I was at a seminar recently that discussed the differences between the Baby Boomers, Generation X and the Millennials. One of the key differences between the three generations was what they seek in life: the boomers chased money and status, the GenXers chased balanced, and the Millennials seek meaning and personal fulfillment.

Ah, balance. It’s true. My grown-up life has been a quest to find that elusive life balance. Not just in work/home life, but in time for me versus time for the family. I’ve seen it said before: we’re a generation that grew up being told we can do it all – but we don’t really want to do it all, we just want to do some of it enough that we feel we’re doing most of it. So very post-modern of us.

I’ve been thinking about balance a lot lately. The big irony in my life right now, I think, is that when I dropped my day job down to part-time status at 30 hours per week a couple of years ago, I pretty much nailed the balance thing. Three days at home, four days at work. I felt like a good mom, but I was living a life outside of the house too. Breathing space all around.

And then, because I never can sit still for long, I pulled it all out of whack again with this photography phase I’m in. I’m delighted that it’s been such a success, but I’m exhausted, too. Now instead of one job, I’ve got three: the day job, the blog job, and the photography job. Oops. And all that other stuff moms are supposed to do, too.

The toughest part is that the photography job feels selfish, because at the end of the day it’s optional, and a choice I can make. A couple of years back, working full-time was not an option. Weekends crammed with photo sessions and editing? That’s an option, something I’m doing for love as much as – hell, even more so than — money.

So what’s the problem? The guilt. Oh, the guilt. And it’s back with a vengeance, because now I’m *choosing* to spend time on the computer, or in front of my camera, instead of doing a lot of other often meaningless but ultimately necessary domestic minutiae. I mean seriously, what would you rather do? Head out to the countryside with a couple of cute kids and chase ‘em around for a couple of hours — or clean the toilet?

I know it’s a busy season for photographers, but right now, I feel like I’m spending way too much time with the computer balanced precariously on my lap, my attention span wavering between the image opened in Photoshop in front of me, the domestic battles raging around me about whose turn it is to watch what on TV, and a boy’s earnest but dreadfully boring recount of what’s just happened on Club Penguin, all while pointedly ignoring the crumbs from yesterday’s dinner that never got swept off the counter.

I’m not complaining here, make no mistake. I am so proud of what’s become of the photography business, to say nothing of my mad photography skillz over the last little while. But yeesh, talk about being the architect of your own demise.

Those of you who know me best are probably not even surprised by this turn of events. I mean, there’s nobody to blame here but me and my infernal inability to sit still.

So this whole balance thing must be a bit of a myth, right? Is it working for you?

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1. Another dream comes true
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Daycare.

Sigh.

I really hope that our struggles to find consistent, affordable, quality daycare have been the exception instead of the rule, but I fear otherwise.

As you may remember, I found out in early April that the caregiver taking care of Lucas is getting out of the business so she’ll have more time to care for her aging parents. Perfectly understandable, but that leaves us searching for daycare. Again. For the eighth time in just over eight years.

I could wail and gnash my teeth – I came very close – but *shrug* that won’t help find new daycare. So I sent the word out on every network I could think of, and while I’ve come up with a few options, nothing is yet settled. This is Lucas’s last week with the current caregiver, but since Beloved will soon be home for the summer, we won’t need care until mid-August. The week before our caregiver announced her pending retirement from the business, I had registered Lucas in 3-days-a-week nursery school, so we’ve been hoping to find someone who can shuttle him to and from nursery school two days a week and care for him the rest of the time. Not likely, I know, but we got lucky on this count once before with Simon.

A friend recommended her former caregiver, but I nearly choked when I heard the rates: $57 a day. (!) The most I’ve ever paid per-child is $40, so that was a bit of a shock. We met, though, and after talking to her I was very nearly sold and ready to sign on. I had some concerns, but liked her style and philosophy well enough to swallow them. She runs an intensive educational-type program with scheduled activities, circle time, crafts, things like “letter of the week” and show and tell — it sounded much more like preschool and nothing like most of the home care we’ve had. At $969 a month for part-time, it was a big pill to swallow, but truly, what cost is too high to know your child is safe and happy? Oh that nefarious parental guilt.

She wanted to be paid for statutory holidays, which I understand (even though I don’t get paid for them as I work part time), and a couple of weeks of paid holidays each year. Again, okay, but the costs were starting to mount up. When I mentioned in passing that Beloved’s school year is done in May, she told us her school year runs until July 1st and we’d have to pay to that date to keep a spot for the following fall, and then in the days before we signed the contract, a few more issues presented themselves. It wouldn’t work out.

The next thing I looked into was the Manotick Montessori. I know a few people who have had wonderful things to say about the Montessori program, so I looked it up. Yikes! They charge $1400 per month, more than I was paying to have a full-time live-out nanny to care for all three boys. Scratch that option.

I got our names back on the centralized waiting list for Ottawa, and am waiting to hear if we can get a spot at the Rideau Valley child care centre. I’d still have to pay full-time rates, but I’d have the flexibility of a spot available any day of the week should we need it, and their hours of operation are more accommodating to the potential early mornings Beloved may face. They’re $881 per month for full time, which I don’t mind paying, even if I’m paying for the Wednesdays I keep Lucas home with me. I have some concerns about a day care centre as we’ve never gone that route before, but since Lucas is so ready for school (oh how I wish I could enroll him in JK this fall!) I’m sure he’ll take to it. The chances seem fairly good that we’ll get a spot, but once again we’ll have to quit the centre for the end of May and hope there is a spot for us again next August if we want the summer off — or suck it up and pay for three full months of care we won’t use.

