experimenting

This summer I'm babysitting Jaden for a few hours a week, and he has become my official test subject for science activities for four-year-olds. I've been getting all these great ideas for preschool science from my Young Child as Scientist grad school course, and from good ol' Pinterest, but since I'm not based out of a classroom, I haven't really had an outlet for my kid science excitement. (Most activities I get stoked about -- and can realistically carry out in someone else's home -- are a little too juvenile for Sasha's sophisticated tastes.) So I got Jaden's parents' permission to experiment on their kid.

life update (transitions, pt. 2)

We have a lot of exciting transitions happening in the next few months. Let me explain. No, there is too much; let me sum up.

Moving to an apartment with HB; major reduction in hours with Sasha & Ezra, ending care with Athena; starting regular hours with Jaden; working on a graphic novel; taking weird summer intensives at grad school; traveling in the fall; starting regular preschool teaching (hopefully) between November and January.

Okay, but here's the long version.

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

Borrowing Kids

Halloween is my favorite holiday. I don't know if it's just that I'm breathlessly in love with fall, or that the holiday has so many opportunities for one-time-a-year artistic endeavors (carving pumpkins! sewing costumes!), or that it has really fascinating historic and contemporary ties to other celebrations like Samhain and Dia de los Muertos. Whatever the reason, I get super stoked for Halloween right around when the first rainstorm slicks the city in October every year.

The past three or four years, October 31st itself has been rather a letdown. I'm in this liminal space between kid and adult that is almost incompatible with Halloween:

• I'm definitely too old to go trick-or-treating without kids in tow.
• I don't have kids.
• I don't like the types of parties that people my age typically attend.

So the last few years, if I bothered to make a costume at all, I couldn't bring myself to put it on for Halloween. Instead, I sat in my room and avoided Halloween entirely. Last year we didn't even get any trick-or-treaters.

This year, Jaden's mom took pity on me and invited me and HB (who also babysits Jaden) to go trick-or-treating with their family and a friend's family. HB and I clumsily, valiantly biked to Jaden's place wearing our costumes and carrying everything we would need for the next 24 hours. (We've been cat sitting for a person whose cats require us to stay overnight, so we've been hauling food and clothes back and forth from our house to the cat place each day for two weeks.) I'm sure we were quite the sight. Totally worth it when Jaden bounced over to greet us and play with our costumes.

Ultimately we were a flock of six adults chaperoning two three-year-olds. Only two of the adults hadn't dressed in costume, which means some houses offered us candy, too! We had a grand time, and the kids did too.

HB and I rounded off our night with hot spiced apple cider and a movie (and unsuccessfully tried to cajole the cats into snuggling with us), and we agreed that when we have kids, we hope that, like Jaden's parents, we will invite kid-loving kid-less adults into our kids' lives. It's rewarding for everyone.

High fives,
-MP

an ode to camera phones

Babysitters, nannies, non-primary-guardian caretakers of the world, I want to share a secret with you.

Camera phones. And an unlimited texting plan.

For as long as I've had a phone on my camera I've taken quick, fuzzy snapshots of the kids I care for, usually for the purpose of later showing it to a friend in a "mine are cuter than yours" babysitter pissing contest. After a few momentary bragging episodes, the pictures would get buried in the archive of bad cell phone photos my poor SD card stoically keeps on file.

Very recently it occurred to me that I could do more with these adorable, grainy photos: text them. To the kids' parents.

I experimented with this on Jaden. The first time his mom left me alone with him, she'd only been gone about half an hour when she texted a "how're you guys doing? Sorry, I'll try not to send too many annoying check in texts!" Rather than just say, "We're fine," I sent her a picture of Jaden eating breakfast with all his cars lined up on his table watching him and an accompanying description of what was going on.

She loved it.

Throughout the day I sent her four or five more pictures of other activities we did: art, a science experiment, trying on my glasses. Jaden's mom thought it was the greatest. She thought I was the greatest. As one of my housemates pointed out, this is a win-win for parents: they get pictures of their kids being adorable and hilarious, and the reassurance that they're having a good time and being well cared-for, without having to be the ones doing the diaper changing and tantrum talk-downs, and being easily able to carry on with their meeting at work or their romantic date night.

