Month: January 2010

Project 365: The Penultimate Week!

There’s good news and bad news from the land of Project 365 this week. The good news is: next week is the big finale!! Only six days to go!! The bad new is: next week is the big finale!!

Okay, not really. While I’m a little anxious about both what will happen on day 366 — I still haven’t decided — and what I’ll do for day 365, I’m still pretty excited about being finished. The bad news is actually that I think I may have killed my camera. The poor old D40 has been acting up lately, and I fear that I may have photographed it to death. I’m getting this weird hypersaturation in the last week or so, and the exposure seems off.

I got curious as to the life expectancy of a D40, and found out that you should get in the neighbourhood of 50,000 shutter clicks, but that in standard “your millage may vary” form, many report D40s that went on to live happy lives in the land far beyond 100K clicks. Then again, those D40s may not have been subject to the rigours inclement weather, being hauled around absolutely *everywhere* (and, ahem, perhaps dropped once or twice), used to placate a curious 18-month-old and the various other indignities to which I have subjected my beloved camera.

So I got curious about the whole counting shutter clicks thing. I’d realized back in October that I’d taken 10,000 pictures when my internal counter rolled over and started using image numbers I’d been using in March, but I didn’t know how to figure out the exact milage on my camera. Turns out you can find out through your EXIF data, which is displayed on Flickr, under “More properties” in the “Additional Information” menu on the bottom of the right-hand menu of any given picture. At least, that’s what it is for me. All that to say, that just before I started Project 365, I had 5,372 shutter clicks on the D40, and as of yesterday I had 21,251 clicks. That means in a year I’ve snapped off almost SIXTEEN THOUSAND images. Yeesh! No wonder I feel like I’ve got a permanent one-eyed squint going on!

So anyway, here’s this week’s pictures. This was from last Friday, a special “Breakfast for Dinner” treat for the boys. I don’t know why I like TtV pictures from my kitchen, but I do!

353:365 Breakfast for dinner

This week’s subliminal theme is apparently kittens. You might remember we had to put down our 17 year old cat in 2008; you might more recently remember that we had mouse issues this past autumn. The topic of reacquiring a cat seems to be a subliminal theme in our lives lately, especially ironic because I — the non-cat person — am more into the idea than Beloved, the avowed cat lover. In fact, I came *this close* to getting him a cat for Christmas, but sweet though it would have been to have a bright-eyed kitten in a box under the tree, I couldn’t in my heart give the gift of more than 15 years of litterbox scooping. Because that? Is so not my job.

Anyway, all that to say, we already had kittens on the brain when we visited our friends Jojo and Jaimie and were utterly charmed by the Christmas kitten they gave their daughter.

354:365 Take me to the kittens

Oh, the cuteness! (I went with the above pic as the photo of the day, but in hindsight, I think this next one is better.)

Take me to the kittens 2

And then, a couple days later, we were on a family trip to PetSmart to get some dog food for Katie, and Lucas tried hard to liberate this cat waiting for an adoptive family. Universe, are you trying to tell me something?

356:365 Here kitty kitty...

Speaking of Lucas, doesn’t he look like he was enjoying his excursion out into the cold?

358:365 Baby it's cold outside

This was almost a throwaway, but I kind of like it. In the 365 Community on Flickr, there was an optional theme on primary colours, and when I saw how the light was hitting the pushpins on my cubicle wall, I immediately thought of that. Don’t they look a little bit like gems? Besides: ooo, shiny!

357:365 Pushpins

And, more gratuitous colour: Beloved playing Rockband Lego on the Wii.

355:365 Rock on, dude!

This one isn’t really out of focus, the focus is just somewhere where you might not expect it – on the basket in the foreground. See the murkiness in the colour, though? That’s part of what makes me think my camera is ailing.

359:365 Fruit bokeh

That’s it for this week. Six days — SIX DAYS!!!! — to go!

Delurker Day 2010

Well, wouldja lookit that? Turns out today is Delurker Day 2010.

You know what this means, right? You have to pay your annual toll by delurking and letting me know something about you. Lord knows y’all know more than enough about me; now it’s time to turn the tables and pay the piper and whatever other tired old clichés you can think of.

Delurk, and tell me something about yourself, or why you’re here, or just wave hello for goodness sake! (C’mon, you know you want to!)