And, I’m still running down options for in-home care in the neighbourhood, but after a month of beating the bushes, nothing has come to fruition on that front. Anyone know a daycare in Manotick with spots for a precocious but adorable preschooler?

Sigh.

The fact that I know I’m not the only one jumping through these insane hoops on an annual basis doesn’t make me feel any better. Daycare should not be this complicated, irregular patchwork of solutions. It’s easiest for me to complain about the money, but really, I wouldn’t have a problem paying $1000 a month for 100% reliable, quality care. I can’t imagine how hard it must be on families that have extra complications like shift work, or only one parent, or less money to throw at the problem.

We’ll get through this, and I can see the light at the end of the daycare tunnel for us. The boys’ school has before- and after-school care on site, so really, I just have to get through the next three years, tops, and we’re done. But after eight years of fighting an uphill battle, of posting ads and reading flyers and conducting interviews and trying to glean from first impressions whether someone is worthy of entrusting to them my most precious treasure — I’m tired, really, really tired of this.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. More daycare angst
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The day after we saw and fell in love with our new house, I posted an online ad looking for child care. That’s before we’d even put a formal offer on the house, before the building inspections, before anything. Because? Quality, affordable child care is that important. And, that hard to find.

I got one promising contact and we chatted back and forth through the long process of listing and selling the old place, and moving and getting settled in the new one. But even though we started the big boys in their new school from the beginning of September, I dragged my heels on transitioning Lucas to the new care provider. She seemed nice enough, but I was content with our existing caregiver. More than content, I adored her. However, the 15 minute drive back and forth to Barrhaven was getting inconvenient, especially for Beloved trying to get all three boys out and get to work himself at a decent hour. After putting it off for several weeks (classic denial — if you ignore the problem it goes away, right?) I finally made arrangements to have Lucas start with the new caregiver last week.

I was practically sick with anxiety. Lucas is not as clingy as he once was, but he is still very shy of strangers. Even though he’d been with our most recent caregiver on and off for six months and I know he loved her, he’d still fuss when we dropped him off some days.

We went for two practice visits at the new caregiver, just dropping by before lunch for a wee visit to meet the other kids and let Lucas get to know her a bit. The first time went well, but on the second visit I looked down at Lucas as we approached the porch and he had tears streaming down his face — even though no mention had been made of leaving him, nor did I have any intention of leaving him. For whatever reason, he sensed that change was afoot and didn’t like it.

And, I must admit, I was anxious about the new caregiver myself. She seemed nice enough when we met, and had great experience, but I fretted nonetheless. For the last several caregivers, one of the big boys had been home with the baby most of the time, which provided a security that worked both ways — I could get a full report from the more verbose big boys, and they could act as a human security blanket to Lucas. But with the big boys now both in school full time, I’d be sending Lucas off by himself. I haven’t send a child solo to day care since my eldest was one year old!

In the nights leading up to leaving Lucas with the new caregiver, I lost many hours of sleep worrying over the transition. Maybe, I thought, we should just make the “commute” to Barrhaven work. After all, wasn’t a stable and loving environment more important than a few minutes of inconvenience and extra driving each day?

The night before his first day, I made sure my work calendar was light and told the new caregiver that if he was too miserable she should call me and I would come and pick him up. I castigated myself for not making a longer transition period for him. I counted my family leave days. I broached the subject carefully with Lucas, telling him what to expect the next day and nearly weeping when he began to object, mollified only by the idea of a half-finished puzzle he had started on one of our preparatory visits.

And you know what? Beloved dropped him off that first day and he went happily into her house without a backward glance. No tears, no fuss. He’s been happy as a clam ever since. He loves his new caregiver, and especially loves her 13-year-old daughter, who seems to return the favour.

So I ask you this: when am I going to learn to stop working myself into a lather over things that turn out to be absolutely nothing?

And if you’re keeping count, that’s seven caregivers for our family in seven years — and ours seems to be a story of success and stability compared to many I’ve heard. We’ve been blessed by some truly wonderful caregivers, and only had a few bad apples in our lot. But of all the challenges we’ve faced in raising our three boys, finding accessible, affordable, quality child care continues to be the most daunting.

We’ve been so lucky, and I’m grateful for that. But something as important as child care shouldn’t be left to the caprices of good fortune. Here’s hoping our luck holds out. I think this one’s a keeper.

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1. Oh no, not another post about daycare!
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It went something like this:

Ring, ring.

Hello?

Hello DaniGirl.

Oh, hello Universe. Nice to hear from you. What’s new?

Oh, you know, the usual. Had an impressive supernova blow out last millennium near Rigel Four, made for a pretty good show. It should get to your galaxy in about a half a billion years, but don’t sweat it just yet. In fact, that’s not why I’m calling.

Oh yeah, thanks for those amazing Northern Lights this week, they were fantastic. So anyway, what’s up?

Well, I heard you were a little stressed about the whole moving thing, and about balancing the financial responsibility of the new house. You were beginning to fret, and to wonder if maybe you should give up your part-time arrangement and go back to work full time.

Sigh, yeah. I’ve been thinking about that. In my heart, I don’t want to — but I don’t want to be house-poor either. We’ve had an unexpected extra expense, and suddenly the load will be a bit tough to bear if I’m only working four days a week.

Yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, so I ran this article in the Ottawa Citizen today, about how a recent study countered previous findings about families with working mothers, and found that “overall impact of a mother’s participation in the paid workforce on her child’s mental and social development was measured, the effect was neutral. The positives — higher family income, better child care, the mother’s improved mental health — outweighed the negatives, such as less time for mother and baby to interact.”

Thanks Universe, I appreciate you thinking of me. But whether or not I work is not really a question. I have to work, much as I’d rather be home full time. Me not working is just not an option.

