Nanny up

Let's play catch-up, shall we?  In Lagerfeld news, I am now:

• responsible for an entire family in the Philippines
• preparing for two major job interviews next week (5 person panel, 1.5 hours long)
• trying to extricate myself out of the daily doings of the house after a year of Casa Lagerfeld-Dotytron being my own personal fiefdom
• packing up 5 year's worth of ephemera from the basement, to be stored at Momma D's house
• re-organizing Momma D's basement to prepare it for the graceful acceptance of said ephemera
• making a quilt for my new fav lil' baby in the universe (Dr. Rei had a baby!  He is the cutest chicken in the universe!)
• preparing to go back to work in T minus 22 days
• trying to squeeze the marrow out of these last two weeks of summer

IT'S NOT INSIGNIFICANT, GUYS!

Our nanny started this week, part-time, as part of her introduction period.  She will be full-time as of next week.  The process of hiring a nanny was a little stressful (HUGE UNDERSTATEMENT ALERT!), given that it happened during renovations (more on that later, I've still got post-traumatic stress), and while we were coming off living with my outlaw mom.  Unlike the adage, you really CAN'T go home again.  Living in someone else's home, while they're there, for an extended period of time (we were there for four weeks), with three kids, under any circumstance is going to be trying.  Momma D is lovely, but she was sick during that time frame, and I was trying to project manage a major renovation, and you know, I HAVE THREE KIDS AND TWO OF THEM ARE TWIN INFANTS.  There's just no way to be graceful about things in that scenario, especially when your partner is working full-time and DJing a million high school proms and winding down the school year.  

To give you a sense of how desperately we wanted to be home, I moved back in, WITH THREE KID AND TWO OF THEM ARE TWIN INFANTS, into a house that had no working: fridge, stove, shower, and the only running water was in the upstairs bathroom sink.  

I'm going to let that sink in for a moment.

For about a solid week, we were trooping to our neighbour's houses and having showers there (imagine a family of five, showing up bedraggled on your doorstep with towels - reason #58971005200 why I live on the best street in the world) and I was taking our dishes to be washed at their houses.  But we were still HOME.  

Anyway, I signed up for one of those Facebook-for-caregivers sites (Care.com) and put up an add.  Out of the 20+ replies, I ended up finding about 3 people to interview off of there, and 1 person who was referred from this Facebook twins page I'm part of (the awkwardly acronymed TPOMBA - Toronto Parents of Multiple Births Association), and one which was a referral from a nanny I knew and admired from one of our local drop-in centres.

We literally Googled a list of "interview questions for nannies" and I worked a million hours on spreadsheets to figure out what we could afford to pay.  Here is (one of the ways) where having THREE KIDS AND TWO OF THEM ARE TWIN INFANTS screws you:

1) I need to pay for 3 kids in care, 2 of whom are infants (daycares traditionally charge more for infants)

2) The Canadian government offers a child care tax credit of $7000 per child, per calendar year.  This credit reduces the taxable income of the lower wage earner in your family.  Whereas some people can afford to pay their nanny, part-time wages on the books and top up the rest with cash (an arrangement that works out well for both parties), the amount of "on the books" money I have to have each year is $21000 - which is basically someone's minimum wage salary.  

3) Some people can share a nanny, so that their monthly expenses are say, $2000 for childcare but the nanny is taking home $4000 (an arrangement that works out well for all parties), but because I have three kids, no one is going to share with me, so we are on the hook on our own.

Basically, I'm getting owned here.  Because we are two civil servants making middle-class wages, it's not like we have a lot of room, here.  We live in Toronto.  We couldn't offer a lot of money, and then you have to factor in that as an employer, doing everything above board, we have to deduct the employee's portion of CPP, EI, federal/provincial tax, etc. (which hurts the nanny's bottom line) and then we have to pay the employer's portion of all of the above, and quarterly WSIB to boot, which hurts our bottom line.  

