We tried to be really careful about how much stuff we bought for the baby, and mostly did well, but babies still need a fair amount of maintenance related things and parents definitely need some stuff for sanity’s sake.
On review, I think we have a good idea of how well we did for this fourth-trimester phase.
Our Chicco Car seat & stroller set
LB hated the car seat at first but came around after a few weeks. The stroller is awesome. It took months but we found the perfect lightweight, one hand collapsible, complete overhead canopy coverage stroller that we can both use. Ze loves staring at the sky when we’re out for a walk and conks out for naps in it.
Baby bouncer kinda like this. Ours was a hand me down, and too big for LB as a newborn but ze has grown into it and figured out that kicking really hard makes it rock. We can actually put hir down to hang out while we eat sometimes. Ze is still insistent on being held a lot more than we’d like but this gives us the occasional break.
Boppy pillows. We used this ourselves as pillows when cuddling, to prop hir up when nursing or bottle feeding, as an arm rest when bottle feeding.
Pampers wipes, Sensitive Too dry! And too thin. These are two of the three Bears of baby wipes, for us.
Not worth it…
We got an adorable cradle hand-me-down and it was in great shape. Sadly, LB wasn’t having any of that putting hir down business when ze was small enough to use it, and when ze finally was ok with laying around to play or maaaaaybe nap, hir wingspan was just too wide. And what child sleeps with hir arms flung wide to either side? MINE. Of course.
I still have a box of 100 Lansinoh disposable nursing pads. They were highly recommended and I’m sure they’re great but I can never remember to use them, and generally I’m pumping or nursing frequently enough not to need them. *shrug* There is a point to ordering things online with free returns, I don’t have to leave the house to get my money back.
I’m working away at Swagbucks to earn Amazon money for household, Little Bean, and dog things we need. Feel free to join using my referral link if you like!
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Retirement: I’ve been doing lump sum contributions to my IRA at the end of each tax year, but I should really do it monthly instead. Mostly for superficial reasons: seeing $5500 come out of the savings at once is more painful than ~ $500/month. Plus I can probably cash flow that $500/month if I’m creative, rather than taking it out of savings at all! Or am I getting greedy?
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Update: screw it, I’m cashflowing that sucker. 2014 contribution, done.
2015 contributions, set up as recurring withdrawals.
2016 contributions, will automatically go forth and withdraw.
We recently experienced a little improvement in quality of life, and so decided to take on another challenge.
Since none of my family had met the newbie yet, and his family was ready to take another crack at it, we loaded up a rental and drove down the coast. Here’s how it went….
Night 1: we left an hour and a half behind schedule. I blame Enterprise. They botched pickup, they didn’t have the car at the location even after I confirmed with them two days in advance AND they didn’t have a clean car ready to go when PiC finally arrived at the 2nd location where the cars were allegedly ready. They threw us exactly 1.5 hours behind.
We rented a minivan because STUFF and we wanted to be safer w/Seamus and LB. I hate not being able to crate him for the drive but there is no way to fit a Seamus-sized crate in the car. A truck, sure, but I’m not a fan of popping the dog in the truck bed, exposed to the elements. And LB, of course, requires a car seat and numerous other accoutrements. We tried to minimize as much as possible and consider this a learning experience for future packing.
I haaate running out of diapers and paying full price so I packed nearly 100. For 5.5 days away. It’s called pooperation, alright? I also packed twice as many doggy poo bags as Seamus could use. Very little worse than being stuck in a shitty situation with no clean up available.
Surprise: LB still hates being strapped into the car seat and hates sitting still in the car but loves freeway driving. We prepared our souls for multiple stops and screaming, instead ze slept the whole first 4 hour leg.
Day 2: we made an extra stop on Leg 2, making it 2 of 3 stretches before we made it the Home Base and that 45 minute delay put us in the middle of hellish traffic. 2:30 and like a bloody spider, GPS showed traffic stretched out every direction from the body of LA. Of course. It was a quick tutorial in why we can never move back. Every trip would take at least 45 minutes, if not 2 hours, because our friends and family are scattered everywhere.
LB ran out of “sitting in a car seat, putting up with freeway” steam at the tail end of Leg 3 so we rode the rest of the way serenaded by hir increasingly ragged roars. We slept pretty well that night, when we slept. It was a parody of our routine at home: sleep til ze wakes, one stumbles to get the bottle and the other weaves over to the sofa with hir, both collapse while ze is fed and patted back down. Stay on the sofa the rest of the night.