Words: Banished and Best of 2009

It’s a great week for content here at the Mothership. Earlier in the week, we had a righteous (but, as always, entirely civil) debate about parenting, and today we have some word geekery. All we need is a cute kid anecdote and we’ve hit the “my favourite things” trifecta!!

I’ve blogged about Lake Superior State University’s Banished Words list each year from 2006 through 2008, so of course I had to bring you the 2009 list. Rather than list them for you, I just cut-and-paste LSSU’s press release. The bolded terms are, of course, the banished words.

Word czars at Lake Superior State University unfriended 15 words and phrases and declared them shovel-ready for inclusion on the university’s 35th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.

“The list this year is a teachable moment conducted free of tweets,” said a Word Banishment spokesman who was chillaxin for the holidays. “In these economic times, purging our language of toxic assets is a stimulus effort that’s too big to fail.”

Former LSSU Public Relations Director Bill Rabe and friends created “word banishment” in 1975 at a New Year’s Eve party and released the first list on New Year’s Day. Since then, LSSU has received tens of thousands of nominations for the list, which includes words and phrases from marketing, media, education, technology and more.

Other terms nominated for banishment included sexting, App, transparency and bromance.

One can’t help but notice the congruence of “Tweet” being on one group’s Banished Words list while being named the Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.

Other nominees for ADS’s 2009 Word of the Year were:

-er A suffix used in such words as birther, someone who questions whether Obama was born in the United States; deather, someone who believes the government has death panels in its healthcare reform plan; Tenther, someone who believes the Federal government is mostly illegal because it usurps rights which belong to the States, in violation of the 10th Amendment; and truther, someone who doubts the official account of the 9/11 attacks.
fail A noun or interjection describing something egregiously unsuccessful. Usually used as an interjection: “FAIL!”
H1N1 The virus that causes swine flu.
public option A government-run healthcare insurance program, desired by some to be part of the country’s healthcare reform.
Dracula sneeze Covering one’s mouth with the crook of one’s elbow when sneezing, seen as similar to popular portrayals of the vampire Dracula, in which he hides the lower half of his face with a cape.

And of course, since we changed not only years but decades this past New Years Eve, we have a Year of the Decade list from the American Dialect Society, too. The winner, quite rightly IMHO, is google. Note the small “g” – it’s google the verb, as in to search the Internet, and not Google the company. Also-rans in the Word of the Decade contest were: blog, 9-11, green, text, war on terror and Wi-Fi.

(In the ADS press release, they have a list of prior winners. In January 2000, the Word of the Decade was web, the Word of the Twentieth Century was jazz and the Word of the Millennium was she.)

I always find the banished words more fun than the favourited ones (oh look, there’s another term that didn’t exist 10 years ago: favourite as a verb) and not only because the ADS’s list is a little too, um, Americanized for my taste. Frankly, I hadn’t even heard of some of the terms they nominated.

So speak up, bloggy peeps. What words or phrases would you banish if you could and why? Or, take the other road and tell me what you think the most influential word of the decade should be. (Personally, I’d ban the words “why” and “no” exclusively because my toddler has worn my nerves to stubble by using them as a torture device.)

Talk to me about Nova Scotia!

Hey bloggy peeps, talk to me about Nova Scotia. We’ve been to Bar Harbor in Maine and Quebec City, but we’ve always wanted to go to Nova Scotia and have started talking about driving out there this summer. Three little kids in the car for four or five solid days of driving? Who wouldn’t want to do that? *wink*

I know some of you either have done a similar trip, live out there now or have lived there in the past, so I’m crowdsourcing your thoughts and opinions. I’m not even completely married to the idea of NS, if you think I should stop in New Brunswick or head over to PEI instead. I’d *really* like to visit Newfoundland, but I’m worried that the drive to Nova Scotia might be on the outer reaches of too far, let alone all the way up to the Rock.

I’m leaning toward Lunenburg, simply because someone suggested it to me and from what I’ve read it sounds lovely. Ideally, we’d find a seaside cottage big enough to accommodate all five of us with kid-friendly amenities. This looks like a good choice, for example, although I’m a little concerned about the size.

So tell me — what must we see in the Maritimes? What should we avoid? And, for those of you who travel regularly between Ontario and Nova Scotia, could you suggest a good place to break the trip into two manageable days? 16 hours of driving is out of the question right now, but eight hours times two days is feasible if we can find something fun to do along the way. I’m even open to making the trip out in three days, if we can find things worth seeing and doing on the way out there.

Any advice, insight or tips would be greatly appreciated!

