Bunchland

Meri Perra blogs about the challenges she and her partner face in trying to raise their girls with feminist values

Every parent whose kid is in public day care learns two things quickly:

• Snot comes in a multitude of colours, more than you ever knew
• You will need to have extra child care arrangements in place for when your kid gets sick. Because you haven’t known sick until you’ve had a kid in public day care.

I’ll say it again. Sick happens, enough to test the limits of the most generous sick-time benefits of a tired parent. One more time. Sick happens. Deal with it.

Catherine and I do not have childcare outside of day care arrangements. Our “dealing with it” means “screwing up our work lives.” If you haven’t guessed it, our stress of the week(s) is that cold and flu season has officially hit our household. A variety of species of infections and viruses have all of us running, flowing and vomiting in a whole bunch of different directions. (The bodily fluid story-telling portion of this blog post ends here, mostly.) I am never at the, albeit unpaid, internship I need to do in order to complete my journalism diploma. At this point in one’s new career, where you are supposed to be making a good, fresh impression on your chosen field of work, my impression is that I am never there.

What can you do? I take deep breaths, realize at least we don’t have to be worried about not making the rent or feeding the kids because of all this time off (what’s a day’s pay cut when you’re not making anything?) and try to enjoy the extra time with the kids. Which is to say, the less sick and cranky they (and mommies) are, the time together will go that much better. We’re at the point in the illness now where the kids are banned from day care until they manage a solid poop. We’re BRAT dieting, drinking plenty of water, and hoping it all ends soon.

And my mental health is such that I have not frantically emailed my childless- in-the-know-about-things-I-don’t internship supervisor with something like: “We were just getting out the door to day care when both girls got diarrhea soup in their pants and we had to call in sick. Oh God!” Even though that has totally happened, I haven’t shared it with my boss. So we’re doing good.

We went to the library today. When I had one child, or one walking child, going to the library meant some quiet time reading books. Now it means using the children’s space as an indoor playground, with my girls running through the aisles, pulling books off the shelves, and me wondering what drug these patient, goddess and god librarians are on who always seem glad to have us there. (And then I wonder if you can take it while breastfeeding, and if I can get some.)

That the Toronto Public Library lets you bring food in now means we also use that proud urban institution as a cafeteria as well. I cleaned up a lot of rice with wet wipes. It’s amazing what a parent learns to do, quickly with wet wipes. In fact, I’m convinced it was impossible to parent before wet wipes were invented, but that’s another post.

In our adventures, we stumbled upon a wonderful potty training book. Potty by Leslie Patricelli. It’s mostly pictures, so I was able to read it while my kids were scarfing down BRAT rice. It’s a totally gender-neutral toilet training book. The character is a cute toddler who decides to use the potty after thinking about how the cat and dog go. It’s a little young for those stubborn kids who hang on to nappy wearing well into their late preschool years. It’s more a book for those younger toddler potty enthusiasts. I really loved that there is no mention of the little toddler’s gender.

We decided to check it out. As we were leaving, I put on my coat, and watched my kids run to the other end of the children’s section, with the book. I couldn’t see them as I got ready, but I knew where they were, and I had the vantage of seeing exactly that there was no one else coming in to the section. You know all this happens in about one minute.

I got my kids’ coats and went to them. Rosa was “reading” the potty book to her sister. Little Lileith, who is an toddler potty enthusiast, and one of those clothes-Houdini type kids, looked up at me, smiled her heart-melting smile, and said the usually cute but in this situation horrifying, “Poo potty.”

She had found a box of books, just the right height, and was in potty position.

Oh God, we’re about to be banned from the library.

It turns out, false alarm. There was no poo potty on the library books. We put the kids’ coats on, checked out book, and left. No one saw. Still, I recommend the book. I mean, it works well. We just have to work on that no poo potty in public thing.

Meri Perra is a community worker-turned-journalist living in Toronto’s Riverdale neighbourhood with her partner and two daughters