To compound matters, we found that a lot of our interviewees or people we contacted liked to discuss a net hourly wage (so, I expect to be making $15/hour after tax, based on a 44 hour work week), which means that I was basically killing myself on the government's payroll deductions online calculator page figuring out different models of gross versus net wages for the nanny, plus what our actual monthly would be, once you factor in our portion of the taxes, etc.  Finally, I talked to a neighbour and he said that he experienced similar when hiring their nanny and finally put his foot down.  It's not the employer's responsibility to figure out your take-home income.  You get offered an hourly and you either accept or you don't.

At the end of the process, we found a lovely woman who has wonderful references (an old high school friend of mine who lives nearby nearly hired her himself) and is sweet and warm and loving and patient and also has her own ideas about childcare practices and believes in open communication.  After hanging with her for a half day yesterday, I truly feel we made the right decision and I hope she stays with us.  

It is a very difficult situation when you hire a nanny from the Philippines.  Our nanny has an 11 year old son who she hasn't lived with since he was one and a half.  ONE AND A HALF.  Instead, she has spent the past ten years looking after other people's kids.  She hasn't been able to afford to go back home more than 3 times in that span.  The Dotytron and I are committed to making it so that we can buy her a plane ticket home every year, if not every other year.  

One of the things we could offer that we thought would be a plus in our negotiations with prospective nannies was the fact that we could do a tonne of paid time off, with the Dotytron's teaching schedule.  So we offered 3 weeks paid vacation and a week of paid sick days, with more paid vacation available if they were willing to take that time during the summer when the Dotytron is off, to offset our slightly lower wages.  In our experience, nannies from the Philippines were less interested in time off.

Our nanny is also supporting her husband and her aging parents and has no siblings.  Her elder sister passed away in a car crash so she's also responsible for her sister's 4 kids.  SO OBVIOUSLY I SLEEP WELL AT NIGHT WITH THAT INFORMATION.  I now know a LOT about the consumer price index in the Philippines the Philippine-Canadian exchange rate.  One of the reasons we hired her is because she was looking for employers who would treat her like family.  We really really like her and she lives close by and I want to be able to help her in any way I can.  

 Last week we spent about 4 days at the Executive Director of my work's cottage.  I spent a good portion of those four days screaming, "DON'T. TOUCH. THAT!!!" The cottage is beautiful.  It was built in 1957 and is as charming as you would expect.  It feels like a home and is charming and individual.  It's on a lake that remains shallow for like, 40-50 feet off from the shore, and the cottages are all fronted with sandy beach.  Perfect for the kids (minus inevitable sand consumption).  We had one glorious day of sunshine and then it was rainy and cool, but honestly, our summer has been so bucksauce and filled with stress and socializing that it was nice to be holed up at a cottage with just my immediate family.  We loved it.

 

Finally, big things going in haircut news.

The Quincess has had some unfortunate, wispy, old man, Doc from Back to the Future hair for a while now (see below).  SMckay did some shaping and now he's looking way more legit.

SMckay also gave the Big Yam the same haircut as Sosuke from Ponyo (so, the classic Asian boy haircut) and it's the best.  He looks so freakin' cute!

  

Gotta go and make sure inflation is holding steady in the Philippines.

Fin.

Hiatus

As it turns out, managing a major renovation, moving out, hiring a nanny, and having 3 kids can be a slightly stressful experience.

I'm not gonna lie folks, this reno has beaten me down a bit.  I'm a changed person.  The Little Dynamo has been broken.  More about my reno trauma in a later post.

For now, let me do some catching up.  We spent a glorious week at a rental cottage with Momma D and Ehmdo and it was lovely.  Going to the cottage was adding to my stress, initially.  It was finally looking like we would have a fully operational kitchen and then - BAM! - we had to pack everyone and everything up and head out of dodge and our house was going to lie fallow with no one around to tie up all the finicky loose ends for a week.  Also, while we were dealing with (to be detailed later) reno issues (the use of the word "issues" is a bit of an understatement) we were ALSO interviewing nannies and the Dotytron was teaching summer school and the Big Yam is home with me 3 days a week instead of just 1 and it was just...a lot.