Day 3: Most of the morning and afternoon was spent recovering from the long drive and then ze finally met part of my family that night. Ze was full of chatter and what we call “crab bubbles” and then crashed hard.
We got to visit with some friends briefly that evening, and wind down almost like regular people, except we had to keep checking on LB since we didn’t bring a monitor.
Day 4 was the most intense day. We had a morning to early afternoon engagement, a small reunion, and ze decided that since we had to be up at 715 anyway, why not get up at 620 and stay up?
Thanks to, again, SoCal traffic, we didn’t get home til after 3, and then it was back out again for a dinner. This dragged on far longer than was civilized for a tiny infant and ze passed out in the car. Blessedly, this was the night of the long sleep. Ze actually stayed asleep for 8 hours. Hadn’t happened before, hasn’t happened since. But boy did we need it.
Day 5 was one last hurrah gathering of family and arguably the best one. LB was whisked away by Grandma, only to be seen again when hungry, then whooshed off to a cuddle and feeding with Grandpa. Aunts and Great Grandma finished up the rounds of baby passing and ze fell asleep in PiC’s arms. I don’t see this branch of the family often enough and boy do I miss them. Ze was also surprised with a handful of amazingly timed baby gifts: all things ze needed and I hadn’t even thought to mention them to anyone. Psychic family, I tell ya.
Logistics!
Packing. We were pretty sure that we overpacked but didn’t want to take the risk that going too minimalist would be to my detriment. I can only handle so much manual stuff, before you factor in the stress of travel, disrupted routines, and the energy drain of socializing.
Turns out we didn’t need: the spare cozy blanket (we brought two heavy/cozy and one light blankets, 2 were used regularly); the baby carriers (we were too tired to wear hir); a picnic blanket. I could also have packed about 10 fewer diapers but let’s never skimp on packing diapers because I don’t want to pay full price or live with regrets.
Feeding the Bean. I planned to do combination pumping and formula for hir feeding so we could be flexible. Turned out we didn’t need most of our handy formula packets. When I didn’t have enough prepumped milk packed, I nursed hir, and most days I was able to get nearly 20 oz in just two pumping sessions. Really quite convenient.
Costs. The car rental was nearly $400, and of course we had to fill up about three times. We stayed at places with breakfast provided and packed enough food and drinks along in our cooler so that we only paid for takeout twice. The convenience of not having to cram everything into our smaller cars and risking things falling over on Seamus or fighting with squeezing stuff into every inch was so worth that outlay.
PiC took a generous holiday last year to be home with us and, despite working through most of it, I was immensely spoiled.
He was an absolute superman! He only left me the chores I wanted: laundry, cooking, correspondence and gifts, all financials, tending to work and hobbies. Everything else was taken care of.
He was all over it: furniture related acquisition/building/maintenance, Craigslisting, car maintenance and upkeep, reorganizing, dog stuff (usually my specialty but on temporary suspension), keeping the house clean (always his specialty).
Oh, and feeding me fruit. He’s excellent at feeding me fruit regularly. It was great. Very nearly the ideal split of home life, with me continuing to work and him doing stuff he wanted to get done and in a timely manner.
It got me thinking that, despite loving having my quiet time and space, this suggests that my once upon a time dream of being the breadwinner and having PiC be the SAHD and house manager isn’t so farfetched after all. I just assumed that I couldn’t bear that much time in close quarters even with my beloved spouse but it turns out we enjoy each other’s company more than I realized!
The other piece of the puzzle is that after all this time with Little Bean, I do not like giving over hir care to someone else. I want to be the one hugging, cuddling, feeding and even changing hir. Failing that, PiC should be doing it. This is an odd sense of possessiveness (MY BABY) that I never expected to feel, or at least not this strongly, and the desire to be home with my child is utterly foreign.
Mind, I do not want to be a stay at home mom, I’d be terrible at that. Physically, I’m simply not up to it. And eventually, I’d get antsy to do other things, my brain would go right to mush and my temper would fray. I’m not the full time SAHM anyone would want. (Though, when I’m hung up on an idea that won’t develop properly, the idea of just cuddling LB while I think is awfully appealing. I am pretending that ze isn’t heavier than a sack of potatoes and demanding full time attention.)
I want to be home and available to LB, to continue to work and have my family be together.
What would it would take?
