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It’s been a while since I’ve had a good post about poop, don’t you think?  Instead of just talking about poop for poop’s sake, though, I’m going to frame this as a tip for all parents of young children.

So, here’s your tip: If you buy your child a jumperoo, make sure you only put him in it after he’s had his first poopy diaper of the day.

Because you know what happens when a baby poops while bouncing in a jumperoo?  Do you?

I do!  Let me share!

The effect of a jumperoo on a dirty diaper can best be described with just one word: Squish.

And no diaper on this Earth can contain the force of that squish.

And you will immediately need to do laundry.

And your baby will immediately need a bath.

And you will be very, very lucky if you get through all of this without getting any poop on your hands.

So.  Use the jumperoo with caution, is all I’m saying.

This has been a public service announcement.

I am one of the approximately nine lucky women on this planet who really has nothing bad to say about her in-laws.  Mine are pretty decent people who seem to like me for some reason, and we always get along well.  In fact, not only do I not despise my mother-in-law, Sherry, I’m kind of in awe of her.

Whenever we go to Sherry’s house,  it’s always so well-kept and nice.  Everything has a specific place where it belongs, and pet hair is not covering every stick of furniture like it is at our house. Going over to Sherry’s is always a calming experience, and coming home is often a bit of a downer as we open the door to a living room that has been taken over by baby gear and Care Bears. The potty chair in the corner may or may not have been emptied after its last use, and there’s a half-decent chance one of our dogs will have had an accident while we were gone.

When Rob and I talk about the condition of our home, it’s always with bewilderment. How are other people able to keep their homes tidy?  How do other mothers find time to vacuum with their children around?  (Mine — well, at least one of them — panics at the sound of the vacuum cleaner.)  What’s the damn point of putting all the toys away when your kids will drag them back out ten minutes later?

On Friday night, Sherry volunteered to keep the kids at her house overnight because Rob and I each had our own plans with friends.  Of course we said yes, because we’re not crazy.

The next morning, Rob went to his mom’s house and they stayed away all day so I could have some time to myself — which always means I end up doing chores because I just can’t help myself, but that’s beside the point.

I wasn’t there to see this, but Rob says that when he arrived at his mother’s house on Saturday morning, the living room was a disaster.  I may be exaggerating (again, I didn’t see it myself), but in my imagination it looked like an IED went off in Sherry’s house, except instead of shrapnel and nails, it was packed with tiny stuffed animals and plastic play food.

With apologies to Sherry, this makes me so happy.  If my kids can take her house and turn it into some sort of toddler war zone, my house never stood a chance.

The warm, fuzzy feeling I got from realizing this will last me all week.

One condition of getting The Bed With The Pink Ladder was that Kaylee would officially be a BIG GIRL when it arrived, and BIG GIRLS don’t use pacifiers.  I’m starting to see the constant binky-use affecting her teeth, and the kid’s almost three years old, so we figured it’s just time.

But we’ve been putting it off.  And off.  And off.  Because do you guys know how loudly that kid can scream?

We saw our chance with the impending arrival of the coveted bed, and I warned Kaylee a couple of days in advance that she was going to have to give up the binkies.  She agreed immediately, which of course meant that she wasn’t taking it seriously.  When a hard-core alcoholic says, “Yeah, sure, I’ll stop drinking on Saturday when I get my birthday present.  Sure, no problem,” you just kind of assume they don’t really mean it.

So it was no big surprise when Kaylee pitched a fit the moment she was denied a pacifier.

I thought I was prepared to be a hard-ass and refuse to cave in, but she really knows how to arrange her face into an expression of outright despair.  How could I continue to refuse her a binky when that would clearly kill her?  Her heart, it was stopping.

I carried her downstairs, sobbing into my shoulder, and we sat on the couch and had a little talk.  I told her we were going to have to compromise.  She tearfully agreed, without even asking what “compromise” means.  I said she could have her binky back, but every night before she goes to bed she has to pick one pacifier out of her collection and throw it in the trash.  And when they’re all gone, she can’t have binkies anymore.  (Hey, I was thinking on the fly here.  It was the best I could come up with in the nine seconds I had to think up a new plan.)  I’m hoping that giving her some amount of control – in that she gets to decide which ones to keep the longest – will make it easier for her.

She agreed to it, and every night since she’s cheerfully tossed a pacifier in the trash can without even the tiniest flicker of regret.