But listen to this: the article goes on to say, “the best of all worlds was not when mothers of young children stayed at home full-time, but rather when they work part-time.”

You know, I’ve really been feeling that way since I started working part time last year. What else does it say?

So you work 30 hours a week, right? The article also says, “children whose mothers worked fewer than 30 hours a week benefited from the higher household income, better quality daycare, a happier home-life, plus interaction with their mother.”

No shit? The best of all worlds, you say? So in other words, I lay awake half of last night wondering and worrying about whether I should go back to work full time, and you heard me and published this article in this morning’s paper, just to help me decide?

Yep. Cuz that’s just how I roll.

Thanks Universe. It’s always nice to hear from you.

Anytime, DaniGirl. Anytime.

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It seems somehow both painfully ironic and sublimely fitting that in the days since I posted a meandering article rife with smugness about leisure time and how zen I am about the pace of my life that I have been too busy to pee, let alone consider writing another blog post.

Universe 1, DaniGirl 0.

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1. Memo to the universe: Please slow down!
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“Moms have more leisure time than they think!” reads the provocative headline on ParentDish, and you don’t even have to read the comments to imagine the divisive and ultimately completely unhelpful comments from both mothers and those who love to hate mothers. And of course, there were defensive howls of outrage across the mamasphere.

A few clicks brought me to the original article in the Washington Post. It’s quite long, but very good reading. A busy mother with a full-time career as a writer set out to find both good story fodder and a solution to a problem we all face: “Most days, I feel so overwhelmed that I barely have time to breathe” she wrote. So she kept a diary of all the time she spent on various activities and handed it over to an “expert” for analysis, who told her that she has 30 hours of leisure time each week. The kicker, of course, is in the definition of “leisure.” This particular expert defines leisure time to include, for example, visiting a sick friend, watching a movie with the kids, lying in bed listening to the news on a clock radio, and “sitting in a hot, broken-down car for two hours on a median strip and playing tic-tac-toe with my daughter while waiting for a tow truck.”

The fun times in Mommyville never end, I tell you!

Seriously, though, she raises a point that few of us would deny. We’re busy. Overwhelmingly, crazily, frustratingly busy. Ironically — or maybe not so much — I’ve been reading the source material for this blog post and pecking it out in stolen moments over the course of about four days, in an ADD-inspiring dozen or so separate sessions, because that’s how my life works these days.

I have two places I want to go with this post. The first is that I’ve been a whole lot happier in my life since I stopped feeling persecuted about the sheer amount of effort it takes to keep our family on track. Never in my life would I have imagined I’d be the kind of person who runs the swiffer at 6:30 in the morning because the best time to do something is the instant I notice it needs to be done and four other things aren’t clamouring for my attention. In the not-too-distant past, I was offended at the idea that I’d be required to do any sort of domestic work (tidying the kitchen, packing lunches, putting toys away) after putting the kids to bed because the time between 8 pm and bedtime seemed inviolably sacred “me” time. And I’ve gotten used to the fact that any given moment of doing one thing has an opportunity cost of a whole bunch of other things that will not get done. Between the time I get home from work and bedtime, I almost never sit still, occupying myself with one brain-dead and thankless domestic task after another. This is the reality of my life, this constant crazy juggling act, stealing Peter’s time to pay Paul and always on the breathless brink of having it all come crashing down on me like an ill-built house of cards.

But really, I’m okay with that.

More specifically, I become okay with that when I stopped feeling maudlinly nostalgic for the times when my life did not follow this frenetic pace and I realized that whether I pout about it or not, someone still has to fold the laundry. Again. It takes a damn lot of work to run a household and a family and a job. In fact, the straw that breaks this particular camel’s back is going to be — mark my words — managing the flow of paperwork to and from the school, in addition to managing the homework and the special PJ days and 100th day of school activities and pancake dinners and friendship parties and all the rest of what it takes to be a contributing member to our school’s community.

I’m rambling, aren’t I? Okay, maybe I’m ambivalent instead absolutely content with my particular spot on the leisure-time spectrum right now, but I have to tell you, I’m feeling a whole lot better about it now that I’ve made efforts to go with the flow instead of feeling resentful about the constant demands on my time and attention.

The second place I want to go with this post is that despite everything I said in the first point, I could easily argue that I have a good deal of “leisure” time in my life. I mean, I dedicate probably five to seven hours a week to the blog and my online empire — twitter, e-mail, surfing, etc. (Probably, ahem, a hell of a lot more than that, but I am not yet willing to stare down the reality of that particular truth just yet.)

And there’s another two or three hours a week that I dedicate to photography — taking pictures, processing them, reading photography books, coveting other people’s camera equipment (that last one, conveniently, I can do while doing many other things.) My single hour at the gym on Saturday mornings is something akin to sacred time, as is the 30 to 45 minutes I spend with the newspaper and a coffee the three days a week I don’t have to go to the office. I watch about an hour of TV a day, usually in a bit of a slack-jawed stupor at the end of the day. I meet friends for breakfast quite regularly on a Sunday morning and feel like I’ve done the kids an injustice if I don’t spend some time on a weekend getting out of the house with them, whether playing in the driveway or going to the park or the library or the museum or any of the hundred other places we haunt on our excursions. And I manage to cram in 20 to 30 minutes with a book every night in bed before I go to sleep.

