Wednesday, November 18, 2009

It's Been a While

A new job was started. New routines were learned. A terrible day care situation was remedied, with a dream day care situation, which then had to be changed yet again.

It's a terrible state of affairs in the economy when a wonderful, may I say PERFECT, day care provider is forced to take a different job because there aren't enough kids in her day care? Our Boy was the only child in her day care. A licensed psychologist and play therapist, she spent all day loving, nurturing, and teaching our little guy, but she got no other takers on her wonderful, affordable day care. She was offered a job with the state, paying more than my husband and I make together. She had no choice but to take it or there was fear that she and her husband would actually lose their home. I can't fault her for that. I think it hurt her as much as it hurt us to end the situation. Fortunately, she has a friend who is a licensed provider and the transition was handled as well as it could possibly have been handled. The Boy has been there for two days now- today is his third. He has cried each morning (although he stops as soon as his parent leaves!) It breaks my heart to hear him cry, and I feel so badly that it has to be this way. But I know he is there, with a kind caregiver and other kids near his age, playing trucks and blocks and going for walks.

I can't even speak of our first caregiver. I'm glad he is out of that home, that's all I want to say about it.

The Boy grows every day. Learns every day. His vocabulary grows by 4 or 5 words per week, and he runs headlong into every new experience. He has discovered the joy of Hot Wheels and goes everywhere with a toy school bus given to him by friends of ours. When we are driving in the car, he identifies every vehicle we pass. "Truck! Car! BUS!" He runs to us and hugs us, sending such a wave of joy to me that I find it difficult to stand up.

Three of our friends have had babies since last I wrote. Snuggling these teeny little girls (yes, girls, all of them!) makes me ovulate, I swear. And yet, despite the fact that I want and know we will have one more child someday, it doesn't fail to make me SO GLAD that we are past the baby stage with our Boy. I can completely understand where people who have their children close together are coming from. It seems like such a good plan to get all those diapers out of the way. But in our family, the right thing for us is to have this time as a new family. For it just to be the three of us for a while. To revel in our new parent status, to lavish our time and affection on our firstborn son and to give him all that we can possibly give him before introducing a sibling into his life. If we were to have another child now, we wouldn't have the money or time to be the parents to our Boy that we want to be. I am thankful that we have the option to choose when our next child will be born (barring some catastrophic failure with the Pill, of course). Clearly the Pill has worked for us- when I went off it for the first time in ten years, I was pregnant with the Boy within three months.

Instead, I can live vicariously through these teeny girls, help out their exhausted parents, listen with sympathy to their up-all-night stories. Then I can return home with my husband and our Boy, give him his dinner (which he can eat with a fork), his bath (which he loves to play in), watch some Baby Einstein or read him a story, and tuck him into bed (where he can put himself to sleep and stay asleep all night long). It's a happy time.