So I was thinking the plan was working well enough, when this afternoon she walked into the living room carrying one of Robbie’s Soothies, which he started out using in the hospital but has since rejected.

“Can I try this?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said without thinking.  “Robbie doesn’t like them anyway.”

So she popped his binky in her mouth, and a few seconds later announced, “I like it!”

That’s when I realized the little shit had just tricked me into giving her six more pacifiers.  I couldn’t very well tell her she couldn’t have them, since I’d already said Robbie didn’t like them.

Why do I get the feeling that, as Operation Pacifier Jettison gets closer to its end, Kaylee will magically start finding binkies hiding under couch cushions, inside old shoes and at the bottom of her toy box?  She’s probably been stashing them away for the past three years, just in case.

She’s just that good.

I took the kids grocery shopping on Monday – a feat I accomplish every week without pulling out my hair, and only occasional tears (mine).  I rarely bake, so Kaylee is unfamiliar with the baking aisle at the store, and yesterday she became fascinated with a package of food coloring.

“What is this?” she asked in awe, staring at the brightly colored eggs and iced cookies on the box.

I explained that it was for changing the color of your food; for example, you could use it to turn your macaroni and cheese green.

And that was it.  She had to have it, and she had to eat macaroni and cheese for lunch.

I tried to convince her to use just one color to turn her lunch a pleasant shade of orange or green, but that child would not rest (or stop screeching) until she tried every single bottle of food coloring (which turned out to be neon colors).  She also did not understand the meaning of “Just use one or two drops, ok?”  We ended up with this unholy creation:

Surprisingly, Kaylee wasn’t at all squeamish about eating macaroni and cheese the color of death.  It didn’t occur to me until it was too late that the food coloring would also stain her skin:

Oh well.  Small price to pay for that kind of culinary masterpiece.

Rob, Kaylee and I attended a birthday party this morning for Kaylee’s friend, who’s turning two.  During a conversation with one of the other moms, she said something like this: “Homeownership sounds like a good idea, but really it sucks ass.”

Mostly, she went on to say, it sucks because you can no longer call the landlord when everything goes to shit.

That’s what Rob and I finally and completely realized for the first time on Thursday.

Kaylee and I went to our exercise class that morning and then we killed a bunch of time afterward, so we didn’t get home until almost 1 o’clock.  As soon as we walked in the door, I noticed something was off, because there was a rattling sound coming from the vent right inside the garage door.

It freaked me out a bit, because the last thing we need around here is a furnace problem.  For those of you who don’t live in Colorado, it’s been fucking freezing lately.   For most of this week, it’s been hard to step outside without an immediate and overwhelming desire to turn right back around and head for the kitchen to make a cup of hot chocolate.  The only reason Kaylee and I ever left the house at all was because it’s only possible to survive as a stay-at-home mom when you DON’T stay at home.  The prospect of spending the entire week cooped up in the house with a two-year-old was much more daunting than freezing my face off walking between the car and the mall.

Anyway.  Furnace problems = bad.

So I called Rob, who couldn’t really help me assess the situation because he wasn’t home, and I called my dad, who also couldn’t help much.  But because the furnace itself wasn’t making abnormal noises and the noise was only coming from two of the vents, I decided to wait.

This is the decision that caused me, several hours later, to update my Facebook status as follows: “Heather is too fucking stupid to be a homeowner.”

Because the one thing I learned on Thursday is that, if I suspect there’s a problem with my house, DO NOT WAIT TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS.

I let that rattling noise continue all day long, and when Rob came home from work at about 6:30, it was still going.  Rob, who I’ve now learned has a more discerning sense of hearing than I do, immediately thought, “That sounds like running water.”  And so he went downstairs to the basement and found his office carpet soaked, his computer sitting in water, the drywall starting to sag, and water sloshing out of the crawlspace.

That rattling noise?  Not simply dirt having a party in our ductwork.  It was water gushing from a burst pipe and hitting the metal, before ricocheting off to fill our crawlspace and steadily increase our homeowners insurance premium.

Rob called his mom, Sherry, for advice, largely because she had a huge water problem shortly after buying her current house and there was a good chance she’d have some useful tips.  I called Roto Rooter because I figured if nothing else good came from this situation, at least there was a small possibility that the plumbers who showed up to fix the leak would be Jason and Grant from TAPS.