1. We need enough money to cover both our salaries and the full cost of good health insurance. Health insurance has forever been a main reason I’ve worked so hard. You can’t afford to be without it when you have a chronic illness. Sure, we could live on less but a) I don’t want to, b) we support more than just ourselves and I can’t force Dad to cut costs more (YET), c) savings is not optional.
2. Potential to grow as a professional and therefore potential to grow my salary further.
3. Be location independent, saving my energy for the important stuff.
I’m not an ideas and vision sort of person, I’m a Make it Happen sort so getting started isn’t the challenge, it’s coming up with a project in the first place. I’m an excellent troubleshooter but creativity isn’t my strongest suit.
Sidebar: I both admire and envy friends who knew exactly what they wanted, whether it was to stay home and rock the Best Mama At Home thing, or to get back into the fray at six weeks and rock the Career Lady thing, and were able to execute the plan.
Since my body is a jerk, a lot, things are a bit more complicated but this has my brain ticking again.
It could be time for a major career change once I lay out the details of what we’d be willing to take on and risk, or another change altogether for the same result. Let’s see!
Is it ironic to anyone else that one of the first things you have to look for when you’re expecting, assuming you haven’t decided that one of you will stay home with the kid(s), is childcare? I mean, you’re going through all that trouble to bake and birth the child and then we have to farm out their care to some degree.
I say this with absolutely no judgment at all, I have never wanted to give up my professional career to stay at home with the kids a day in my life so I know it’s part of the cost of my choice but it sure does feel counterintuitive. I enthusiastically support the idea of Doting Dad PiC staying home if we could swing it but since we’re not quite there yet, sitters and daycare are part of our reality.
Sidebar: I have had friends who chose to stay home after looking over the finances, not because they wanted to do that more, and also SAHP friends who did want to. We have all sorts in our cohort and I respect all those choices equally. /sidebar
The minimum for your bog standard daycare here is a shade under $2000/month for full time, five days a week, maybe including a snack but usually not. They don’t come standard with: diapers and wipes, hot or full meals or snacks, or video monitoring.
You might think I’m nuts expecting that last but it is becoming more common in the LA area and that’s one thing they may be doing right. For my money and sanity, I’m not leaving my kid with strangers without some kind of oversight – I’ve read too many (horror) news stories about abuse. Just the other day there was a 2 month old killed by her sitter’s 11 year old kid. ELEVEN. I nearly threw up reading that and don’t tell me that hormones have anything to do with that reaction other than the hormone of their world will BURN if someone tries to abuse my Little Bean.
Right. Back to the point.
In the Bay Area, full time daycare is bogglingly expensive.
Our mornings are hard enough that I hate the idea and the logistics of dropping LB off at some location with strangers and no video surveillance for the day. This is further reinforced by an unexpectedly strong sense of not wanting to let hir out of my sight. We need other options at least for the first few months that I’m back to work.
We do have some flexibility here in that I can work remotely for a period of time. I initially wanted to hire a couple mother’s helpers but they’re charging nearly or just as much as experienced nannies in this area for very little experience. I’m talking about $18-25/hour for 0-2 years of experience, and $20-45/hour for 10-30 years of experience.
Indeed.com shows that full time nannies in the SF area are typically charging 35% more than the rest of the country’s average and run about $30-40K per year. Obviously, we do not have that kind of Silicon Valley/SF dot com money.
We had a frustrating trial with a mother’s helper who came highly recommended. She’s great with toddlers but had to be told four times in the same day to check LB’s diaper when ze cries on waking from a nap – my patience doesn’t extend to repeating basic instructions several times a day. In the end, we decided that it’d be worth it to try and find someone with more extensive experience. We scoured care.com, urbansitter.com, and sittercity.com for both, and they were all three kind of a crapshoot.
After we interviewed a handful of providers it appears that the people posting profiles use the listed rate ranges like a weird kind of target practice.
You’d see:
* Will take up to 3 kids
* Comfortable with pets/dogs
* Will take care of sick children
* XX years of experience
* Will drive kids to and from school and activities
* Will cook and clean, do laundry
* $15-20/hour
I’d expect that $20/hr would be for more than one kid, with lots of other work thrown in, and $15/hr would be for much less work, which is what we’re looking for. 1 kid, very minimal clean-up, feeding, diapering, and putting down to sleep.
Instead, all were charging $20/hr minimum, with paid sick leave, holidays and 2 weeks of vacation, and are horrified by Seamus. Oh and are utter Awkward Aardvarks with the baby.
