We found out Jen was pregnant in late Septmeber, 2006. By November, some 6 months before our son was born, we had started to put his name down on daycare waiting lists.

Such is the state of babysitting in 2007. You’re not a human being in the eyes of the law, but you’re all good to be on a daycare waiting list.

We are now on 5 different waiting lists and we’re getting closer to the end of Jen’s mat leave. She’s back in May and we still don’t have a guaranteed spot for Le Grand Monsieur.

We had our first interview yesterday.

Jen was nervous. She’d forgotten her list of questions at home. I tried to reassure her it was just one of those things. You “have a feeling” when you walk in. An instinct will tell you if it’s an okay place, or not.

I mean, how else do you say “I would like my son, the ultimate love of my life, to spend 75% of his waking hours in your care.” It has to be trust. It has to be instinct. There’s no other way to get it done.

The state of daycare is what’s really disappointing. We almost have to take the first space that becomes available. We’ve been on waitlists for 18mos and still nothing has opened up.

Jen and I are lucky in that I work in radio and can be home most mornings, while she is in sales and can do work from both home and the road. So we have the ultimate in flex schedules, but we still need someone to look after him, and at 11 months old, that’s almost like saying “we need someone to raise him.”

She hands us a schedule of when meals and changes happen.

“She only changes them 3 times a day,” Jen says. I don’t get it. “I never let him sit in a wet or dirty diaper,” says Jen. “Will she?”

I’m not sure. She’s got 5 other kids to look after, and my mind immediately runs to Jon and Kate Plus Eight. How can 1 person do it?

The menu includes chicken nuggets. Hmmm. Sounds like Le Grand Monsieur is going to be brown bagging it. I make all of Zacharie’s food. A friend turned us on to Annabel Karmel’s books and I do the boiling and pureeing and freezing each week. It’s dead easy. I don’t know why people buy the processed stuff.

Maybe its easier to throw your child in care when the kids start toddling and can take direction and get around on their own, but Zacharie is just.a.baby.

Ideally, Jen would stay home. She wants to stay home. She loves her job, but she loves her son more. I mean, who can blame her?

We have friends who have not gone back to work after their mat leave ended, and I don’t know how they do it. Maybe it’s because they got in the housing market 3 years before we did - that means about $250 000 less on the mortgage, and if we had that kind of equity, one income would be doable.

While we’ve been doing fine on E-I since Jen’s been off, not falling behind, we’re not necessarily getting ahead either.

So we will continue the search for care and look for someone worthy of raising our son.

Which is pretty much impossible.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 4:04 pm and is filed under baby, dad.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.