The daycare has a faculty improvement day next Friday. This means the school will be closed. I don’t have to be anywhere on Friday, so it’s fine by me. But what do other parents do? Fridays are usually quite a busy time at school.
I have heard of these faculty days before but I never wondered what parents do in these situations. I mean, if they had an alternative, they wouldn’t be using the daycare to begin with.
Clarissa's Blog 
Ah yes. There are a variety of options, depending on how many trustworthy folks you have on campus and how old the kid is. Many apply to having a sick kid so daycare won’t take them. Many of my colleagues and I have taken our kids to work with us. My two older kids have each sat more than once in the back of my classroom when I taught. For younger kids, as my husband’s on campus and about a 5 min walk from my building, I would just plop the baby with him for an hour in case he cannot take time off; we’ve also done the here’s-the-car-with-a-sleeping-baby-in-it-go-do-something-for-an-hour passing of the batton-baby so I can run up and teach. On occasion, I also placed a preschool/school-aged kid in my grad student office at one of the empty desks, turned on the computer and found some games for them, and surrounded them with snacks; grad students had the instructions that they don’t need to do anything just make sure the kid doesn’t leave the room. For a bit older kid (grades 3+), I leave the kid in my office with an iPad and snacks, make sure they go to the bathroom before I leave, and then just leave them alone in my office. If you have trustworthy colleagues who are also friends, you can ask them to watch the baby while you teach; friendly staff works as well; I would just make sure that I can either reciprocate (I can watch their kids) or get them occasionally a token of appreciation.
Things like these are what makes combining work with motherhood tough. We academics are fortunate to have much more flexibility than folks in corporate America.
Good luck!
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Yes, our daycare closes two extra days/year for staff development. Our kids are still little (3 and 1) so at the moment we either take time off – usually trying to split the day somehow between my husband and myself or, in extremis, pay a babysitter for all or part of the day. But this is so expensive!
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“The daycare has a faculty improvement day next Friday. This means the school will be closed”
Any connection with your “monthy drunk” post”?
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Good question. ☺☺☺☺🤔🤔🤔🤔 Gosh, if somebody deserves to get sloshed, it’s those heroic teachers.
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The school my mom works at has a daycare and preschool, so when I very, very little she took me there (I’m pretty sure she told me that was my first daycare, too). That’s a pretty unique case, though. Once in a while I think I went with my mom to work, but I honestly don’t think it happened too often. My dad says sometimes they had to take a day off work for my sister and I. When I got to around elementary school, I started staying with my grandmother if she had a day off, and went with my dad to work when she didn’t. When I went with my dad I would either do something on his computer or do some very small work like folding boxes or follow him around the greenhouses, playing my gameboy.
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This is when having your own network of friends who are parents can become useful. Theory is that if you’ve had other kids over to play at your house often enough (perhaps because the kids are friends with Klara -this gets easier as she gets older) that you can then appeal to the other parents to have her over to play at their house on the particular day you might be struggling for childcare? This practice can feel like a minefield of unspoken etiquette, but is generally accepted as part of modern child rearing?
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It’s like telling a blind person that having 20/20 vision is very useful. Or a person with no legs that running a marathon is a great way to spend time. 😆😆😆😆😆
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You’re supposed to have a huge kinship group — grandmothers and aunts and sisters — that don’t have jobs, who you can leave your kids with. That’s the unspoken expectation here. The working world still counts on the unpaid labor of women.
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If one had unoccupied grandmothers close by, one wouldn’t need daycare to begin with.
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