The most patronizing thing you can say to me

As you might have guessed from the longevity of this blog, I like to discuss parenting issues. I’ll compare notes with any parent, any time. I often find it’s the first area of common ground I establish with someone — do you have kids? If not, there’s always the default – do you have parents? It’s failsafe!

I remember one day in the waiting room of the pediatrician’s office, a mom and I compared our babies. Lucas was maybe six months old, Simon just turned four and a half, and we spent quite a while swapping anecdotes of the baby years. The funny thing was, her son was sitting beside her drowning her out with his iPod as he flipped through the latest Macleans. He must have been at the very top end of the age group for a pediatrician, maybe 15 or 16 — old enough to wear a trench coat and have stubble, anyway. But she blithely went on describing his various toddler exploits as if he were still in preschool. It was utterly charming, and only the tiniest bit creepy.

You know what really drives me bananas, though? I really hate it when parents of teens or adult children haul out that hoary old nugget: “Little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems.” I find that the most dismissive, patronizing, and downright annoying thing one parent can say to another. It’s even more annoying than the hyper-competitive mom who wants to make sure her baby is hitting all its milestones before yours, or the whole slacker-mom movement. (Really? Don’t get me started.)

I get what they’re saying, these condescending parents who diminish the daily struggles of life with little kids by insinuating that life with teenagers is so much more complex and fraught with peril. Now I’ll give you that toddlers rarely come home with random body piercings, preschool is virtually flunk-out-proof, and the only substance I worry about my seven-year-old abusing is his brother. I’ll admit that when things do go wrong in the teen years, there is always the potential for things to go catastrophically wrong in a life-altering sort of way. But I still don’t think that the actual parenting of a teen is so much harder than parenting a preschooler.

In fact, I’ll put it right out there and argue that parenting a child is WAY more labour-intensive than parenting a teen. I think the parents of older children have more freedom than do parents of schoolage kids, and I’m willing to gamble they get more sleep. When kids gain independence, so do their parents. Of course, the emotional investment is the same and I’m in no way saying that you somehow disengage from your children as they get older (hell, I’ve shown no signs of disengaging from my mom and I passed 40 this summer!) but I think the bulk of the parenting “effort” if I can call it that, is expended in the first 15 years or so.

The crux of it is that I truly cannot accept that any stage of parenting will be as traumatic, as transformative, as hard as parenting that squalling newborn. And anyone who has rose-coloured memories of the sweetness that is the toddler years is welcome to come to my house tonight between 4 and 6 pm and witness the debacle that is a our feisty, moody and endlessly adorable not-quite-two-year-old during the arsenic hours. Bonus points if you can entertain him (because he missed you all day while you were at work), supervise the homework, get dinner on the table, ask the middle child about his day, make the lunches, clean the kitchen, and sort the paperwork from the school without wanting to curl up in a ball and rock yourself to sleep on the dining room floor. Surely this is not simply a function of the quantity of kids in my house — it has everything to do, I think, with the fact that there is just more of me required in every hour of their lives than will happen when they’re 16 and trying to have the absolute minimum amount of contact with me.

Of course, I have only sang the first couple of verses of this particular song. My oldest will turn eight in March, so I can really only comment on the first half of the equation. So I bring it to you, bloggy peeps. What say ye? Is there merit to that hoary old nugget, or am I right to bristle when I hear it? Is it really any harder to parent older kids and teens?

(Although if it is, I’m not sure I want to know about it!)

In which she joins the ranting multitudes on Apple’s ridiculous iTunes gift card policies for Canadians buying apps

So I got an iPod Touch for Christmas, as I mentioned. And, as I mentioned, even though I hadn’t even asked for it and when I opened it, wasn’t entirely convinced I wanted it, in the two weeks I’ve had it I’ve come to love it dearly.

It didn’t take long for me to start exploring the app store, and most of the apps I downloaded were the freebies. (I have to admit, I am highly impressed by what you can get for free. And, in a delicious coincidence, my new task at work is to figure out how to make our Web site more mobile-friendly, and even look into creating an app of our own. Wicked cool, and wickedly serendipitous.) But, of course, there were a few games that sucked me in. I had no problem forking over $4.99 for Sim City, and I think Tetris set me back $2.99. The one I play most often is Boggle — I think that set me back another $2.99. I didn’t mind splurging a bit on games, though, because Beloved also gave me a $25 iTunes gift card to go along with it.

