Daycare Despair

“What do you do for childcare?” This is a seemingly innocent question that can really get under my skin. The true answer is that we care for our child ourselves. I’m home (and often out and about) with Young C from Monday to Friday and Ed picks up Saturdays while I work. That leaves Sunday for family time. Still, I tend to babble in circles. “I work from home, you see … uh, yeah, freelancing … well, no, I’m not very productive, I guess … he’s on a wait list for part-time care … I do work Saturdays …” The problem is partly that while I did not want to work a full-time job and have to hire someone else to care for my child, I also had no visions of becoming a stay-at-home mom. There was no love lost for the tele-help job I’d held before Young C was born, either, and I thought I would be able to pursue a part-time career as a writer while I stayed at home. I have done a teensy bit of writing, but I finally have had to face up to the truth that I’m just pretty drained after putting in a 12 hour day as a mom. I wound up having to pick up one or two waitressing shifts over the weekend to make ends meet, which, of course, leaves even less time and energy for doing the work I want to do. It hasn’t been a horrible set-up considering that I get to take care of Young C all week and then can make pretty good money in just a couple nights. Until now. The fast pace and long shifts and crowded dance floor of the restaurant cum live music venue where I work means I won’t want to be there for the second half of this pregnancy.

The other part of the problem is that I have been trying to get child care. At 18 months, I decided that Young C would probably do well in a daycare setting on a part-time basis and set out to register him somewhere. But this is Toronto and unless you’re willing to let the retired lady around the corner watch your kid, you have to wait. (And we’re not even looking for a subsidized spot — that’s a whole other story.) Now I know there are great agencies that assist with finding a regulated home care spot, and I’m sure that many of those women do a wonderful job. But I wanted Young C to have interactions with his peers and be cared for by fully trained Early Childhood Educators. I wanted a daycare centre, yes, but I wasn’t particularly picky beyond that. I wasn’t worried about getting him into a Montessori program, for example, particularly after learning about their TWO YEAR wait list. So we toured the local High Park Jr. YMCA and spent $40 to get Young C’s name on an estimated four month wait list for any two days a week. Five months later, I’m told that a spot has opened up but they no longer support part-time care. What?!? We had all our eggs in this basket, assuming that our flexibility would make it fairly easy to find a match. Hell, we could even do one or three days a week if we had to. I was told that they would double check the policy and call me back.

So, plan B. Novus Day nursery is around the corner and offers half-day care, which is even better than two or three full days for us, and they start at two years old. So we make an appointment and are told that Young C would be able to start within a couple weeks. Even though he’s not quite two, they are impressed with his language and independence. Great. Tick, tick, tick … I call back a month later to find out exactly when Young C can start and now the story has changed. They have space, but are only licensed to care for two children between the ages of two and two and a half. So we have to wait until the end of June. The difference between having him in for six months before baby number two arrives and we likely have to pull him and four months seems huge. Starting him now would have meant a few weeks of financial cover while I worked at writing during the week and kept my restaurant gig on the weekends. There will be no such cover in July. The cost will be even harder to justify since my father and teenage brother will be available for occasional child care during their summer vacations. So we’ll see how it goes. I’ll try to drum up some work in the meantime and maybe we can enroll him for just three mornings a week.

So, what do I do for childcare? I’m still figuring it out, and something tells me that there’s really no long term solution when it comes to kids. We’ll do what we can for now, and when there’s two babes in the picture, we’ll figure something else out.

Image courtesy of sideshowtoy.com.