jobs right now and there always seems like there’s more work for him to do.  Also, he always has deadlines at the end of the day (when Amelia is at her fussiest) and that just doesn’t work at all.

I’m still a little numb about it, though I do feel some sadness about leaving our daughter with a stranger, no matter how dedicated, kind and loving that stranger seems.  It’s just SO difficult to be even slightly productive when you’ve got the baby with you home alone, and we’ve both been run very ragged in the last 6 weeks.

So we’re trying this out for a week to see how we all do.  I hope it works and I hope it doesn’t.  I’m worried that I’m giving up my principles re: “I don’t want to have a baby and give her to someone else to raise,” and that soon we’ll be leaving Amelia with Janet full time.  Which we might just barely be able to afford, with one of our salaries going directly to pay for childcare, matching the prevalent  paradigm of middle class parents of young children.  One of us staying home full time would NOT pay the bills, unfortunately, and in this rocky economy I’m loathe for either of us to voluntarily give up a good job.

It’s just very disappointing that we couldn’t make the working-from-home/caring for baby synchronized swim work well enough.  And we both worry that we’re failing our daughter.  Sigh.

Janet called with an update around 10 am:  Amelia had spent a very fun morning playing with Seville!  She loved the buzzy chair that Seville has outgrown and hadn’t cried once all morning.  She had drunk a little milk and was fast asleep in the chair when Janet called.  Oddly enough, her phone call brought me to tears more than driving away from the house did this morning.