(Many of you are nodding along, because you know what’s coming. I have to admit, I had no idea, but I am peeved.)

I didn’t realize anything was amiss until I happened to see the $1.99 and $2.99 charges to my Visa card. Apparently, in Canada you cannot use an iTunes gift card to buy apps. That is annoying in and of itself, but to me even more annoying is that I had no idea. Not when we gave our niece and nephew $25 each gift cards for Christmas to use on their new iPods, and not when I entered my iTunes password to purchase the apps. It did not give me any sort of indication that I was bypassing my $40 gift card balance and instead charging the purchases to my Visa card. A friend of mine with an 11 year old didn’t notice until there were nearly $100 worth of charges on his credit card, so I guess I got off lucky.

So I started poking around on the Internet, figuring there must be some sort of workaround out there somewhere, but there isn’t one that I could find. What I did find was post after post after post of angry consumers, many of whom had contacted Apple and received paltry compensation like a credit for a free song or two. Apple seems to be claiming that they are unable to allow the use of gift cards to purchase apps because of what one Apple customer service rep called “Canadian Commerce Laws”.

Then I found a guy named Jim Whitelaw who showed a hell of a lot of initiative and managed to get Industry Minister Tony Clement to address the issue in a letter to his own MP. I mean, if the Minister of Industry doesn’t think it’s a problem, and if Sony and Nintendo and other companies allow the use of gift cards to purchase games and software, I have a hard time understanding why Apple is choosing to draw this particular line in the sand.

I’ve had lots of reasons to interact with Apple over the years, and I’ve always found them reasonably responsive. But this totally taints my opinion of them. I’ve been seriously considering both an iPhone and a Mac, but if this is how Canadian Apple customers get treated, then I’m not sure I want to invest any more of my time or money with Apple. It’s a bit of a tarnish on my love of my shiny new iPod, too. I’ve written to Apple (feel free to do so yourself if you’re as ticked as I am — they say they are responsive to customers) but don’t expect anything more than a cursory response.

Consider yourself warned, if you haven’t already found out about this one the hard way like many of my friends already have. The policy itself is bad enough, but the lack of information is inexcusable.

Edited to add: while Apple did respond to me, the response was rather unsatisfactory. The first e-mail told me, rather unhelpfully, that gift cards could not be used to redeem apps in Canada. When I replied that my initial query stated that very fact, and that I was asking instead about the “why” of the policy, I got a second response that said:

According to Apple policies, canadian customer’s are not able to purchase Applications using Store Credit. I know this must be really frustrating.

I encourage you to use the iTunes Feedback page to submit your feedback below, it may help us to improve our customer satisfaction. We will be considering your feedback very carefully:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

Your efforts to share your feedback are very much appreciated.

So, I took their advice and I encourage you to do so, too. Have at ‘er, bloggy peeps!

At least he comes by it honestly!

Please indulge me in a moment of shameless bragging. I’m practically bursting with pride.

I got a call from Tristan’s teacher this week. (I swear, getting a call from the school elicits the exact same physical response in me now that getting called to the principal’s office did when I was a schoolchild myself. That wincing anticipation of unpleasantness ahead.)

In fact, she was calling to tell me how delighted she was with a piece of work Tristan handed in. Can we take a moment and admire the kind of teacher who calls a parent after school hours to offer random praise? And can we find a cloning machine, please? They’d been working on descriptive paragraphs and given a sentence upon which to expand. Tristan took a sentence about a tree and apparently turned it into a very vivid description of a boy sitting in a tree reading a book, and his teacher was blown away by the thought behind it, the style, and the way he evoked the moment.

I laughed out loud when she started describing it, because right away I knew from where Tristan had taken his inspiration. Remember this picture from my 365 project last autumn?

236:365 Tristan in the tree

Apparently, so does Tristan!

She went on to say through the year Tristan has proven himself a bright boy who has little difficulty with his school work, but that she’s had trouble encouraging him to fulfill his potential. While he is able to meet the standards expected of him with relatively little effort, despite her encouragement he has shown little interest in excelling beyond the standard. Until, it seems, this particular exercise. She wondered aloud if he should be put into the gifted stream in the next year or so, and while I was delighted to hear she was pleased, I am not going to even bother thinking about those things right now.

For today, I’m happy to hear that the same boy who has in the last few years shown an amazing aptitude for drawing inherited from his father has also inherited a certain grace when it comes to stringing words together. I think I might know where that one comes from, too.

