remaining calm

A couple of weeks ago, HB and I babysat Colby and Molly together. This is nearly always an easier task to do together, because both kids tend toward separation anxiety meltdowns, and if one starts crying there's a 90% chance it will set the other one off.

Colby is notoriously a bedtime fighter, and nearly always insists that he will stay awake to wait for his mother's return. As long as he's in bed with the overhead light off I don't care what he does for the three hours between official bedtime and babysitter departure.

That requirement was apparently completely unreasonable.

Colby screamed, cried, slammed the door, threw things, basically freaked the hell out for about half an hour (waking Molly, of course) while I calmly, patiently stood in the doorway and kept repeating myself in a soothing voice. Everything I tried was failing: resorting to firm preschool teacher language ("turning on the light is not a choice" -- "Yes it is a choice! It's my house, you don't live here!"), acknowledging his feelings ("I can tell you're upset") and reiterating reality ("I know you want your mom but she can't come home right now; she will be here in three hours"). Just about at my wit's end, I decided maybe I could try something new: getting to the root of his emotional outburst and enlisting his help in problem-solving.

When I asked him to name his feelings, he said, "sad and mad." I asked what was making him feel that way, and he said it was because I wasn't letting him have the overhead light on. I asked a few more questions and figured out he was scared of the dark. (Although when I asked what he was scared of specifically -- I do have some good monster repellent tips -- he said "I forget." So just general darkness heebie-jeebies.) Then I asked him if he could help me come up with a solution besides turning on the overhead light. He agreed that a flashlight would work if it was bright enough, but their house didn't have a working one.

So I offered him my bike headlight, which is extremely bright. Like, don't shine it in your eyes unless you want retina damage bright.

He agreed (cautiously) to try it, and he spent the next two hours shining it around on the ceiling and talking to himself. Every so often he'd yell, "Mom?" and HB and I would repeat, "She's not home yet, Colby. We will send her in to your room first thing." but he actually fell asleep, bike light in hand, before his parents got home. I felt like a champion.

It seemed that what he needed was feeling heard, understood, and respected, as well as feeling like he had a sense of agency over the situation. Which makes perfect sense. Isn't that what most of us want most of the time?

Hugs,
-MP

converging

Until recently, HB and I have never taken care of kids (besides her nephews) together. She goes to her nanny job, I go to mine, we reconvene in the evening to recount the adorable, the frustrating, and the ridiculous.

The approach of the holidays (and the apocalypse) have been throwing everything out of orbit, and consequently our nannying schedules have been different enough from usual that we've had a few opportunities to visit each other during our shifts (with the families' permission).

Last week HB biked all the way to Sasha and Ezra's house with me, and I introduced her to Sasha's mom. While I feel kind of weird around Sasha's dad, I'm super comfortable with her mom and figured she'd be delighted to meet HB -- and she was. "You're totally welcome to hang out any time, you'll have to meet Ezra when he's not napping! And Sasha loves people, I bet she'd love to meet you!" So later that very same day, HB and I met up (Ezra in the Ergo on my chest) and took him, with ponytail and flowery hairclip and baby flannel, to a kid-friendly cafe to play in their kid corner.

A day or two later, I biked to the science museum after handing Athena back to her daddy so I could hang out with HB and her two little charges, Jay and Wren, who are three and one. Afterward we biked them home, fed them dinner, and got them ready for bed together.

This week, since school's out, I took Sasha and Ezra on the bus to the science museum, and HB met us there, meeting Sasha for the first time. (Sasha, for once, was exceptionally compliant and well-behaved, and had a blast.)

We have also done a couple of rounds of evening kid-sitting together, once for Jaden and once for two new charges, Colby and Molly.

The point of all this: I am impressed by how well HB works with the kids. She is patient, respectful, flexible, and attentive -- sometimes more than I am, and I'm the one in school to be a preschool teacher. She goes out of her way to really see things from the kids' perspectives. An illustrative moment (pun totally intended) was when Jay was coloring a picture after HB had said, "We need to clean up and get ready for bed," and when Jay said, "I need to finish coloring this," instead of pulling the crayon away from him (which I did once on a different occasion, and then immediately regretted and felt awful about), she listened to the word "need" and let him finish. When he felt done, he happily cleaned up and got ready for bed.

I'm also surprised and delighted by how well we work with each other with the kids. As a team. Without needing to discuss it, we naturally pick up on each other's thoughts and intentions and needs, and step up to support each other. When one of us announces the approach of a transition time (snack time, bed time, time to go) the other is right there as backup. When the kids run in opposite directions, we arbitrarily pick a kid each and stick with them through whatever activity they're doing, without any confusion or anxiety or need to communicate much about it. Later we just come back together and fill each other in.

I take it as a very good sign that someday we will parent our own (hypothetical) kids together as an effective, efficient team.

High fives,
-MP