If you’ve never seen someone hold a floppy necked infant for the first or second time, it goes something like this:
Here’s the baby! *ginger or wary acceptance* They sort of stick the baby into one side with one arm, bracing as if for impact, while most of the baby remains free. Baby wiggles. Switch to the other side. Then back again. They grimace and adjust their hold. Baby, slipping, flails an arm or a leg. They adjust again. Baby squeaks and writhes indignantly. They start. Baby looks up at them, and their head suddenly flops forward. *thunk* Eyes wide, they return the baby.
It wasn’t quite that bad with the people we met but it was close.
The one touting 30+ years of experience with newborns kept asking us to show her how we hold the baby, adjusting her from one floppy position to another, insisting that my (already incredibly opportunistic) child was unhappy because ze “wants to be held the way hir parents hold hir.” The picture of grace, I managed not to laugh in her face. Yes, of course, ze knows how hir parents hold hir. That’s why ze just rejected me in favor of Grammy who cuddled, rocked AND cooed at hir for a weekend. Don’t tell me what my baby prefers. Ze’ll take the best offer going. And the best offer was NOT that nanny.
One didn’t come near the baby and told me that vitamins are a lie that doctors tell us to make them hyper. The origins or the why of this theory, we’ll never know.
I was starting to think we’d never find anyone but we took a shot with someone who looked less qualified on paper and it was well worth it. She actually holds the baby like she’s met one before and had that parentese down pat. LB was cooing at her in 90 seconds or less. It remains to be seen how well it works out on an ongoing basis but we’re doing a trial with her.
Sleep: the old saw “sleep when the baby sleeps” rarely applies here. Either I couldn’t fall asleep or the sleep cycles were so short I only had time to drop into sleep before being shaken awake by the need to change a diaper or feed hir. Naps felt amazing though, and for a few weeks, every 30 mins of sleep felt like half a night’s rest. After that, it just felt like punishment.
There are moments when ze has been nursing for more than an hour and I haven’t slept in weeks, and my body is beyond the point of crying out in fatigue because it’s too tired to do that even. I look down at hir and ze is just … cute. This is what keeps infants alive, I’m convinced of it.
Babywearing is great. Not for my back but definitely for morale when a distraught LB just needs to be held and my arms simply cannot anymore or I desperately need arms free to do things. It’s strangely comforting and I like being the Kanga to my now detachable Roo. Name change? LB–> Roo?
My first moments of despair thanks to pain and fatigue preventing me from picking up Little Bean struck in week 3, but the second month is when it really came home. I dodged the expected baby blues, but fear of a crippled future just around the corner instead of on the horizon was cause for some serious introspection and a few frustrated tears. PiC and I stayed up a few late nights talking through my worries and his reassurances meant the world to me. It also made me wish even harder that I’d figured out a way we could afford for him to stay home with us on just my earnings because he’s an amazing hands-on dad and genuinely enjoys taking care of LB morning, noon and night.
Ze started smiling at us this month. Ze wasn’t interested in making eye contact with anyone except PiC before. Now, ze will look around, see me, and grin. It’s awesome. Also ze smirks in hir sleep and I love it. It’s like there are good dreams going on in that bitty human brain. Sometimes it’s just because ze just had a great poo though.
Also awesome: baby babble. Ze isn’t forming sounds that are remotely like words but ze is making sounds on purpose and the range has increased to include a variety of tones, volume and interest. We started doing call and response. I leave hir laying on a playmat and holler random noises as I dash around the house trying to wash a bottle or get the laundry going or grab some food. The ones that please hir best get a delighted squeal, the OK sounds get a chirp. After a week of this, ze moved on to just babbling away on hir own at the ceiling, the window or the TV. We do lots of wide range vocabulary talking to hir regularly but when ze is participating, ze is most responsive to fun combinations of sounds so we go with it. Plenty of time to learn words and languages and all that.
I’m working away at Swagbucks to earn Amazon money for household, Little Bean, and dog things we need. Feel free to join using my referral link if you like!
I’m only getting half my normal income in maternity leave benefits and surprisingly this hasn’t wrecked our cash flow. I’m not saving anything, and neither am I setting aside the previously budgeted Little Bean money for the moment but we’re doing OK.
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Little Bean money: PiC is still contributing to hir fund and ze has received generous Happy Being Born gifts (called lucky money in our cultures). Kid’s making a killing off being born!