I now regularly ask parents if they have unlimited texting and if it's okay for me to send them a picture or two each day. They have all said yes. So far, every parent has been delighted to receive a picture of their kid swinging at the park, or licking the side of the stroller, or learning how to throw a ball for the dog, or coated in smashed blackberries.

Seriously, if you want to delight parents, text them a picture of their kid eating a bagel or grinning at themselves in the mirror or petting the neighborhood cat. They will think you're the best babysitter ever. They may even up your pay or recommend you to their friends and not be able to pin down why they're doing it, just that they have a really great, fuzzy feeling about you. And all thanks to your great, fuzzy cell phone snapshots.

High Fives,
-MP

the art of coming out without tripping over things

Now that I've been employed long enough to receive my first checks from my two regular families, I've been contemplating if, how, and when to tell these families about my family. Specifically, that I'm a big ol' queermo and that I share a bedroom and a cat with a person I usually refer to as my partner. I fly pretty silent on most people's queerdar since I have the double whammy of fairly feminine mannerisms and a fairly feminine physical presentation. (I even currently have long-ish hair that is neither a buzz cut nor a pixie cut, my two rotating constants over the past six or seven years.) So it's not like these families would look at me and just know, or even suspect that I'm, you know, "of the gay." (Unless they saw my Yeti legs, which I always cover during interviews with new people anyway because preschool teaching effectively ruined my body hair self-confidence in childcare settings.)

With Jaden's mom, I knew her from her blogging presence on the internet, so I had absolutely no doubts about coming out. Within minutes of meeting her I had casually dropped the "my partner" bit, and not only was she instantly receptive ("your partner is welcome to hang out too, Jaden loves people!") but her kid was obviously acquainted with the term partner because he immediately asked in his adorable three-year-old lisp, "Does yo' pawtnah wike kids?" like an old pro. I gave him a mental high five.

My first day with Sasha and Ezra, I picked up a baby board book off the couch and upon my second or third reading to Ezra, I had it well enough memorized to start looking at the pictures that accompanied the text. It's a book called Everywhere Babies and even though it rhymes, it's the least obnoxious rhyming board book I have yet come across. I was surprised and delighted to see that even though the gist of the story was "babies are everywhere and they all sleep, play, and poop" it actually featured a very diverse cast of characters. Not only did it have what were pretty obviously same-sex couples, but it also showed grandparent-aged caretakers and caretakers who looked different from the babies (presumably fostering or adoptive families).

This was my sign.

This family is probably gay-okay and won't fire me upon revealing my true rainbow sparkle colors.

The next time I showed up at Sasha and Ezra's house, as their mom gave me my morning orientation, I saw my window and I plunged for it. It wasn't even really a window, but was shaped enough like one that I was pretty sure I could make it into a window. It went like this:

The Mom: "Sorry about all the noise, the workers should be done pulling off the roof after today. Ezra really needs a nap but he won't sleep through the noise so you'll have to put him in the stroller."
Me: "Yeah, I wouldn't be able to sleep through that noise either."
The Mom: "It's hard to sleep through sudden loud noises, like when they hammer or drop something big."
Me: "For sure. Last night somebody was going through our glass recycling out front and the noise of the bottles banging around woke us up. My partner got really worried that whoever it was would come in and steal her bike. But the type of person who bothers sorting through the recycling for bottles to deposit for a nickle each is probably not the same type of person who will then break into your basement and steal your bike."
The Mom: "Yeah, those people usually consider it their little job, and go from house to house on recycling day. Your bikes are probably safe in the basement."

Did you see that? She didn't even blink at the casual "my partner, she" bomb.

Of course, my partner sometimes goes by "they" pronouns, but one step of coming out at a time.

I would like to high five the people who illustrated Everywhere Babies, as it is now one of the very few board books that I don't despise on sight, but that I actively like. Good job on the passive diversity education front, Everywhere Babies.

Hugs,
-MP