I just wanted to be home, you know?  Home in my beautiful new kitchen, cooking on my beautiful new stove and using my beautiful new fridge, and chucking the mess in my beautiful new dishwasher.  But no, I had to go to the cottage and oh, did I resent it.  At first.  We drove up, unpacked all our boxes and once the initial frenzy of arrival-at-the-cottage wore off, all of this happened:

 Yes, that is Lindsay unabashedly stuffing his fat face with sand.

That grin kills me (my lower half edited out for unapologetic vanity purposes)

Naked  dockside snacks

Our neighbours tipped us off to a reconditioned steam train that runs in Huntsville so we took the Big Yam on a rainy day.  It was pouring and we were drenched and cold to the bone, but that smile made it so worth it.

Near the tail end of the week, this little nugget realized that you can go swimming naked at the cottage and he ran around with his gitch out thereafter.

The cottage was near-perfect.  On a point of land, so you couldn't see your neighbours.  A giant dock, a sandy entry for the kids, small enough so that the water was warmish but big enough that you got a decent canoe ride out of exploring it.  The fire pit was on a separate stretch of sandy beach and there was a horseshoe pit.  You could tell it was a well-loved and well-maintained family cottage, striking the perfect balance between homey, without you being slapped in the face with family photos of ugly kids you don't know doing cannonballs off the dock, and not being a suburban style McMansion.  It was just the reset I needed.

Things that have been making my summer so far:

- hangs with a very pregnant, due-any-day-now Dr. Rei, where we reminisce about old times (like, the time she wondered what life would be like if Evan Dando's real name was Evan Anne Dando), or older times like back in the raving days when everything I wore was basically a pocket square tied together with dental floss, or when the Dotytron is impersonating Prince and his adroit and uncanny ability to erase his internet footprint: "Police officers are always coming into schools and telling you that everything you put on the internet is forever, but Prince is all like, 'nuh-uh' *click*"

- Micelli Mondays.   Last year, we set up weekly themed movie nights with Lolly and SMcKay that involved a movie and an appropriately themed meal.  These eventually turned into just watching episodes of Who's The Boss.  The 2014 edition has been dubbed "Micelli Mondays" after the proto-feminist protagonist of the series and actually has never taken place on a Monday, but I love alliteration so there.  We've gone swimming and then to Country Style Hungarian and Baker Bots (which was supposed to be tied to a viewing of the Grand Budapest Hotel, but we couldn't squeeze that in).  We have made meatballs and watched Meatballs.  This past week's iteration was a mixed bag featuring: AYCE Japanese, a trip to Pacific Mall for the iPad mini cover pictured below, a random grab bag of fridge-clearing snacks for dinner, and a viewing of Divergent.

- The continued and progressive awesomeness of the Big Yam.  Quotes from this summer:

While watching one of his BBC Blue Planet documentaries - "'Meet the manta ray' means the manta ray eats meat."

After going to the beach, insisting on bringing rocks from the beach home despite the lack of pockets, shoving them into his underwear, and walking bow-legged back to our bikes - "The rocks are talking to me.  They're saying, 'I want hot dogs!'"

"Nana misses us." Me: "Yeah, she does."  BY: "She's saying, 'I wish they would come back so I can poop on them!'" The day after we moved back home after the renovation.

"What's diarrhea?"

- General good times with our friends and family and the neighbours.  The usual good stuff: swimming in the pool, wading pools, beach, backyard, etc.

These are the things that have been sustaining me while I think about the imminent BASEMENT UNDERPIN in our future.  UGH!  My mantra is: "it's cheaper than moving. It's cheaper than moving."  My actual coping mechanism is to ball up all the associated stress of 4 weeks of jackhammers and concrete and more dirt and dust and no laundry into a stress singularity that sits in the pit of my stomach, ignored except when the reality of packing up a whole floor of our house in the next three weeks comes to the fore.

Excuse me, I have to go curl up into a ball and cry silent tears of anxiety.

Fin.

One-der Twins

(See what I did there?) 

