My blog readers - the few, the proud, the awesome. Thank you for your stellar baby music suggestions - it's the kind of task I normally relish, but for some reason I just wasn't feeling the editing love this week. I was much more interested in knitting little udders for the cows in the farm set I am also frantically trying to finish. We leave tomorrow for Canadian family-ville, a week that includes her first birthday. I keep checking and rechecking our passports and documents, certain we will get turned back at the airport like last time, though there is no reason. At least this time I am traveling with AH, so he can help entertain and carry her and jiggle her - though she is so squirmy and bellowing now, I don't quite know how we'll survive it. Or more precisely, how our fellow passengers will survive it.
If you listen to NPR rather constantly like I do, maybe sometimes you too want to throw a shoe at the radio when the umpteenth terrible report about the economy comes on. Though we have been assured our jobs are safe as houses, I feel the wolf getting a little nearer to our door every day and it is uncomfortable. Then this morning, we dropped Simone off at daycare and her daycare teacher was in tears - she had just been laid off. Several parents at the daycare had been laid off recently and pulled their kids and like a domino effect, this had meant less money and work for the daycare and voila - my baby's teacher was laid off too. This makes me feel sick, literally. This is the woman I have trusted with my kid every single day practically since she was 6 months old, someone I like and feel good about handing Simone over to. She loves her, honestly. It's a weird relationship you develop with the Substitute Mom - a mix of gratitude and envy and guilt and a weird kind of love. No one else will discuss the tiniest details and developments of your baby, each and every day. I thought about her teacher all day and going home to her own three kids and telling them she had lost their job. The crap economy feels just that little bit closer and more personal.
Now I must go finish cramming our one suitcase per person to the brim.