Count up all that and we’re well over 20 hours per week of built-in “leisure” time. Mind you, I paid a price to buy that extra time in my life when I took a 20 per cent pay cut to drop down to a four day week, so maybe I’m not representative of the kind of “career mom” they’re talking about. And, rare is the time that I’m dedicating myself fully to a single task. I swear, I will not be that mother who surreptitiously checks her Blackberry while pushing junior on the swings — I don’t even *have* a Blackberry and I feel quite smug about that fact — but I have been known to check the blog or Flickr for new comments in between reading Dr Seuss and Sandra Boyton.

This quote from the Post story stayed with me, though. “In the Middle Ages, the sin of sloth had two forms,” [the time management expert] said. “One was paralysis, the inability to do anything — what we would see as lazy. But the other side was running about frantically. The sense that, ‘There’s no real place to go where I’m going, but, by God, I’m making great time.’ ”

In the end, you control what you can, and one of the ways to control your own personal chaos is with choices. I choose to blog rather than clean the bathroom, and I think that’s a perfectly reasonable choice four times in five, as long as you get to the bathroom eventually.

What say ye, bloggy peeps? Are you ladies (and men!) of leisure, or on the fast track to burnout? Do you have to work to find balance and, more importantly, do you succeed? And, most important of all — has anyone seen the toilet brush?

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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.

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I read with interest the story in the media this weekend of how the Walt Disney Company is offering refunds on the purchase of Baby Einstein DVDs, after the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood challenged the idea that the DVDs were a teaching tool rather than simply brain candy for toddlers.

Okay, seriously? People really thought that these DVDs were learning tools and not just a way to keep the baby entertained for 20 minutes so poor mom can take a shower or load the dishwasher or just gaze aimlessly into middle space for a precious hiatus?

But I was curious and I knew I wanted to blog about this story, so I did my due dilligence — which, apparently, the Ottawa Citizen / CanWest Global did not. The original article I read, which I read in the Ottawa Citizen on Saturday, says refunds would be made available to American AND Canadian parents, but when I went to the Baby Einstein Web site, I found that the offer is — as usual — good in the US only.

So let me get this straight — gullible American parents who feel they’ve been duped can be compensated, but gullible Canadian parents, who pay about $5 more per DVD by the way, are SOL? Nice.

The good news is, we should be hearing about the “blueprint” for all-day kindergarten in Ontario today from Premier Dalton McGuinty. I’ve heard that it will be rolled out in a limited fashion within two years but full implementation will take up to five years. Hoping it comes to Ottawa for the fall of 2012, at least!

I spent a lot of yesterday scanning Twitter for H1N1 chatter. Even anecdotally, I can see the tides turning in favour of the vaccine and in my opinion, rightly so. Even though I heard that the vaccine clinics were a bit of a debacle yesterday — seriously, they have people lining up OUTSIDE for up to THREE HOURS?!? — I am highly, highly impressed with the city for implementing a twitter account that updates the wait times at various vaccine clinics across the city. One of the smartest government applications of social media I’ve yet seen. Bravo!

And here’s a tip for those of you without a twitter account: you can still read the latest update by going to http://twitter.com/ottawahealth. For previous updates, just scan down the page.

I’m pulling the big boys out of school and blowing off nap time (lord help us) on Wednesday afternoon to bring the kids in to get the H1N1 vaccine. Say a prayer to the god of short lineups and patient children for us, willya?

By the way, I was listening to CBC radio this morning, and Kathleen Petty was interviewing a local pediatrician (or maybe family doc) who had just won a prestigious award of excellence. They were talking, of course, about H1N1 and the doctor provided in just a few sentences the information that I’ve scoured hundreds of articles looking for. The main indications of *any* flu are cough and fever, plus at least one of sore joints, runny nose, etc. She said unless you have cough AND fever, emphasis on the “and”, you likely don’t have any kind of flu but if you do have (or, if your child has) both cough AND fever, you should be proactive about keeping your self/child home. Finally, a rule of thumb!

Thanks to everyone for your considered and considerate opinions on yesterday’s peanut butter toast post. I think that in the end, I agree with whomever suggested that the restaurant was certainly within its rights to honour the family’s request that no peanut butter be served, but that it would have been better handled had they informed people as they came in the door and not as their food was being served.

Edited to add: Please, if you haven’t already, read this comment from Jody. One of the most reasonable, well-informed comments I think I’ve ever read on the subject of peanut allergies. Thanks Jody!

I’m just putting the finishing touches on my giant annual list of local Christmas and Holiday parades! I love doing this post each year — and there are some exciting changes to the City of Ottawa parade this year. More soon – stay tuned!

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From CBC Ottawa, news that an Ottawa couple successfully argued that both parents are entitled employment insurance (EI) parental benefits for their twins. Each parent claims the benefits for one child. The decision applies only to this couple, but sets an amazing precedent. Way cool!

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3. Twitter 101 for Parents

I thought it was worth a second post (here’s the first) to link to some of the fantastic opinions people have expressed on the subject of full-day kindergarten in Ontario.

In our little corner of the blogosphere Rebecca at a bit of momsense is still on the fence. BeachMama isn’t on the fence at all – she doesn’t suppport the idea.

Randall Denley in today’s Citizen provides a rant contrary opinion from the grumpy old men contingent, and Elizabeth Payne (one of my favourite Citizen columnist) provides a more balanced and thoughtful — not to mention favourable – insight. Best quote to date, IMHO, goes to Elizabeth Payne for this one:

Bail out a badly run and outdated car company and people will shrug their shoulders. Try to build a system in which all children have access to good-quality care, and an equal start in life, and wait for the howls of outrage.

I’ve been loving your comments, here and elsewhere in the blogosphere. And I’ve been prudently ignoring the comment sections on articles about full-day kindergarten in the major media. If I believed the majority of those comments, I’d be thinking I’m a “self-indulgent, latte-toting, lazy mother who had more children than she could afford to raise and is now looking for to the state to raise them for her.” Nice.

