Childcare

I have been back at lab for a month now, and although productivity has not been high on my part, we are somewhat getting into our routine at home. Everyone told me that it would "get easier," and while it certainly is easier now than on Day 1, I'm not sure it's getting progressively easier. I have been staying at home with Ruby on most Wednesdays, so on Thursdays and Mondays when I have to leave her again, I still feel down in the dumps. This is despite the fact that I make things very easy on myself by coming home early whenever I can to take Ruby to playgroups and whatnot. It's the days when I'm gone the whole day that are the hardest, and I'm not sure I could do a job that would require me to be away all day every day. Like most babies, Ruby is at her best and happiest in the morning. By the time the evening comes along, she is often cranky and tired from her long day of playing, eating, and pooping. Unfortunately, this happens to coincide with the time the parents come home and are themselves tired and hungry. From my experience, on the days when I am away the whole day, there is a lot less opportunity to enjoy the baby and a lot more focus on accomplishing the essentials, i.e. feeding the baby, feeding myself, and putting the baby to bed.

For the first two weeks that I was back in lab, Steve stayed home with Ruby. This really helped me through the initial Leaving of the Baby, as I knew that Ruby was used to being with Steve, and they often skyped me during the day so that I could see them through the webcam. Since then, Ruby has been at home with the nanny, which has required a whole new set of adjustments on my part.

We found our nanny through Golden Gate Mothers Group, my primary source for everything baby. Finding childcare was one of the parts of parenthood that I was least looking forward to. However, I had started to consider my options long before Ruby was born. Her name has been on the waitlist for the UCSF childcare center at Mission Bay since we found out we were pregnant. However, we don't hold out any hope that she will be offered a spot, as the waitlist is so long that by the time we are called, Ruby might be fully grown. After considering our remaining childcare options, we decided that the most ideal was a nanny share, where two families share one nanny. We liked this arrangement for several reasons:

1) It's more economicable than having a single-family nanny.
2) It allows Ruby to have social interaction with another baby, much like having a sibling
3) It gives us a support system in the other parents, providing an extra set of eyes and increased security in the event that there is some issue with the nanny.

Although the concept is really great, we found out quickly that a nanny share is not so easy to set up. First there's the matter of which to find first, the family or the nanny. We initially met with several other families, but we realized that that was a little like putting the carriage in front of the horse, because what was most important to us was finding a good nanny. We decided that we would really like to have a Mandarin-speaking nanny so that Ruby can have some Mandarin immersion on a regular basis. While Steve and I do speak some Mandarin, we just can't muster the energy to speak it around Ruby all the time. Finding a Mandarin-speaking nanny was not as easy as I thought it would be, even in a city with so many Chinese people. Perhaps if we took out an ad in Chinatown or a Chinese newspaper we would have gotten a lot more leads, but I really felt more comfortable finding a nanny through a recommendation by another Golden Gate Mothers Group mom.

In the end, we only interviewed two nannies, and we decided on the first one. Our nanny is originally from Beijing, so her Mandarin is very easy for us to understand. She has about 9 years of nanny experience around the Bay Area with 3 different families. She has an 8-year-old daughter as well as a 22-year-old son who lives in China. Even though she had impeccable references and a great deal of knowledge about infants, I still had a lot of anxiety about entrusting Ruby to her care. The reality is that I would have had a lot of anxiety leaving Ruby with anyone, even if I found the Number One Mary Poppins Champion of the World Nanny.

I stayed at home for the nanny's first day to show her where everything was in the house and to teach her a bit about Ruby's habits and cues. The next day I went to work half of the day and called once to check in. By the nanny's second week, I stopped calling to check in so as to not be overbearing.

Ruby adjusted to the nanny much more easily than I did, and she has pretty much had no problems at all. So far, as nannies go, I feel like ours is pretty close to exactly what I was looking for. She plays with the baby and talks and sings to her in Chinese. Ruby seems to be able to take much longer naps when she's with the nanny, perhaps because she is tired out from being stimulated and active. She is quite fastidious; she's always careful not to jostle the baby too much right after she eats, and she makes sure the baby doesn't catch too much of a draft when they go on their afternoon walk. She's very communicative; she relays to me in great detail everything that happened during the day, including the exact times when the baby ate and napped, when she was fussy, and how many times she pooped. She is also quite laid-back for a middle-aged Chinese woman. When Ruby went through a green poop phase a couple of weeks ago, the nanny was the first to reassure us that it was normal and nothing to worry about.

Of course when most people envision the "ideal nanny," they think of someone who "loves the baby like their own child." If you were to ask me if our nanny loves our baby, then I would say the honest answer is no. Maybe there do exist nannies who truly love the children they care for during the day, but in my opinion, I don't think you should expect that the person you pay to look after your child will love her the same way you do. I think once I came to terms with that, I realized that our nanny is just about as close to the ideal nanny as one could get.

The process of finding a family to share our nanny with has also been more difficult than I imagined. Although there are many families looking for nanny shares, finding one that lives in a convenient location, works similar hours, and prefers a Mandarin-speaking nanny is not so easy. The search is still on-going, but we're currently speaking with a family that has a newborn baby boy who might join our nanny share in January.

One thing I've learned is that you can never start your childcare search too early in San Francisco. That's why next week Steve and I are going to attend the city's Preschool Preview Night in preparation for Ruby's enrollment in Fall of 2012. I hear from some other parents that we may already be too late ...