Sherry logically suggested calling the insurance company right away too. So after I found that the plumbers wouldn’t be able to come until Friday “morning,” I called Allstate.  They told us to contain the situation as much as possible, try to clean up the water and wait for an insurance adjuster to call.  They also recommended renting a ShopVac to clean up the standing water.

I should mention that, during all of these conversations, I was either fighting back tears or openly crying.  I can be reduced to tears fairly easily on a good day, but when I’m 35 weeks pregnant and feeling responsible for widespread destruction, I am a bit more unstable than normal.  Everyone I dealt with surely thought I had gone off my medication.

We dropped Kaylee off with Rob’s mom and went to Lowes, where they informed us that they do not, in fact, rent out ShopVacs, but we could get a Rug Doctor if we wanted.  The idea of sucking up a gazillion gallons of water one gallon at a time wasn’t appealing, so we decided to just buy a ShopVac.  We found one that had a valve for attaching a garden hose, so that you could drain the 16-gallon bucket without having to wheel it to the bathroom every 14 seconds.

We underestimated the size of a ShopVac, though, so it took a little finagling to get it into the backseat of our car. We had to slide the front passenger seat all the way forward and put the seat in the fully upright and most uncomfortable position so we could get the ShopVac into the car.  Afterward, I slid the seat back again, went to recline the seat a bit — and the handle broke off in my hand.

Awesome.

After a bit more swearing and driving on icy roads, we made it back home, where Rob’s brother Tim met us with Sherry’s off-brand ShopVac-type thingy.  Ok, time to get started!  Oh wait, the new ShopVac needed to be assembled.

I left the two of them putting the ShopVac together while I went to Taco Bell to buy dinner. While there, I got stuck behind someone in a four-wheel-drive vehicle who didn’t know how to drive on snow, the truck two cars behind mine in the drive-through managed to have a freakishly loud and squeally engine problem every single time I opened my mouth to order, and the person behind me flashed their brights at me over and over while I was waiting for my food.  I briefly considered getting out of my car and going car to car, punching people in the face for fun.

Ok.  So I got back to the house, and I was setting the food down on the dining room table when I heard Rob saying, “Ack! Arr! Ahh! Tim! Stop!” I hurried down the stairs to see water gushing out of the top of Tim’s wet-vac, as its automatic stop-when-full feature hadn’t worked at all.  Where the carpet had once been simply wet, it was now a lake.

We thought this was a good time to break for some food and an episode of The Office. It was when we were sucking down our large sodas that we began to ponder where one pees when the water is turned off in a house. Rob is a little bit proud that he has now officially peed in our new backyard.

When we returned to work, the boys decided to use the new ShopVac to empty the tank on the other one, since garden hose should theoretically make the task easy.  On the first try, the automatic shutoff feature worked like a charm.  Woot!  And the garden hose emptied the tank beautifully into the basement shower.  Double woot!  Well, that was $109 well spent, wasn’t it?

… And then the automatic shutoff feature failed completely when Rob tried to use it on the ocean in our crawlspace.  Our basement carpet now had an undercurrent, with high and low tides.

… And then it started smelling funny when he tried to use the drain-by-hose feature.

… And then it started sounding funny and no longer moved water.

… And then it started smoking.

$&^#!

It was about 9:30 p.m., so there was no returning it to Lowes at that point.  The boys returned to using the off-brand wet-vac, the one we’d so cruelly disparaged because it didn’t have all the nifty features of the new ShopVac.  I believe we all felt sufficiently ashamed for turning our backs on a trustworthy friend in favor of the new, popular kid with all the shiny toys.  It was like an after-school special.

Tim quickly learned how to tell when the tank was full, so we didn’t have any more major spills, and I broke out our steam cleaner to start sucking water out of the carpet, one gallon at a time.  After a while I played the pregnancy card and left, going to Sherry’s house to get some sleep.

Oh hey, I have an interesting bit of trivia for you guys!  Did you know there is a condition called pregnancy rhinitis?  What this means is that a lot of pregnant women have a perpetually stuffy nose for no good goddamn reason!  Yay!  And when you have year-round allergies, like some of us do, it’s even worse!  Yay again!

For some reason, my body chose that night of all nights to make my nose stop working.  Add to that the discomfort of sleeping in a bed that you’re not used to, with hip pain from forgetting to bring that magical pregnancy pillow to sleep on, and you end up with zombie Heather the next morning.