Edited to add: hoo-boy, it’s not just the anonymous comentators who are opinionated wing-nuts. Alberta’s Minister of Finance thinks ‘raising children properly’ requires one parent to stay at home. Yikes!

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1. Back to school and other thoughts
2. Letter to the editor: child care and early childhood education
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A couple of weeks back, I started writing a series of posts about the state of early education and child care in Canada. The first post was an introduction and summary of the Canadian Senate’s report called “Early Childhood Education and Care: Next Steps.” I was rather underwhelmed by the Senates main recommendations, which were for more bureaucracy. Before I had a chance to write up my next post on the series, the government of Ontario released a watershed (I hope) report full of jaw-dropping recommendations for early childhood education in Ontario, centred around the recommendation for full-day kindergarten for 4- and 5-year-olds.

Compared to the Senate’s call for more bureaucracy, I was delighted – practically gleeful! — to see the clear plan and call to action laid out in “With Our Best Future in Mind: Implementing Early Learning in Ontario.” The report, commissioned when the McGuinty provincial government was elected in 2007, contains recommendations that are so full of promise and potential that I’m almost afraid to hope they might be implemented.

Here are some of the things the report recommends:

“Every child in Ontario who turns 4 by December 31 would be entitled to attend two years of full-day, school-year Early Learning Program operated by school boards.”

“Parents would have the option of extended programming before and after the traditional school day and year, not as an add-on but as part of the Early Learning Program.” That’s integrated before and after school care!

The report also calls for schools to become “community hubs” offering many of the same services that the current Early Years Centres offer, including parenting support and counseling, pre- and post-natal support and information, early identification of issues and resources, etc. Schools will be open to the community from 7:30 am to 6 pm, 50 weeks of the year. “Crucial to the new vision for Ontario is the transformation of all elementary schools into community schools, open to their neighbourhoods and capable of providing families with opportunities for children’s learning, care, health, culture, arts, and recreation from the prenatal period through to adolescence.”

Imagine that! Schools open to the community! (Is anyone else vaguely disturbed by having to stand outside a fence practically off school property for school pick-ups and drop-offs? I understand the school’s concern for safety, but I do in fact feel vaguely alienated from my kids’ school!)

It also calls for fee-based Extended Day Primary programming – basically, enrichment programs in arts and sports for ages 6 to 8 and 9 to 12.

A final recommendation is the implementation of a 400-day paid leave for parents, including a six-week leave for the exclusive use of fathers and other “non-birthing” parents.

It’s a hugely ambitious plan, aiming for implementation beginning next year in 2010-2011. I can only hope the school boards and teachers’ unions that are currently criticizing the plan have the sense to recognize it as containing the kind of radical shift in philosophy that we will look back on and wonder why we didn’t do it a generation before.

I love the fact that this report gets it right by first suggesting a series of finite, clearly enunciated steps to be implemented more or less immediately, and THEN follows it up with a recommendation for the necessary ministries and legislation to support the revitalized system, instead of the other way around as recommended by the Senate report.

If you haven’t read it between the lines, I’m very excited about this report and just about everything it contains. Once upon a time, when the idea of full-day kindergarten was first floated by the McGuinty government circa 2007, I admit that I saw it mostly as a way to reduce my own out-of-pocket costs on child care. But, after spending a lot of time recently up to my elbows in public reports on child care and early childhood education, I can see that there are huge societal gains to be had in implementing these ideas and the potential for saving a few bucks on daycare is actually among the lesser of the huge benefits to be reaped. I’ll take a look at the research I’ve seen in the next post in what is becoming an increasingly elongated — but suddenly extremely positive — series!

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1. Letter to the editor: child care and early childhood education
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Submitted this morning to the Ottawa Citizen:

As the mother of three boys, ages seven, five and one year old, I read with interest Elizabeth Payne’s op-ed article (“When we are six“, June 4, 2009) about school readiness in Ottawa. I think Ms Payne missed a valuable opportunity to link the issue of school readiness to the state of early childhood education in Canada.

Earlier this year, with practically no fanfare from the media, the Senate of Canada released a report called Early Childhood Education and Care: Next Steps. The report was inspired by a 2006 report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that ranked Canada dead last of 14 countries participating in the OECD’s Thematic Review of Early Childhood Education and Care.

As noted in the Senate report, “the 50 reports that make up the OECD’s review of education and care services for pre-school-aged children comprise the largest body of comparative policy research to date in the field” and “allowed Canada to evaluate itself against international peers and provided a unique opportunity to drawn on best practices in early learning and child care policy and delivery.”

The report notes that of the countries studied, Canada ranked fourth overall for GDP and seventh overall for proportion of working mothers, but had the fourth-highest costs for child care and had the seventh-highest levels of child poverty. And, more on point with Ms Payne’s article, Canada came in last overall for attendance in early childhood education programs for ages 3 to 6 years old. Further, Canada came in 15th out of 20 countries on spending on social programs as a proportion of GDP and last of countries compared in spending on early learning and child care services.

Unfortunately, the main recommendations of the Senate report were for more bureaucracy, including recommending a Minister of State for Children and Youth and a bureaucratic network to support the Minister. It’s a start, I suppose. More disappointing, though, was the abject lack of interest by the media in this vitally important topic.

The issue of quality child care is not just about babysitting or “beer and popcorn” money designed to buy votes. We need to start working now on a workable national system of integrated early childhood education and child care. That will help to level the playing field across socio-economic levels, not just throughout the city but throughout Canada.

