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Five-minute actions, days 8 and 9
This stage of habit-building, where I've been doing it long enough to feel like I want a break but not long enough for the harder parts to get easier, is always the most challenging. But I press onward.
I dropped donations into a couple of fundraisers. I can't do that every day, but I'm glad to do it when I can.
Kit picked up several of the library books I'd put holds on—they were so happy to be able to go to the library again, even just for a quick lobby pickup—and yesterday and today they read Hair Love and Something Happened in Our Town and Let the Children March. (They showed off their books to their teacher, who said, "Wow, what great choices for Black History Month!" I... had forgotten that February is Black History Month. We just got those books because they looked cool!) We also read some pro-social books, When I Miss You and When I Feel Scared, that I think of as activist, in the sense that it's still pretty radical to treat kids' feelings as important and worth paying attention to. Books like that are also part of raising a kid who acknowledges other people's feelings as important, which I view as a foundational tenet of both progressivism and being a decent human.
Speaking of which, a thread on Ask a Manager about professional boundaries with nannies led me to explicitly say to Kit that caring for them and teaching them is Hannah's job—a job she loves, as she was quick to say, but still a job—and that's why she gets to go home every evening and stay home on the weekends, just like we stop our work at night and don't work on the weekends. I'm not actually sure they knew that she works for us. We frequently tell them to respect her hour-long lunch break, which she tends to spend reading on the couch because there isn't really a private place in our house where she can go while she's on break, but I think they see that as equivalent to not knocking on our doors when we're resting or on the phone, not as something she's owed as a person who's working hard all day.
(For that matter, I'm not sure how clearly Kit understands "job" and "work" and related concepts, including money. They're still not great at answering abstract questions like "What do you think money is?" so I'll probably just sit them down for a lesson at some point. My inclination is less to say "Money is what you trade to someone who does something for you or gives you something" and more to say "Money is a great big imaginary thing that we all imagine together". But I should probably start with goods and services and supply and demand.)
Like a lot of Americans, I wasn't explicitly taught how to grapple with the ethics and emotions of hiring domestic labor. My personal approach is to treat it exactly like hiring someone for any other kind of work, which is to respect them as a professional, pay them fairly, and not behave any less formally around them than I would in the office or with a client. We've made a point of talking to Kit about how important it is to stay out of our house cleaner's way while she's working and to respect her and her excellent work, but we haven't done quite the same with our babysitters, and I want to do better on that front. Kit thinks of Hannah as a bonus parent, more or less—she's in the category of "my grown-ups" along with us and Kit's grandmothers and favorite teachers—and I'd certainly rather they err in that direction than in the direction of bossing her around like she's a servant. But there's a middle ground that I think it would be good to be in. Something to keep working on.
I dropped donations into a couple of fundraisers. I can't do that every day, but I'm glad to do it when I can.
Kit picked up several of the library books I'd put holds on—they were so happy to be able to go to the library again, even just for a quick lobby pickup—and yesterday and today they read Hair Love and Something Happened in Our Town and Let the Children March. (They showed off their books to their teacher, who said, "Wow, what great choices for Black History Month!" I... had forgotten that February is Black History Month. We just got those books because they looked cool!) We also read some pro-social books, When I Miss You and When I Feel Scared, that I think of as activist, in the sense that it's still pretty radical to treat kids' feelings as important and worth paying attention to. Books like that are also part of raising a kid who acknowledges other people's feelings as important, which I view as a foundational tenet of both progressivism and being a decent human.
Speaking of which, a thread on Ask a Manager about professional boundaries with nannies led me to explicitly say to Kit that caring for them and teaching them is Hannah's job—a job she loves, as she was quick to say, but still a job—and that's why she gets to go home every evening and stay home on the weekends, just like we stop our work at night and don't work on the weekends. I'm not actually sure they knew that she works for us. We frequently tell them to respect her hour-long lunch break, which she tends to spend reading on the couch because there isn't really a private place in our house where she can go while she's on break, but I think they see that as equivalent to not knocking on our doors when we're resting or on the phone, not as something she's owed as a person who's working hard all day.
(For that matter, I'm not sure how clearly Kit understands "job" and "work" and related concepts, including money. They're still not great at answering abstract questions like "What do you think money is?" so I'll probably just sit them down for a lesson at some point. My inclination is less to say "Money is what you trade to someone who does something for you or gives you something" and more to say "Money is a great big imaginary thing that we all imagine together". But I should probably start with goods and services and supply and demand.)
Like a lot of Americans, I wasn't explicitly taught how to grapple with the ethics and emotions of hiring domestic labor. My personal approach is to treat it exactly like hiring someone for any other kind of work, which is to respect them as a professional, pay them fairly, and not behave any less formally around them than I would in the office or with a client. We've made a point of talking to Kit about how important it is to stay out of our house cleaner's way while she's working and to respect her and her excellent work, but we haven't done quite the same with our babysitters, and I want to do better on that front. Kit thinks of Hannah as a bonus parent, more or less—she's in the category of "my grown-ups" along with us and Kit's grandmothers and favorite teachers—and I'd certainly rather they err in that direction than in the direction of bossing her around like she's a servant. But there's a middle ground that I think it would be good to be in. Something to keep working on.
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Start with basic math, using coins as quantity symbols. Over time it gets easier to blend in fractions, decimal places, place holders and ultimately the more abstract bits of money. Kiddo in her late teens needed to review decimal places in a money context so she'd understand that 15 cents is not the same thing as 15 dollars. (Math numbers on paper were not something she could abstract into "money" on her own.)