Kaylee was kind enough to wake up an hour earlier than normal, and then she complained that her tummy hurt.  By the time we left Sherry’s house to meet the plumbers for their 9-11 a.m. window, she was whining and crying continuously.  This was about when my brain broke and I called for backup.  My parents arrived about an hour later, bearing muffins, bottled water and toddler anti-gas medication.  This fixed both of us.

(Incidentally, another thing I’ve learned from this experience is that I am really, truly unprepared for the zombie apocalypse.  We didn’t have ANY water to drink — unless you counted the water in the toilets.  Once the zombies come, I really hope all the Diet Coke we have on hand will carry us through until the Army rescues us.)

Because of the below-zero temperatures of late, pipes have been breaking all over Colorado Springs, and when you’re given a 9-11 a.m. window that means they’ll show up around 12:30 p.m. Unfortunately, I had a freelance interview scheduled for precisely 12:30.  So my parents met the plumber, who apparently has to deal regularly with people’s disappointment that he is neither Jason nor Grant, and is probably tired of hearing that same joke all the damn time.  Meanwhile, I sat around in a model home for more than 25 minutes waiting for my interviewee to actually show up, wishing I could just climb up onto the massive table in the sales office and take a nap.

So the pipe was fixed.  The water was on.  The toilets were flushing.  (Although, one downside to turning your water off for almost 24 hours is that every faucet in the house will scare the ever-loving shit out of you the first time you use it again.  The loud sputtering has caused my heart to stop no less than six times, and each time I’ve found myself reaching for my cell phone because of lesson number one: DON’T WAIT TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS.)

After lunch, I took Kaylee to my bedroom so we could both lie down for a late nap.  Once she was out, I was finally, blessedly able to close my eyes.

Then I got texts from Rob and Sherry asking for updates.  I told them what was going on and then settled in for some sleep.  Then the claims adjuster finally called.  I talked to him for half an hour.  Then a cleaning company specializing in water and fire damage repair called to set up a time to come by.  And then naptime was over.  Sigh.

Anyway, cleanup is still in progress.  The cleaning company came by today to set up fans and a dehumidifier to dry out our basement.  I’ve managed to stop crying and blaming myself for breaking our house.  I finally got to sleep.  Kaylee’s tummy doesn’t hurt anymore.  There’s bottled water in our house in case the zombies come.  We have muffins.

All is well.  Or at least well-ish.

As my second ever Agonizing Day of Labor and Childbirth gets closer, I feel completely justified in napping with Kaylee every afternoon.  Once the new baby comes along, I’m fairly sure that the only things keeping me moving will be Diet Coke and methamphetamines (kidding!), so I should probably enjoy these naps while I can.

Thus, I was happily enjoying a snooze with my first-born on Monday afternoon when Barney the purple dinosaur used his magical powers to get even with me for this post.  I’m a pretty sure that dinosaur, just like Freddy Krueger, can reach into your dreams.

So, in this dream, my family and I were participating in some sort of Ghost Hunters-esque paranormal investigation. We were to spend a night in a haunted house and make note of weird things that happened, while cameras recorded our every move for the viewing audience.

A little while into the evening, Kaylee came to find me in a room with one of the other investigators and told me her toy was moving.  Since 2-year-olds say all kinds of shit, we didn’t really think much of it, but we followed her into another room to see what she was talking about.  There we found one of her stuffed animals – one of the few that does not have batteries and moving parts – walking around and talking in a very sinister sort of way.

This turned out to be too much for us all.  We could deal with dishes falling off shelves and lights flickering, but a walking, talking stuffed animal was more than we could handle.  Everyone bolted from the house, climbed into our respective vehicles (mine was a minivan – score!) and drove off as fast as we could.  I don’t know how we knew this, but that evil spirit was coming to get us, so time was of the essence.

Just as we started to get comfortable with our escape, I noticed that one of the other cars, which had left before us, had apparently turned around and was headed back in our direction.  The car was easy to spot, because it had a giant stuffed Barney strapped to its roof.  Somehow, this made perfect sense.  But why had they turned around?  Why were they headed back toward the danger?  Eh, oh well, our house was this direction, so we decided to keep going.

