I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that, for parents with young children, weekends aren’t exactly restful: there’s the shopping, the organized activities, the unorganized keeping-them-busy-ness, the deferred errands around the house, and then overall simple running like a maniac to keep the children happy, diverted, and hopefully, fatigued enough …
Author Archives: Theodore
Nanny and the Ex-Wife: the showdown (or just the introduction)
My custody arrangement for JP includes the provision that his mother and I cooperate on hiring anyone who will provide care for him. His mother lives very close to her parents, which means if she needs after school help, she can get it for free. Not that I have any complaint about that, but I …
Continue reading “Nanny and the Ex-Wife: the showdown (or just the introduction)”
Awkward! (A conversation about race and fathers, with our nanny.)
With almost no exceptions, my experience with Ellie’s nanny, who has been with us for about four months, has been great. The baby loves her, Tomoko respects (and likes) her, and I find her calm to be an entire separate, and reliable, infrastructure in the system of our parenting. But I did have one whopper …
Continue reading “Awkward! (A conversation about race and fathers, with our nanny.)”
Kids Are Smart And Adults Are Dumb
Usually, I’m not a proponent of this theory: generally, any individual who needs five years to learn to wipe his own butt, as has been the case with JP, doesn’t rate too high on the intellectual scale. But this little boy’s analysis and internalization of the modern dynamics of marriage is incisive. And he plays …