(Seems about once a year I get my knickers in enough of a knot to write to the Citizen. I’ll let you know if they publish it!)

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1. The Senate Report on Childcare in Canada: Part 1
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3. A call to action for my American friends

You know the topic of affordable, quality child care is dear to my heart, and I hope to continue my series on the Senate of Canada’s recent report on child care and early childhood education in Canada later this week.

Today, I received this note from MomsRising.org about the Family Tax Relief Act of 2009 that is currently before the U.S. Senate, and I thought it was important enough to share with you:

The Family Tax Relief Act of 2009 (S. 997) sponsored by Senators Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME), would improve the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit for millions of families by more than doubling the maximum credit families can claim for child care expenses and making it fully refundable so that low and moderate income working families will also benefit.

Now, more than ever, families need our support. The Family Tax Relief Act of 2009 would make a real difference in the lives of millions of families.

Please forward this message on to friends, families, moms, and dads at your workplace and in your community. We need everyone’s voice to pass this important legislation.

Don’t forget to send a letter to your Senators now asking them to co-sponsor this critical legislation: Click here support the Family Tax Relief Act of 2009.

Thank you for your support of America’s families.

Because the need for affordable, quality child care knows no boundaries.

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At the end of April 2009, the Senate of Canada released a report titled Early Childhood Education and Care: Next Steps. I printed it out and have been lugging it around with me (it runs more than 200 pages) for the better part of a month. If you are at all interested in the issues of daycare, child care and early childhood education in Canada, and how Canada compares to the rest of the world, I highly recommend you make yourself a copy and find the time to read it. If you’ve never read a Parliamentary report, you don’t know what you’re missing! And if you can’t quite find the couple of spare hours you’ll need to polish it off, fear not, because I am going to break it down for you and share the highlights over the next little while.

When I read the Executive Summary, my first reaction was eyeball-rolling disappointment. The main recommendations are (spoiler alert!):

1. That the Prime Minister appoint a Minister of State for Children and Youth, “with responsibilities to include working with provincial and territorial governments to advance quality early learning, parenting programs and child care” and to research early childhood development and learning.

2. The Minister should be advised by a new National Advisory Council on Children, on matters of “how to best support parents and advance quality early learning and child care.” The Council would be populated by “Parliamentarians, other stakeholders, community leaders and parents, with appropriate representation from Aboriginal communities.”

3. That the government call a series of multi-jurisdictional meetings to establish a “pan-Canadian framework to provide policies and programs to support children and their families” and establish a “federal/provincial/territorial Council of Ministers…to meet anually to review Canada’s progress with respect to other OECD countries and to share best practices.”

4. The government should establish “an adequately funded, robust system of data collection, evaluation and research, promoting all aspects of quality human development and in early childhood programming, including the development of curricula, program evaluation and child outcome measures.”

Captivating stuff, isn’t it? The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Techonology took nearly three years to issue a report that calls for — more bureaucracy.

Because this is a topic dear to my heart, and because I think it’s important for every single Canadian to know at least a little bit about this issue, and because I like to think I have at least a moderate ability to translate government-speak into a language people other than the bureaucrats can understand, I’m going to take an in-depth look at this report in a series of posts over the next little while. By the time I finished reading it — and I read every single word because there is no end to the things I will do for my bloggy peeps — I was more or less in agreement with the Committee’s recommendations.

This Committee’s report was inspired by a 2006 report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that ranked Canada dead last of 14 countries participating in the OECD’s Thematic Review of Early Childhood Education and Care. As noted in the Senate report, “the 50 reports that make up the OECD’s review of education and care services for pre-school-aged children comprise the largest body of comparative policy research to date in the field” and “allowed Canada to evaluate itself against international peers and provided a unique opportunity to drawn on best practices in early learning and child care policy and delivery.” Did I mention dead last? Ouch.

The OECD highlighted strengths and weaknesses in Canada’s early childhood care and education system. The strengths included the one-year parental leave, Quebec’s early education and child care policies, a well-established kindergarten network for children aged five years and older, and “efforts of provincial administrations to maintain ECEC services ‘despite a withdrawal of Federal funding and a climate of suspicion of public services’.” The areas of concern included:

• weak public funding of ECEC services, especially for children under five years;
• the separation of child care from early education;
• limited access to affordable child care services and particular issues related to access for Aboriginal children;
• the quality of child care, e.g., very poor accommodation, child care workers’ protective and interventionist approach, lack of direct access to outside space;
• the apparent predominance of unregulated care; and,
• staff qualifications and training and other issues related to their recruitment and retention, e.g., absence of federal and provincial/territorial guidelines and low wage levels, and lmited tradition of professional development.

A few more statistics that I found both enlightening and alarming: among the OECD countries under review, Canada ranked in the top 10 in the following categories:

Wealth: ranked 4th in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita
Cost of child care: ranked 4th in amount paid by parents for early childhood services
Child Poverty: ranked 7th overall
Proportion of “working” mothers: ranked 7th overall for mothers with children under three years old and 8th for mothers with children under six years old.

Further, Canada came in 14th out of 20 for early childhood education attendance for children ages 0 to 3 and last out of 20 countries for early childhood education attendance for ages 3 – 6. We came in 15th out of 20 countries on spending on social programs as a proportion of GDP and last of countries compared in spending on early learning and child care services.

It’s not a very pretty picture, is it?

And that’s only skimming through 20 of 200+ pages of information. In the next couple of posts, we’ll take a look at what other countries are doing, why early childhood education is so important to every single member of our society, and what Canada should do next.

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Interesting interview in the G&M this morning with Penelope Leach, following up on her new book Child Care Today: Getting It Right for Everyone. I haven’t read the book, but I agree with what she’s saying in the interview.