As we approached our house, we began to realize that something was a little bit off.  First of all, it was suddenly at the top of a mountain.  We may have only lived here a couple of months, but that seems like the type of detail we’d notice.  Then my dream-camera panned out, showing that the entire mountain was purple with green dino-spots.  AND, we suddenly had a giant stuffed Barney strapped to the roof of our car.

Dun, dun, dunnnnn.

When we pulled into the driveway at our house, we realized that our entire house was now purple with green spots, too.  The evil spirit had followed us home.  And that evil spirit was Barney-related.

I panicked and turned around in the driveway – as my spiffy new minivan with the stow-and-go-seating apparently had a small turning radius, too, proving that my minivan was awesome – and in the process I accidentally backed into the garage door before I sped off.  We didn’t get very far before Rob noticed a piece of paper stuck to the back of the van in the exact spot where it had made contact with the house.  Using his super ninja skills, he managed to get it without me having to stop the car.

It was a receipt. For a giant Barney.  And it somehow indicated that we had sold our souls. We belonged to Barney now.

“Stop the car, Heather,” Rob said.  “We can’t escape.”

This is when I woke up, somewhat shaken, and realized I had just learned a hard parenting lesson: Do not fuck with Barney.  He will haunt your dreams.

I had a rather long and involved blog post mapped out in my head, and all weekend I kept telling myself to sit down and write it.  Instead I napped and watched TV.  But I still feel like I should sum up that first week of being a stay-at-home mom, because I did actually learn a couple of things.  So here are the bullet points:

• My daughter is not, in fact, a puppy. On Tuesday night, Rob got angry at one of our dogs and smacked him on the butt, and I got angry at Rob for doing so.  The dogs don’t know why he’s mad, I argued, so it’s pointless and mean to get angry at them.  And then I realized that had been why I was so upset with myself for yelling at Kaylee when she didn’t want to take her nap.  I’d been thinking of my daughter as this innocent, dumb little being who just doesn’t know any better than to misbehave.  But she isn’t (completely) innocent, and she totally knows better.  She knew she was disobeying me, and when she saw my head explode, she decided that maybe she’d better go ahead and take that nap after all.  Her little brain is getting smarter every day, and Kaylee is more than willing to manipulate me if it means she gets to watch one more kitty video or eat one more piece of candy.  So I have to be willing to let her know when she’s crossed a line.
• I am but a prop in my daughter’s carefully choreographed universe. Kaylee has started to give me specific instructions for how I am to behave.  For example, she might call me to the other side of the room (“C’mon!”) and then pat the floor for me to sit down.  Then she’ll shove me over into a crawling position and run away.  If I don’t chase her down on my hands and knees, she heaves an exasperated sigh and comes back to explain it to me again.  My other roles include pushing the mouse button to start YouTube videos, and bringing her popsicles.  I am not to sing or dance except when she deems it appropriate, otherwise she’ll push my shoulder and sternly say, “No!”  I am also not allowed to make her wear socks.
• I may be a little bored sometimes, but you couldn’t bribe me to go back. The other day, I was sitting with Kaylee watching a kitty video loop for the seventeenth time, feeling like my brain was leaking out of my ear from the boredom.  And I thought, “If I still had a job, I would be doing something important right now.”  I even believed that for about a second and a half.  Then I realized that if I still had my job, I would still be killing time on the internet, but I wouldn’t be doing it with my daughter, and I wouldn’t be watching her crack up when that kitty does a backflip.  What’s more important than that?

Although I failed in my attempt to come up with an excuse to post photos of Kaylee playing in the water, I do have something to talk about today.

Today is Kaylee’s first day at a new daycare, and I had to drop her off for the first time this morning.  I was prepared for tears and heart-wrenching sobs, and a desperate attempt to cling to the familiar.  It turned out that none of those things came from Kaylee, while all of them came from me.

When we arrived this morning, the toddler room at the new daycare was in chaos — the kind of chaos you expect when you put 10 toddlers in the same room.  Kaylee watched the action but wasn’t exactly angling to be put on the floor.

When the time came to hand her over to her new teacher, I was expecting the screaming, shirt-clinging scene that I’d come to expect at the old daycare.  But today, she just went quietly, only looking mildly concerned.

I, however, was a mess.  I’ve been singing the praises of the new daycare, but that doesn’t mean I’m not worried about how Kaylee’s going to adjust to her new surroundings.  And the thought of her spending several days in misery just … well, it makes me cry a little bit.

