The Child Care Lottery

Welcome to the child care lottery

The Mumdanity household has won the child care lottery!

Our name and number has been drawn from among thousands of other entries languishing in the mysterious child care application barrel, and we have been allocated two days a week in the nursery room of a local child care centre. 

The winning offer came unexpectedly, sliding onto my smartphone and into the rest of our lives as a straightforward plain text email. There was no fuss, no fancy footing, no fanfare - just a short and simple email, offering a big and potentially heart wrenching family deal. 
 
The offer caught me completely off guard, partly because it was still early and I hadn't had time to inhale my morning coffee, but mostly because permanent child care positions are excruciatingly hard to come by in our inner-outer, outer-inner Melbourne suburb.
 
Located on the cusp of the city fringe - where the suburbs hold hands with the central business district and the house prices are almost affordable - our suburb has recently experienced a rapid influx of pregnant couples and young families.

The local child care infrastructure has proved woefully inadequate in the face of the baby overflow, with the existing centres and providers barely able to touch the sides of the overwhelming baby boom demand.

Options abound, but the waiting lists are positively daunting: an average of two years for private centres, and an extraordinary average of three for the handful of council operated cooperatives and family day care providers.

In response to the crisis, my Parents Group has begun dedicating a large chunk of our weekly coffee catch up to child care acquisition strategies: centre tours taken, grovelling emails sent, desperate phone calls made, miraculous offers received, first preference wins whispered on the grapevine.

My husband and I have spent hours sitting around the dining table trying to crack the waiting list code - we have thrashed out theories ranging from age to gender to parent profession to food allergy types to street locality to random selection by Twister game board - but have failed to come any closer to understanding the mystery. 

In light of the dastardly daring nature of the child care game, a win is right up there with coming across a full packet of Mint Slices hidden at the back of the breadbox or finding an unsquashed piece of banana beneath the high chair. Our unprecedented lottery win knocked our collective non-cotton socks off, the brilliance encapsulated in the unpredictability of the draw and the magic wrapped up in the early January start date. 

Celebrations aside, though, you don't get anything for free - and much like every monetary lottery win comes with an unwanted tax, my child care lottery win comes with an unwanted cascade of emotional upheaval and mummy guilt.
 
Making the initial decision to enrol my baby girl in child care was a tough one - even just using the words 'enrol' and 'child care' in the same sentence as 'my baby' is still enough to make me want to have an impromptu litter of kittens.  

Like many parents and guardians who sign on the dotted child care line, my decision was based on a cacophony of inner voices and personal factors, and balanced precariously atop a wobbly stack of practicality, personalty, ideology and financial viability.  

While a big part of me feels hollow and panic-stricken at the thought of leaving my baby in care for ten hour blocks of time, I have come to accept over the last six months of soul searching and bad late night television that a key element of my mind is craving the balance and challenge of returning to work.

My professional self has been hidden in the cupboard with my pre-pregnancy jeans since I started maternity leave, and is clamoring to be allowed out for an airing. And my alliterating, argumentative, analytical self needs be rescued from the dish washing water before she bores the blogosphere to tears (sorry).

I have also come to accept that as much as I like the idea of living in my own private oasis and feeding off my (disheveled, wilting) vegie patch, utopia is just a sleep-deprivation-induced mirage and there is a financial imperative to go back to work on a part time basis - we are totally not in Kansas anymore, Toto!

Our little household is currently scraping by, but I would rather glide than scrape. I'd like to buy onesies with wild retail abandon, and pay bills ahead of schedule, and fatten up the abandoned piggy bank before I have to put him out to pasture.

Another scale-tipping factor is the belief that my daughter needs to play with other babies, and socialise outside our little family circle of three. My husband and I are familial strangers in this city, imports from another state without a network of family and cousins spread around us, and we are the first among our friends to cross the parenthood bridge. We play games and sing songs and roll around on the floor, but there is only so much you can do before the baby works out you are not actually another baby at all.

She needs to learn to play with other little people, share her toys and not bite explorative fingers and passing elbows. She needs to learn to sleep in different environments, and pat bunny rabbits, and stack blocks with the other kids and drink from a big girl cup. She needs to be allowed to grow and explore, just like her mummy and daddy.

Rationally, I stand firm behind my decision. But the crushing reality of having to actually leave my daughter at a child care centre and just drive away - just drive away - is pushing down on my soul like a full-term baby's crown pushing against a tired cervix.