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I was absolutely tickled when Kate over at One Tired Ema asked me to bring my posse of lactating Canucks into the conversation about an article in this month’s Atlantic called “The Case Against Breast Feeding.” You can go read the Atlantic piece if you like, or you can skip on over to Kate’s place and read her excellent summary and reply, and some really interesting comments. Be warned, though — block off some time, because it took me the whole bus ride home yesterday and then a bit more time today to get through it all!

The gist of it is this: as Kate so concisely summarizes, it’s an article “in which a white, upper middle class, urban mom of three–and journalist!–takes on The Popular Establishment, which purports to tell you that nursing is actually better than formula feeding.” She (the author, Hanna Rosin, not Kate) basically refutes the idea that breast is best and says all the medical findings are questionable at best. The literature she reviewed by borrowing a friend’s password to an online medical library showed “breastfeeding is probably, maybe, a little better” but that the studies are largely inconsistent compared to the way they are presented in the popular literature.

She then goes on to opine that we as a society are placing way too much emphasis on the importance of breastfeeding, and that our breasts are in fact ruining whatever slim chance we had at equality in the workplace and even in the home. She literally “seethes” (her word) at the burden placed upon her shoulders as a mother to feed the baby, and says “the debate about breast-feeding takes place without any reference to its actual context in women’s lives.”

Okay, so that’s the Coles Notes version. IMHO, she’s no different than the French woman who wrote the book about how motherhood is a trap for women a couple of years ago — she’s using inflamatory language and a shockingly unpopular opinion to stir the pot and rile people up. Hey, more power to her. It’s hard for me to imagine a mother of three — who, FWIW, seems to have nursed all three to a year — could actually believe what she says she believes, but she also seems to have been generally resentful to the whole process of nursing and maybe even motherhood in general. She says she’s “often tapping [her] foot impatiently, waiting for him to finish.” I cringed when I read that. Poor baby.

Anyway, all of that has been done to death around the blogosphere — just do a search on “the case against breastfeeding” and Google practically oozes the vitriol of the nursing masses — but there is one nugget in here that really interests me, and Kate drew it out.

One of the points that Rosin makes is that the American Academy of Pediatrics officially recommended in 1997 that babies be exclusively breast-fed for the first six months, followed by six more months of partial nursing supplemented with the introduction of solid foods. And we know that in the US, most women get maternity leave in the range of three to 12 weeks. I’ve often commented that I simply can’t imagine how new mothers are coping with being back at work and having a newborn at home. I think this is about the only legitimate point I’d give Rosin: demanding that mothers of young babies be fully functional in a day job AND nurse a baby six or eight times a day AND do all the other things a mother is supposed to do really does set up some unrealistic and often unattainable expectations.

Of course, the answer is change the policies, not change the recommendation to breast-feed exclusively. But I’d like to do a straw poll here and ask: how has your maternity leave affected your ability to — or, desire to — breastfeed your baby? If you’ve been around a while, you know the early days of nursing were hell for me three times over. If I had to be back at work a month after Tristan was born, I’m not sure I would have had the wherewithal to keep nursing.

And there’s the other side of the coin, too. Kate asked me specifically if the year-long maternity leave has affected my career path and my feelings of “equality”. It’s a good question, but also brings out my main criticism of Rosin’s piece: so many factors are at play here, it’s hard to suss out one piece of the puzzle and say it’s the mitigating factor.

I’ve had three years of maternity leave in the past seven years. Because I’m blessed with a job that gives me a full top-up to my original salary from the base that employment insurance provides, we’ve taken no financial ‘hit’ because of my years off. (*says a silent prayer of gratitude*) I returned from my first maternity leave into a new job with my old employer. It was a job I’d been working toward for almost a decade, and I was thrilled to finally achieve it — and then I was back on mat leave within the year. Within six months of returning from my second mat leave, I won a promotion. When I was pregnant with Lucas, I was identified as a potential “high-flyer” in our agency, someone to be groomed for an eventual management position. I was actually supposed to come back from maternity leave into full-time French training so I could start down that road, but as you know I pulled myself off that path by taking a different position and dropping down to four days per week. I’m still with the same employer, just doing a slightly different job.

My maternity leaves don’t seem to have affected my employers’ (writ large) opinion of my capabilities and potential, and I’ve been moving progressively up the ladder. I make just about as much now at four days a week than I was making when I was pregnant with Tristan and working full time. I love my job most days and I work hard, but I’ve made no secret of the fact that my family comes first. I’ve pulled myself off the fast-track in search of balance, and it was one of the smarter decisions I’ve made where working and mothering intersect.

So, the answer is of course having children and taking time to raise them and having them be the primary focus in my life has affected my career path. If our time spent, in Kate’s gorgeous phrase, “tooling around in the Badlands of Infertility” had come out differently, I would very likely be in a very different job, likely more senior, and I’d definitely more focused on my ‘career.’

And there would be a big aching void in my life, because being a mother is all I ever wanted out of life. I’m proud that I’m successful, and that I’m seen as someone with potential and worth investing in. But I’m also proud that Kate sees me as a mother whose opinion in this debate is valuable. And I don’t have to tell you how proud I am to be a mother.

In five or six years, Lucas will be in school full time and I’ll be able to refocus on this whole career thing again. If I were a more ambitious sort of person, maybe I would be resentful and see my role as a mother in terms of sacrifices I’ve made instead of joys I’ve earned. Certainly, that seems to be where Rosin’s head is at.

Do we have equality in our home? Hell, no. But we have balance, and I think that’s better. Some things are heavier on Beloved’s shoulders and some on mine, but we share those burdens. That’s why our relationship works, I think — we’re perfectly compliementary, but that doesn’t mean we’re perfectly equal. It works for us.