The City responds to your question about composting

I could have put this in the original post about Green Bins and composting, but it’s a couple of days old now and I wanted to make sure you guys saw it.

One of our regular commenters, Windex, asked the following question:

You know I was talking about the bin to the hubby last night as he is opposed to it big time and he was saying the biggest complaint is why we pay $14 million a year to give it to a company who will make a profit on it – but I am thinking he is missing info from statement – Can anyone fill in the blanks? Are we really given our compost to them for free?

I sent the question back through my PR contact, and she provided this response directly from Chris Wood, the Waste Diversion Project Coordinator for the City of Ottawa:

The specifics of the City’s contract with Orgaworld allows for the company to retain 90 per cent of the compost and the City retains 10 per cent. The city will use its 10per cent for internal greening efforts and community-based tree planting and garden projects. Orgaworld plans on selling its share to the local Ottawa farming community—our community wins here too, as farmers are able to get good yields without relying on chemical fertilizers. This same process has been successful in other communities such as London, ON– to the point where they have more demand for compost than they can supply. In fact, the compost Orgaworld plans to create from Ottawa’s waste has already been sold!

While yes, the City is paying Orgaworld $93.40 per tonne of waste, Orgaworld is also investing in our community, building $20 million dollar facility, and employing local residents. The main benefit to Ottawa though will be seen through the extended life of existing landfills, allowing the City to defer the cost of setting up new landfills (which is always contentious and expensive). The Green Bin program, along with other waste diversion strategies, are part of the City’s goal to achieve 60 per cent waste diversion.

Thanks for a good question, Windex, and to the City of Ottawa for a prompt, informative and IMHO, very reasonable reply.

Project 365: In which she comes perilously close to running completely out of things to photograph

After more than 350 days of taking pictures, I’m running out of steam. I still love taking the pictures and processing the pictures and especially sharing the pictures, but I have to admit that I’m just not as keen to go out and hunt for the pictures, yanno? So most of this week’s photos were taken of things that were nearby. Call me lazy! (And, I just noticed, probably the first week since I got my Duaflex in October that I don’t have a TtV shot.)

This may be my favourite shot of the week. We went tobogganing on New Years Day. Okay, so that’s not quite true. The big boys went tobogganing (and somehow Simon coerced Tristan to pull his sled up the hill for him each time, cementing my assurance that he will go far in life) while Lucas sat in the snow and ate large handsful of it.

346:365 Sledding

This was not the same day, but just as there were lots of flower shots in July, there’s lots of kids-playing-in-snow shots to be collected in January!

351:365 Simon in the snow

And even when they’re inside, kids at play make for a charming subject, don’t you think? (I called this one “Building a fort with Tristan is a hair-raising experience!”)

Building a fort with Tristan is a hair-raising experience!

This is part of a blog post I was planning to write this week and never quite got around to it. I was poking around in the basement looking for my old LPs for a half-formed 365 idea and I came across an carton with tonnes of old school papers in it. I found this, the journal I was required to keep in English class the year I was in Grade 11: February to June, 1986. One word: boycrazy. Another word? Painful. Really, it’s a wonder I survived to see 17.

347:365 Dear Diary

This next one? Classic “oh crap, what am I going to take a picture of today?” Oh look, there’s my makeup bag. Haven’t taken a picture of anything in there yet. *sounds of rummaging* Stubby lipstick? Nah. Mascara? Not feeling it. Compact — pretty colours. Excellent! Reflection — even better. Macro filter? Delightful. Picture done!

350:365 Compact colours

What’s that? You say you can’t get enough of the baby fingers at work pictures? Me neither.

349:365 I can do it myself

This was from my mental checklist of “things I noticed that might make a good picture some day.” Now that I’m within two weeks (eep!) of finishing, I can start using them up! This is from the pine tree in front of the boys’ school.

352:365 Snowy Pinecones

I like this one because it reminds me of those blissful three or four days over the Christmas holidays when I spent most of Lucas’s nap time in heaven with a hot cup of coffee, a wee snack, and the latest Stephen King, a gift from Beloved. I can’t remember the last time I spent back to back to back afternoons curled up with a book!

348:365 Afternoon delight

And finally, last week marked the last day of December, so here’s the full month in pictures.

December mosaic

Less than two weeks to go!

On daycare, yet again

It’s been a good long time since I’ve bitched about child care, hasn’t it? I think we’re loooong overdue!