So I did my best not to tear up while I was still inside the daycare, and then I went ahead and cried once I got back to my car.  I spent most of the morning convinced that Kaylee was miserable and sobbing hysterically, and that I’m the worst mom ever for inflicting this change on her.

Then I called the daycare a couple of hours ago to check on her.

You guessed it: She’s fine.  Perfectly, wonderfully fine. She even took a longer nap than she usually took at the old daycare.

So I figure I need to come away from this with a lesson.  I guess it’s that Kaylee’s a tough kid who can handle a lot more than I give her credit for.

And also that I’m probably going to need therapy when she goes away to college.

I should have known.

The moment I sat down to write Friday’s blog post, I should have given my hands a task other than typing. I could have made cookies, learned to knit … But the last thing I should have done was write up a blog post taking a stand (and so publicly!) against taking my kid to the doctor for every little thing.

See, it’s almost 10 p.m. on Monday, and I’m writing this post from home while Rob tries to get our wailing baby to go back to sleep. We both stayed home from work today because we were completely exhausted from Kaylee’s screaming last night, and neither of us could bear to make the other stay home alone with her today.

The doctor’s office opens at 8 a.m., and I was on the phone with them at 8:00:01 to make an appointment for her. Rob and I were pessimistic, though, believing that the pediatrician would again tell us there was no medicine that could help her. On the way to the doctor, we both ranted at the pharmaceutical industry for not being able to come up with a safe, effective cold medicine for kids under 2.

So when the doctor looked into her ears and said, “That’s infected,” we were sad that our kid was suffering. When he said, “We’ll give her antibiotics,” we looked at each other and quietly said, “Yesssss!” Because finally, finally she can actually be treated for her misery.

I sense that there’s a lesson in this. Maybe it’s that I should take my kid to the doctor every time she sneezes. Maybe it’s that I shouldn’t question the daycare employees and their wisdom.

Or it could be that, when I’ve had a lot of this and this , I should not be allowed near the keyboard.

When Rob and I started planning our family, I knew I wanted to go back to work after the baby was born. There was no question in my mind that I’d be a saner person if my daily life included adult conversations and accomplishments that existed outside of my roles as a wife and as a mother.

And then Kaylee was born.

In the first three weeks or so, I was desperate to go back to work. This motherhood thing was a lot harder than I expected, and the idea of handing the baby to someone else and spending my day in a place surrounded by people who didn’t demand to be fed every two hours was the happiest idea in the world.

By the end of my seven-week maternity leave, though, I’d settled into deep pit of mommy guilt, and I couldn’t even think about going back to work without bursting into tears. (I was a joy to be around, let me tell you.) I felt like I was going to miss everything — her first word, her first step, the general joy of seeing her grow and learn. And I was inconsolable.

But staying home wasn’t an option for financial reasons, so I reluctantly started taking her to daycare. By the end of the first week, I was able to leave her there without crying. By the end of the first month, we’d developed a predictable routine and I’d settled into the role of a working mom.

BBC News recently published the results of a study that found working mothers to be happier than stay-at-home moms. (Kate discusses the results today in the Pikes Peak Parent News blog.) The number of hours worked outside the home doesn’t seem to matter, just that they’re working.

I can’t speak for all moms out there, but I can say this about myself: I’ve come to realize that I was right about myself, way back in the beginning before Kaylee even existed. I cherish every day that I get to take a vacation and hang out with my daughter, but I don’t think I could manage it every day of the week. She’s wonderful and I love her, but I can’t spend all day every day retrieving toys that she just chucked across the room and searching for pacifiers that she hid between the couch cushions. I have to spend some time doing things for myself, or I will simply go crazy. (Or more likely, get very depressed.)

That said, I don’t think our current situation is ideal, either. I spend about nine hours a day away from my child, and I only see her a couple of hours a day when she’s awake. All the “experts” say that Rob and I should plan a regular date night to keep the romance alive or whatever, but that means handing Kaylee off to someone else AGAIN. It’s hard to convince myself that a date night is worth it when it means that the only time I get to see my baby is when I kiss her sleeping head at the end of the night.

So, in case anyone wants to do me a big favor, here’s what I need: A part-time job making just as much money as I make now. I could work either four hours a day or two full days a week. And just to make it easier on this imaginary employer, you could pay me a little less to offset the slight savings in daycare I’d receive for only using it part-time.

Any offers?

Hello?

Anyone?

I didn’t think so.