And, While We're on the Subject, Who's Your Daddy?

About.com's Working Mom's blog has a post today titled "The Best Jobs for Moms and Dads." The title is a bit misleading because it doesn't actually list any specific jobs. But the page did lead me to a number of comments about another blog post, "Does My Child Love the Babysitter More Than Me?"

For our kids and the woman who watched them from early infancy through about age 2, the answer was definitely yes.

We lucked into meeting the sister-in-law of one of Jenn's friends who'd been watching small children for a few years. We starting bringing Jackson to her when he was only a couple of months old, and though the woman was very loving, we worried about not seeing him for most of the day. It didn't help that we had had as much baby-raising experience as Jackson's lifespan, so in his mind, he was spending wonderful days with an experienced mom and then in the evening was forced to hang out with a couple of retard-parents.

Jenn was worried, as were some of the women who commented on the article, that Jackson would consider the sitter "Mommy," but at least his first word wasn't the sitter's name, which apparently happened to some of the commenters' kids.

Neither of us had a job that paid enough for the other one to be a stay-at-home parent, so sending Jackson (and then Sasha) to a sitter was something that we had to do. We were fortunate that the sitter was very loving (Jackson often didn't want to leave when it was time), and we felt that he really enjoyed the change of pace. I recall that when he and I had to spend a day together, I was so worn out from the feedings and lack of sleep and the day-to-day stuff that it was hard for me to get jazzed up for the actual "fun" part of hanging out. (Or, I'm just a lazy dad.)

For us (and the kids) the hard part wasn't sending them to the sitter—it was bringing them to daycare once they turned 2. We were worried that they'd be so used to the extra attention (the sitter watched maybe three or four kids at most, while in daycare the class sizes were larger) that they'd have a hard time adjusting.

(In fact, they did, at least initially. When they began staying with the sitter, they were so young they got used to the idea very quickly, while dropping them off at daycare was quite a mess the first week or so.)

But somehow, and I don't know how, our kids seemed to figure out who Mommy and Daddy were, even if sometimes I tried to forget myself.
Read more...