Hanging up my Cape

For the last five years, I've been running a family day care. I started with my two girls and my nephew, and then it grew to include another little one as well. You can only have four under school age, so that was pretty much my life until Sophie went to kindy. Then I got new kids to fill the gaps. Everywhere I went, four small children in tow. Some days different kids, other days all the regular ones, but mostly every day, four children.

I got a lot of understanding looks from people, and a lot of awe. So many people would tell me they didn't know how I did it, or I must be so busy. There was appreciation for the hard work I was doing in many conversations. Disbelief as they contemplated what it was like to have so many children around all the time. Wonder and admiration as I would navigate my crew across a car park, or call them off the playground and they would all come (well, most of the time).

To be honest, I never felt like I was doing anything particularly heroic, or amazing. Just doing what I could do to get through each day and come out the end of it with four little people alive. But the responses to the work also made me feel like a superhero. Like I was doing something unattainable by mere mortals, normal people, everyday folks.

Now I've made a decision which effectively leaves me hanging up the cape of a superhero: I'm finishing up with family day care.

In the Time Before Children, I was a teacher. Oh how I miss being a part of the bigger world of teaching. The shaping children as they grow, and challenging their thoughts and world view on a daily basis. How I miss being a part of a team, teachers who understand what it's like when you have that kid you just can't click with, or the class you so love going to. Teachers who are an infinite resource of ideas and encouragement.

I don't think I missed it as much before COVID-19 changed everything, because before then, I was just family-day-care-ing every day, keeping kids alive and well, helping them breath fresh air and building their endurance with some quality tough love as I made them walk up hills for school pick ups. Then COVID-19 happened, and we were all told to keep our kids home; that for the foreseeable future, their classrooms would be here. Suddenly, I was getting to deliver lessons to two attentive little girls (while juggling the usual family day care stuff too) and I was loving it.

At the start of 2020, I had dropped to three days full time, and two days for paperwork/cleaning/groceries/life stuff. The plan was to see how that went, and then probably just drop a day a week as I gradually moved back into teaching. Thanks to COVID-19 the two weeks teaching at the start of Term 2, I realized I didn't want it to take that long.

So I'm hanging up my cape. Everyone can now know, I'm only going to be doing family day care for the rest of 2020. Come December, I'll be selling up all the baby toys, taking down the safety gates and putting the change table away for good. I'll no longer be the superhero that herds four children into school at 2:55 and then six children out the gates and down the hill at 3:05. And I'm ok with that.

In the meantime, I'll keep doing what I'm doing, and remembering that the time I have left with these kids is all the more precious because it's about to come to an end. Even if I'm never a superhero again, the last five years when I was have been pretty amazing.