The baby crawls now! It's an army crawl and appears to take a great amount of effort, but he's getting where he needs to go. And where he needs to go is always, always over to his brother so he can try to grab whatever toy he's playing with.
Despite being a younger sibling, I never appreciated how different it is to be the second kid until I had one myself. Gabriel reads Jonah's books, he plays with Jonah's toys, he watches Jonah's shows. He has skipped right over almost all the baby things. When you're second, you live in your sibling's world right away. They're very cute together. Gabriel loves Jonah so much and laughs at anything he does. Jonah lays down next to Gabriel on the floor and crawls with him.
When Jonah was eight months old we were just moving to Princeton. The previous couple months had been super stressful — we had been kicked out of our rental house in Michigan and I got a new job and we had to find somewhere to live on extremely short notice. Seems insane I was doing all that with a baby! Very grateful we're not in a similar situation now.
I remember that the first thing I did after accepting my job at Princeton, even before signing a lease, was secure a daycare spot. I remember being so relieved when I found a place that would take Jonah on the date I needed. I was thinking about that when I read this essay in The Point, where the author seems to think that daycares are even worse than McDonalds: "A Big Mac tastes the same from Orlando to Omaha, but fast-food chain equivalents of McDaycare vary dramatically."
I have a feeling the writer hasn't been to McDonald's in a while. Possibly ever. But she's not wrong — not all daycares are alike. The first daycare I took Jonah to was insane about covid — they made me wear gloves to drop off my baby, even though I wasn't allowed to enter the building. Every time I handed him over I wondered if they knew that he was a human being and not a piece of sanitized plastic.
But the McDaycare my kids go to now is very nice. The same ladies who take care of Gabriel took care of Jonah when he started. I may be raising them in a "collective" but everyone on staff knows my children's names. The teachers get paid vacation and sick time, and I get to have reliable childcare every day except for some federal holidays. When we are not all struck down by norovirus, it works.
The writer of this essay seems to live in New York City, where apparently McDaycare costs more than double what I pay. This sucks for her, but I bet her rent is double what I paid, too. New York is expensive: is this breaking news? And like all essays about childcare, hers throws a lot of stones ("We were just back from the better part of a year abroad that had spared us the rigged American childcare market") but provides no actual solutions.
Actually, that's not true. Her solution is that instead of making baby Big Macs, you should consider parenting her way: with a part-time Portuguese nanny. This would be lovely, really, if only my work were part-time and my house did not double as my husband's office. Basically, it would work great if my life were entirely different.
I love reading parenting essays, though, because everyone who writes them seems to think that parenting is somehow a shared experience. It's not. It's shared in the same way as, say, puberty. We've all been through puberty, and the steps were similar, but the actual experience is singular. No two puberties/parentings are really the same. All we can do is trade stories and commiserate.
So here is my parenting essay/haiku: If you love your child and do your best to keep them safe, you are doing a great job. Congratulations.