My babies turned one two Saturdays ago, and there's been so much upheaval around here that I'm only now getting a spare minute to talk it out.  I managed to carve out the time before our big renovation exodus to pick some key photos from the past year and was basically reduced to tears the entire time I spent scrolling through their sparse photo albums on my computer.

I'm feeling pretty guilty for how quickly the year has gone by and how little I have to show for it.  I can't believe they are a YEAR old.  I can't believe they went from being the scrawniest, most inept breathers and eaters, to the robust (though still on the small side) characters they are now.   I can't believe how much they've changed and how it happened without me noticing, even though I spend almost every waking moment with them.  I'm feeling guilty about how I wasn't present enough with them, and how I wasn't that doting, super-attachment parenting mom, and how the reality of our living situation basically means that they learned from very young to be self reliant and got accustomed to a lot of autonomy.  I'm feeling guilty that a whole year is GONE.  Gone.  Done.  Their entire first precious year, reduced to some photos and hazy memories.  

On a certain level, I can rationalize that it's always going to feel like this with your kids.  Especially when you're as baby-hungry as I am.  But I feel like I didn't soak it up enough.  I feel like I didn't relish every moment with these guys.  I have hundred and hundreds of photos of the Big Yam from my mat year leave with him.  These guys?  A fraction of that.  I wanted to document, to chart, to capture every moment and instead I get a stuttering jump-cut representation of this year.  And guys, really?  It was a hard, hard, hard year.  I know, I'm the original tough guy.  I don't complain (a lot).  I take what I'm given and I plow through.  That's my way.  My low days this year were very, very low.  Maybe it's for the best that I only have the greatest hits reel?

I know some moms who are WITH their kids.  Like, WITH THEM.  24/7 love.  Moms where every cry is answered with a comforting hand on a brow, a shush, cuddles until eyelashes rest on chubby cheeks, where all their actions are narrated for the developmental benefit of the growing minds in their charges, moms who drink in their babes every second of the day.  I'm not that mom.  Sometimes I wish I was that mom - there's a niggling part of me that suspects that those moms have better reserves of patience and unending wellsprings of love for their children, and don't sit there juggling sourcing floor tile on the computer, negotiating with the patio door people on the phone, and organizing oil changes for the car in a paper day timer, while their babies do laps around the main floor, only looking up when their babies pull down cake stands on themselves or the babies are already halfway up the stairs.  

This post has taken me about three days to write and I'm exhausted and I can't pull a coherent thought together.  In summation: I'm sad they're so big, I love them to the ends of the earth, I want to put the breaks on time, I resent capitalism and modernity for making me less able to savour my time with them.  

This year has challenged me in ways I couldn't have imagined.  As far as day-in, day-out goes, I still think my time in a professional kitchen was more consistently difficult, but this year has pushed and stretched me.  I've still got a lot of growing to do and I'm hoping that I can be given the grace to become the parent I want to be.  

I love them so f**king much.

Fin.

Helmut Newton...

...has left the building.

By that I mean, that at our Sick Kids orthotics visit on Monday, Quincess had a head scan and has hit (or exceeded) all the benchmarks we had wanted to.  There are all these vectors they measure: quadrant to quadrant symmetry, the overall cranial vault asymmetry index, etc.  His head circumference has increased by almost 2cm since we started in late January.  It's been so hot these past few days and he was such a little sweatball that we had decided that if there wasn't going to be much projected growth in the next month, we'd just call it now.  Since he's hit all his markers, then we were good to go.  Look at how much his head shape has changed since the first time:

Look at how lopsided his little head was!  

I'll forego the suspense.  After 5 months of 23 hour-a-day helmet wearing, here he is:

Just kidding.  That's Lenny.

 Here he is, for real:

Look at that little sweet face!  

Hanbo referred to Quincess as "Helmut Newton" once and it was (is) the best nickname ever.  He really does look so much better.  The back is still a little flat, but not nearly as pronounced as it was, and the bulging on one side has completely evened out.