The reason it’s been a good long time since I’ve bitched about child care is because I’ve been so happy with the young nanny who has been coming to the house since I went back to work after my maternity leave ended last January. After a horrendous search, we found a gem and we’ve been thrilled with her care. And we will be thrilled with her care, right up until she leaves on March 1 to start her own maternity leave. Sigh.

When she came back after the summer off, she told us she was pregnant and I steeled myself for another demoralizing foray into the search for affordable, accessible, quality child care. In late September, I started haunting the online child care ads, and whimpered in dismay. And then, early in October I think it was, I mentioned our situation to one of the other moms from Simon’s kindergarten class that I’d befriended. I told her about the nanny’s (relatively) imminent departure, and asked her to keep her ears open for me. To my surprise and delight, she called me up the next week and wondered if I’d be interested in having *her* take care of the boys, and I couldn’t say yes fast enough. She has three kids, too, almost the same ages as my boys at the same school, and all the kids are friends. It’s perfect! I swear, it’s like karmic payback for all the daycare shit I’ve had to wade through over the years. Not only the easiest daycare search ever, but with optimal results. I couldn’t be more happy. It’s only an interim solution, as she doesn’t want to keep doing daycare beyond this spring, but it gives us a perfect bridge over the gap in care this year.

So she can bridge the period between the nanny’s maternity leave and the end of Beloved’s semester, and Beloved will be off from May through August with the boys. In September, Simon will be in Grade 1 (!!!!) and Tristan will be in Grade 3, which leaves me finding full-time care for Lucas and before and after school care for the big boys. Should be easy-peasy, right? Not so much.

A part of me is dismayed to be looking in January for care that isn’t required until September, but I’ve been at this game long enough to know there is no such thing as too soon. I’ve been tossing around different options. I could put Lucas into the day care centre near our house for $40 a day, assuming we creep to the top of that waiting list — I’ve been told it’s even odds since he’s been registered since 2007. Yes, he was born in 2008. Hell, they just called me this year to tell me that Tristan has not yet made it to the top of their waiting list — that he’s been on since 2004 — but since he turns eight in March, he’s no longer eligible for their centre.

If I get a spot for Lucas at the daycare centre — and a big “if” it is — I’d still have to arrange for before and after school care for the big boys. I’ve had them registered on the wait list for their school’s before and after care program since 2006. I just checked yesterday and while the coordinator won’t know for sure until March, she said it doesn’t look good for this year but we’re likely to get a spot for September 2011. Can you believe it? I registered when Tristan was in JK, and we’ll likely get a spot as he goes into Grade 4. And I’m not sure, but I think he’s ineligible after Grade 5.

And setting aside the whole wait list thing, there’s the cost issue to consider. The daycare centre is $40 a day, and the school’s before and after program is $19 per day per child. That’s $80 per day for “institutional” care. If I go private, in-home daycare, rates are similar. On the other hand, I can get a live-out nanny for $80 – 100 per day plus payroll taxes. This is good in that I am the boss and therefore in control of the conditions of employment — the reason I was drawn to nanny care in the first place. Currently, I’m only paying for 4 days per week of care because I’m off on Wednesdays, and we lay the nanny off each summer so she can collect EI and we don’t have to pay a fee to “save” a spot or coordinate holidays with the daycare provider and potentially all the other families for which she provides care. On the other hand, Lucas is painfully shy and I’m thinking it might be good for him to get out of the house for care, and it would be really nice to have everyone out of my house during the day. But finding a daycare provider that has space for all three boy who is in our school cachement area — let alone who is a good person and someone worthy of caring for my boys! — is a Herculean task that I am dreading to my bones. And the idea of going through the nanny interview process all over again gives me a stomach ache.

Sigh.

It’s kind of disappointing to see that even though two of the three boys will be in school full time in September, we stand to gain absolutely no financial break on daycare fees, and will be spared exactly none of the headaches of finding and managing child care. But, of course, we lose the $100-a-month child care payment from the government for Simon when he turns six next month.

Seriously, how the hell do people with less resources than our privileged family make this work?

Editorial Aside: Every link in this post is a link back to a different spot in the ongoing saga of one family’s search for affordable, quality, accessible day care. If you want to read more, you can peruse my “working and mothering” category. I’m sure my experience is just about average to what any Canadian family must endure, and I’m horrified by that. The system is broken, and we MUST fix it.