I've made the decision, I've won the child care lottery - but am I still gambling?

M x

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Lemon-aid

Suburban lemons

We live in the outer-inner suburbs - or the inner-outer suburbs, depending on your perspective - of Melbourne. Close enough to the big smoke to have a continual babble of city white noise bubbling in the background, and far enough out into the 'burbs to live in a largish house on a largish block.

Our house is of the old and crumbling variety, a Victorianesque terrace built with poor quality post-war cement mix and hodgepodged together with random blocks of timber and silicone glue. It is a hefty double brick and bluestone construction, that will withstand almost any force except itself and time. 

It's bulk is a blessing, capturing sunlight and heat during the gloomy winter months and barricading out the main bite of the Australian summer scorchers. And while it is large in space and girth, it is poky in proportions, creating the feeling that you are in an open plan rabbit warren where you can't hide but can be all alone, all the same time.

It is a house of conundrums and errors and really-should-fixes. The kitchen is an old new kitchen job installed in an old house in an attempt to make it new, and is built from the kind of white laminate that won't really stay white for very long, even with a bucket of sugar soap and a sledgehammer of determination. The bench top leans in to the wall at an acute angle, causing jars to roll and plates to slide. 

Windows rattle in the wind, the mortar falls out from between the bricks and the polycarbonate pergola bangs about in perpetual disagreement with the framework. The taps leak, the plumbing backs up, the front door only closes if you slam it and sometimes, if the weather is bad, it even rains in the hallway. 

Despite and because of it's faults, this ramshackle establishment makes you feel unconditionally welcome. The front gate squeaks hello and goodbye like joyous punctuation marks at the beginning and end of each day. Decades of scuff marks tell stories on the wide polished timber floor boards and include you in their history. The cheap purple tap fittings attached to the colonial style bath remind you that this is a home, not just a house with light fittings and matching accessories.

The most welcoming room of the house, though, is the backyard. Living on the city verge, we are free from the restraint of the lifeless brick walled courtyard and instead blessed with a poorly maintained but well-loved backyard. We have enough space to spread out a substantial shed, a vegie patch, a compost pile, a dilapidated lattice trellis, a serious barbecue (this is Australia, after all, folks), a sun-scarred outdoor dining setting, a large dog kennel for an equally large dog, a functional clothesline, several thirsty pot plants and a chunk of suitably unruly lawn. 

The heart of this outdoor room is the lemon tree. Old, gnarly and knotted, it stands in the middle of the backyard with branches crossed and boughs aloft. A monster among lemon trees, it shows above the fence line and across the train tracks and torments the inner-outer-inner city citrus population. It provides shade and shelter and a delicious scent, and kindly blocks the neighbours prying eyes from peeking through our lounge room window. 

Lemon, anyone?

Our tree fruits like it is required to feed an army of citrus-hungry warriors, harbouring and then unceremoniously dropping lemon after lemon after lemon after lemon to the ground. We pick them up, we bundle them in polystyrene boxes and plastic bags, we use them to clean the microwave and the bath tub and the chopping board, we squeeze them over pieces of steamed fish and into cups of tea.

But there are only so many things you can do with lemons, and you can only do those things so often. When we have exceeded our personal lemon quota, we try to offload them. We offer lemons to our visitors, and we offer lemons to the fellow dog-walkers in the park. We take lemons to social occasions, and we encourage our friends to experiment with lemon-based recipes wherever possible. (Yes, we've become that couple, boring our infinitely cooler friends with stories about our lemons and our baby, and our baby and our lemons.)

We hope the neighbours reach over the fence when we aren't looking and steal more than they need. We throw lemons for the dog, we stockpile lemon butter and lemon cake recipes, and we sadly deposit some unlucky lemons into the green waste bin each fortnight. I'm contemplating putting a big box of lemons on the pavement out the front of our house with a 'Please Take Me' sign and just letting them scatter across the neighbourhood, one lonely lemon at a time. 

The lemon tree is like a salve for the soul, a permanent dose of lemon-aid. It keeps the city at bay, somehow dampening the sound of the trains and the trams and the throng. It keeps the country close at hand, reminding us that fruit comes from trees and trees come from the ground and somewhere, there is blue sky and endless space. It will keep the baby sheltered from the sun, and endlessly amused and intrigued. And it will keep dropping hundreds and thousands of lemons, that I will never quite know what to do with.

What would you do with a never-ending supply of lemons? 

M x

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