A few weeks ago, actor and former Saturday Night Live cast member Amy Poehler was among the guests of honor at the sixth annual Time 100 Gala, for which “influential people” are invited to toast the people who influence them. After Poehler got a few jokes out of the way, she ultimately went on to say that the two people who have had the most influence in her life over the past two and a half years–during which she gave birth to two sons–were the nannies who help her take care of her family every day.

Watch her speech here.
Read the rest of this entry

Some days it sure feels like I’m trying to do it all myself, but even in my darkest woe-is-me hours, I know that I definitely, definitely am not. It would be hard to overlook the hands-on support of my does-more-than-his-fair-share husband, and then there are the “it takes a village”-style friends and family who are a part of my son’s life too, but when I take an even bigger step back and look at all the balls I’m juggling on an average day, and I see how impossible it is to do that alone, I realize how much I rely on not just a village but a sprawling network of helpers (paid and not) to keep things running (relatively) smoothly, and I imagine most other working mothers do too.
Read the rest of this entry

One good thing (the only good thing?) about having a Dreaded December Baby is that while everyone else is taking year-end stock of the previous twelve months, I also get to take stock of my latest year as mother to a kid born on December 14. Here are the top five parenting lessons I learned in 2010:
Read the rest of this entry

A year and a half ago, as we were preparing to leave our three-month-old son with babysitters for the first time, I asked for your advice about how to handle a situation in which your sitters were not hired hands but friends who had volunteered for the job. Although I didn’t get to put your advice to work right away (the baby would not take the bottle, so we had to give away our theater tickets after all), we did eventually steal away for some date nights, and our friends/sitters have been delighted with the small tokens of appreciation we’ve given them in thanks. 

Flash foward to today, when my twenty-month-old son is a pro at being under someone else’s care and we have no trouble calculating how to reimburse for those services because the numbers are right there in the childcare contract we signed. He’s been in daycare for almost three months now and he’s absolutely thriving. He loves the activities and the food and the other kids, and he loves his teacher. I love his teacher too; with her boundless energy and bottomless bag of tricks, she is in many ways the mother I wish I were.     

A few weeks ago, I dropped him off on a Monday morning, and during the usual what-did-you-do-over-the-weekend chitchat with his teacher, I mentioned we’d gone to see Daddy’s band play an afternoon concert in San Francisco. Her face lit up and she asked about the band’s name, what kind of music they played, and when their next gig was. Because she wanted to come see. Well, when you’re in a band playing for tips, it’s always good to fill the room with people you know, so of course I invited her along to the next show, but then I got to thinking: could/should we be including her in other things we do too? 

When my son turns two we’ll almost certainly invite her to his birthday party, but what about inviting her to our grown-up parties as well? Should we add her to the list of friends we’d call to meet us at the farmer’s market on Saturday morning, or at the zoo or the playground (she has a seven-year-old daughter)?     

What do you do? Is your childcare provider also your friend, or is she strictly an employee? Does it make a difference if she’s working out of a center versus running the daycare from her own home? Do you feel the same or differently about school teachers? Is it confusing for kids to spend time with their teachers outside of the school environment? 

I knew it was coming. I knew it was coming a long time ago. I knew it was coming and I knew it would be bad, so I even warned YOU it was coming. What is it? Child care, the cost of.
Read the rest of this entry

While I was pregnant (and even before), I read a lot about the experiences of pregnant working women and, in particular, how they handled the Big Question: whether to continue working, either inside or outside the home, after the baby was born, and if so, in what capacity. Following maternity leave–six weeks? sixteen weeks? a whole year? however long it takes to pull your pants up and log in to your email account?–what were the experiences of women who went back to work full-time immediately, eased back into 40-hour weeks gradually, switched to part-time permanently, switched careers entirely, started working from home exclusively, or became stay-at-home moms, either putting their jobs on hold temporarily or giving them up completely? An analyst by nature, I knew that if a “right” answer was out there, I’d be able to find it, by golly.
Read the rest of this entry

Last week an email went out on my neighborhood’s listserve asking for mothers interested in forming a babysitting co-op. Two mothers would be in charge of watching everyone’s kids for a few hours one day a week, and then the next week another two mothers would take over the babysitting shift; with a minimum of four people in the group, each mom would get a few hours off every other week to do as she pleased. The woman trying to organize the co-op lives around the corner, has a daughter the same age as my son, and seems like a nice person. Even better, here, finally, was my chance to foist my beloved but wearying child onto a third party and steal some time for myself (even if I waste it on something dumb like much-belated spring cleaning), and without it costing a penny.

Yes, it sounded like a great solution, so then why was I composing a mental list of all the reasons it was a bad idea for us (the baby would get sick; how could I trust these other mothers I didn’t know?; my schedule changes too much and I wouldn’t want to flake out on anyone; what if my son went missing in someone’s house now that he’s mobile and fast enough to get down the hall and stuck under a table, NOT THAT I WOULD KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THAT)?
Read the rest of this entry

It’s way too early for me to be thinking about this for my own personal use*, but I have some questions about having a second kid.

Read the rest of this entry

It’s a familiar scene: A mother drops off her child at daycare. She kisses him, tells him to be good and to have fun, and turns to the door with a convincing smile. But before she pulls out of the parking lot, and maybe even before she gets the key in the ignition, she’s a mess of tears. How can she leave her child with somebody else all day, day after day, while she goes to work?  What is she going to miss while she’s gone? Will her kid even miss her? What’s the emotional price of that extra paycheck? The guilt, oh the guilt.

Maybe this mom is you. Or maybe, like me, your guilt is made of entirely different stuff–stuff you don’t hear about as often because, even within the working-mom community, the overall sentiment is borderline taboo…
Read the rest of this entry

This might be a stupid question, but I’m an amateur, so forgive me: How do you pay your babysitters when they aren’t (a) teenagers from down the street or (b) professionals hired through a service but (c) friends?
Read the rest of this entry