I have no time for more - packing up my kitchen and bathroom and today I had all three kids to myself ALL DAY and I am super fart-sacked.  I will say that the brightest moment for me today was when I went to the park with my neighbour's nanny, who is hands-down the best nanny I've ever encountered.  So present, so full of energy, patience, Montessori-trained, ECE trained, so many projects (daily science experiments, philosophy, Waldorf-y type stuff, Socratic method) - she's like, a next-level nanny.  She's young too - like, 25 or something and just loves working with kids and it shows.  So I've been doing the odd thing with her on Thursdays because my neighbour and I had a semi-regular overlapping maternity leave date that I've continued with the nanny, when available.  I had just come back from a peeing-on-the-park-slide reset with the Big Yam and she asked me what I used to do before having the kids, and I told her, and she said she thought I used to work in childcare because I'm so good with kids.

ME, GOOD WITH KIDS!

I've seriously been coasting on that all day, LOL!  I'm on my best behaviour around her, because I want her approval, and guys, it TOTALLY worked.  On a day like today (when I started at 5:30am and had all three kids home with me and it's 10pm and the Dotytron isn't home yet) in a week like this week (when there's so much upheaval and I have to pack everyone up to live out of the home and also pack up 2 major rooms in the house, and project manage the renos in addition to all my other admin), that kind of comment is enough to give me the boost I need to stay a calm, centered, reflective, and present parent.

I'm trying to be less reactionary and more calm (I say that all the time, but this week especially!) because the Big Yam has been having some major regressions and I think it's stress and anxiety related and the thought of him being all stressed out and anxious is like, the saddest.  So before we would react rather sternly to potty-training issues (especially since he's been trained for almost a full year) but we're just trying to be chill, and supportive, and not censorious, and just all around shower him with love and attention because he's obviously going through something and doesn't have the wherewithal to either a) properly express it; b) recognize it; or c) even identify the cause.  Poor little boobla.  It makes me so sad to think of him being uneasy to the point where it's been manifested in physical behaviours.  I think the kindergarten open house last week kind of made s**t really real for him and I think he's stressed about it.

I love that little nugget.

Fin.

All Of The Lights

For the past 3 years my street has pooled resources and done fireworks in the park for Victoria Day.  This year, the woman who usually grabs them was away, so I did the organizing and volunteered to grab them from the fireworks store.  I can't remember what we spent last year per family, maybe $15?

I went to Kaboom! and it was hands-down one of the best customer service experiences I've ever had. First of all, I walk in, and it's like 3 Asian dudes who must have maxed out at age 22, going to town on a late lunch from Domino's that consisted of a THREE large pieces, a bunch of garlic knot things and wings.  A large pizza per person is SO CLASSY, in my books.  Then, one of those sweet kids agreed to stand outside and keep an eye on the van while the Wonder Twins snoozed so I could shop.  Then, the 22 year old store manager personally walked me around the store and helped me sort out a show.  This guy was an expert.  In the past, I think the woman has just bought those "kits" which are pretty lame - a million roman candles and burning schoolhouses.  SNOOZERS.  This guy made sure my show had a narrative arc with a beginning, middle, and end and I will say, that after witnessing the show on Sunday night, à la carte is the way to go.  I went a *little* bit crazy and spent like, $150, but the kid manager totally threw in a million sparklers and gave me mad deals on what I bought.  It was amazing.

People who complain about paying that much for fireworks are also the kind of people who can't appreciate how awesome it is when a kid manager buys his staff a large pizza each.  I would love to work in that environment.  Talk about morale!

We had such a nice long weekend.  Saw friends every day - the Roomie and baby T, dinner with JJ and S, MHui and her fambam, our friends B & G and their new baby.  So sweet!  We went for walks and ate ice cream and went out for a restaurant dinner, all five of us, which is pretty special.  When it goes off well, it's like, TOP OF THE WORLD, MA!  Eating at a REAL restaurant?  That is a feat, my friends.

JJ & S's kids are super-geniuses.  I was being a goofball and I was asking their 9 year old a series of inane questions: "Do you like to eat meatballs?  Do you like to eat giant meatballs the size of your head?" and he didn't answer me, so I said, "B! What, you're not talking to me?" and he said, "I assumed the question was rhetorical."  LOL!  He's NINE.