So, Kate, the short answer is yes, it seems quite likely that Canada’s generous maternity leave policies affected my ability to continue to nurse my babies for as long as I did in a positive way. And no, I don’t think the one-year leave of absence has had a detrimental effect on my career path. I’ve dialed it down myself, but that’s a choice with which I am not only satisfied, but delighted. And just wading my way through all this reminds me again that I am coming from such a place of priviledge, and even many of my Canadian sisters have not been nearly so blessed as me.

Phew, this ran long, didn’t it? But it’s a fascinating topic. Tell me, or tell Kate at her place, what you think: has a longer maternity leave interfered with your career and how do you feel about that?

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It’s been a full month since I’ve been back at work, and we’ve settled into a comfortable routine that seems to be working out well for everyone. I think that this four-day week thing was a brilliant choice, and I’m so happy we were able to make it work. It’s made a huge difference in my feeling of connection to the boys’ daily lives and my ability to balance working with mothering. Three cheers for balance!

Five things I love about being back at work:

1. Unencumbered freedom. I can get up and go for a coffee or a chat with a colleague whenever I want, stop in to shops and wander aimlessly on my lunch break, and nobody wants to crawl into my lap when I’m trying to go to the bathroom.
2. Hot coffee. At home, coffee inevitably gets cold before I get half way through because I’m distracted by a hundred other things. At work, I often finish a cup while it’s still warm. Bliss!
3. Grown-up clothes. Shoes that go “click-click” when you walk, make-up, and clothes that you need to iron and hang to dry or (gasp!) dry clean: all things I had more or less forgotten about in the last year!
4. Being downtown. I love this city, and I love where my office is located. Coming downtown every day makes me feel connected to the city and the people in it in a way that I don’t feel out in the suburbs. And being able to leave it here every day and go home to those same suburbs is equally delightful.
5. They’re getting along fine without me at home. Having a great nanny and not having to worry about what’s going on in my absence makes everything easier. (Wasn’t sure whether this belongs in this section or the next!)
6. Okay, one more: using my brain for something other than finding the lost TV remote or calculating the nutritional value of pop tarts. (Although, that also sometimes belongs in the next section, because the mom-brain is getting to me lately and I wonder some days if I have enough brain cells left to actually do this job!)

Five things I hate about being back at work:

1. Commuting. The buses are still farked up, running inconsistently and ridiculously overcrowded. I’ve had to stand the entire way downtown every morning and the afternoon bus is so crowded I almost missed my stop yesterday because I couldn’t work my way through the crush to get to the door. All this joy for the ridiculous price of $101 per month.
2. It’s lonely. Odd, considering I see a hundredfold more people each day while downtown than I do on an average day at home, but even in a crowd I am by myself. Most of my day is spent in crowded solitude or working quietly at my computer.
3. Sitting all day. I’m so used to moving all day long, chasing the baby and putting on laundry and picking up toys and walking back and forth to the school two or three times a day that just sitting here for hours at a time – while relaxing at first – makes me kind of twitchy!
4. Trying to get a full day of domestic stuff done in four hours. By the time I get home, make dinner, feed/eat dinner, tidy up daily disaster, get lunches and bags ready for next day, put out clothes for next day, give various boys baths and get pyjamas ready, it’s almost my bed time. Doesn’t leave much time for fun with anyone, either.
5. I miss the kids during the day. Sigh.

I had a much easier time coming up with the five things I don’t like than the five things I do like about working. Matter of fact, I could have extended the “don’t like” list by another five or ten items without much thought! But, all in all, I think it’s working out fine and I’m grateful that we’re on the path to that elusive but oh so important balance.

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A week or two ago, I blogged about an interactive widget from CBC.ca that compares national daycare costs. If you’re curious, the follow-up article from CBC is here. (Title = “Rising costs, waiting lists frustrate parents.” No kidding?

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I found this interesting little interactive report on daycare fees on CBC.ca. You can enter your city and total child care costs, then compare with others. Note to self to go back and play with it more later…

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I step quietly into the house, not consciously intending to spy on the boys or the new nanny, but knowing that they aren’t expecting me home quite so early. I hear laughter, and realize while expelling a sigh that I’ve been holding my breath with dread. It’s the end of my long first day back at work after my maternity leave, and I’m not sure what to expect.

I don’t want to make a big deal of rushing into the house and freaking Lucas out any more than I have to, so I slip off my coat and walk with affected nonchalance into the living room, tossing affectionate greetings to Tristan and Simon as I beeline toward the baby. He’s been playing happily on the floor with his toys, and my anxiety lessens considerably at seeing him so content.

I expect some form of reaction; I’ve never been apart from him for this many waking hours, and on the occasions when I have left him in the child-minding area at the gym, he has cried harder upon my return than he did in my absence. I brace myself and pause to let him absorb my presence before I sweep him into my arms. He beams in delight when he realizes I have returned, and when I pick him up he melds his body into mine. He engulfs me in his baby version of a bear hug, his arms and legs clinging so tightly that I’m sure if I let go he would hang suspended from my side like a baby chimpanzee clings to its mother as she swings from branch to branch. He lays his head on my shoulder, tucking it under my chin as if he’ll never move away again, and I can feel his relief at my return radiating from him. His perfect stillness as he wraps his body into mine takes my breath away, and I am surprised to feel the rush of tears welling in my throat.

He has never hugged me like this before, and I can do nothing but stand and sway with him in my arms, caught in this breathless moment of love and relief. He’s okay. I’m okay. We’ll all be fine.

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