I can only hope my kids are that smart.  The Big Yam has been trying to figure out a bunch of stuff lately.  "Where does pee come from?"  "Where's my bladder?"  "What belly did Baba come from?"  "What does a Japanese spider crab eat?"  It's hilarious and amazing watching him process your answers.  You can see the wheels turning as he figures out how to phrase his question, and then again once you've given your answer.  My neighbour turned me onto these Youtube dudes called the "Slo Mo Guys" who basically make things explode and record it in super HD and play it back in slow motion.  Everything in that preceding sentence is the manifestation of the totality of little kid fantasies.  When the Big Yam isn't watching hours of ocean documentaries, he wants to watch this:

Meanwhile, the Quincess continues to be such a quiet, clever little lad.  He's like a classic middle child, which is hilarious, because he's the middle child by four minutes.  You basically show him something once and he'll give you a classic Quincess side-eye and then try to figure it out or start to mimic you.  Meanwhile, Lindsay Lou-Lou is, as the Dotytron said the other night, "kinesthetically smart" and then, in a whisper, "the fake kind of smart."  LOL!  Poor Lindsay Lou-Lou.  I don't want to box them in from the time they are babies though, so I will say that, right now,  Lindsay is physically advanced and is very attuned to his own emotions (read: he's very sensitive).

Now, a photo dump:

My garden, 2 weeks ago, freshly mulched and looking fiiine.  

Lendigan just back from the Grateful Dead concert

Happy, crooked smiling Quincess

11 month shot!  So squirmy!

The Big Yam and the babies and I spent all of a gloriously sunny yesterday picnicking in the park.  They've turned out the splash pad water but yesterday was the first real day it's been warm enough to think about getting wet.  Look at that little munchkin' swagger!

21st century manhood

Minds: blown (they can't figure out 2D pics of people they know)

More from our picnic

Lendigan making a run for it

Chicken Milanese dinner on a bed of roasted grape tomatoes and baby arugula

Cinqo de Mayo posole

Meat-free meal - tagliatelle tossed with wilted radicchio and bagna cauda and topped with a fried egg

Mother's day meal: seared rib eyes, brussels sprouts roasted on the grill, potatoes grilled with red onions

That time I ate 2lbs of macaroni and cheese with crispy thyme breadcrumbs

Meat-free meal: roasted asparagus on garlic toast with a fried egg, hollandaise, and leftover thyme breadcrumbs

Stromboli (basically, pizza dough rolled up with sopressata and provolone and roasted red peppers), served with tomato sauce and arugula salad

Alsatian flammenkuchen - caramelized onion, lardon, and crème frâiche on pizza dough.

French chocolate "silk" pie - basically chocolate mousse in a pie crust - I made a pretzel crust but wasn't happy with it.  Next time, will either use a chocolate sablé crust, or the standard piecrust, parbaked.  The filling is worth making again.  Will post the recipe below.

Based on one of my favorite sandwiches from La Cubana - grilled halibut with an avocado-pineapple salsa and a Greek salad.

Fin.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

French Chocolate Silk Pie

serves 10-12

1 piecrust, parbaked

1 c. heavy cream

8 oz. bittersweet chocolate, chopped

3 eggs

3/4 c. granulated sugar

2 T. water

8 T. unsalted butter, room temperature, cut into roughly tablespoon-sized pieces

- whip the heavy cream until stiff peaks form, set aside in the fridge.

- melt the chocolate, stirring until smooth, set aside

- whisk the eggs, sugar, and water together in a bowl set over a pot of simmering water (double boiler style), and whisk until the mixture feels hot to the touch when you dip a finger in it.  Remove, and beat with a whisk attachment or beaters until thickened and cooled to room temperature.

- beat in the butter, piece by piece, then beat in the melted chocolate.

- fold in the whipped cream.

- pour mixture into your cooled pie shell vehicle of choice, then place plastic wrap directly on the surface and chill for a few hours, or overnight.  

- top with additional whipped cream and serve.