I have definitely not been keeping up my end of the bargain and updating the blog very often. I constantly find little tidbits of neat mommy information, too, but I forget to log-on and share.
News in my world is that I started a job at Stanford mid-August. We found a fantastic home daycare in Foster City where Linus learns and plays and dances every day. It's the perfect place for him at this age.
He turned 16 months last week. A lot of the kids at his daycare are about 2 or 2.5, which is fantastic. He loves following them around and watching them play. There are also a lot of boys, which is great for Linus because he's a rough and tumble kind of kid. He's really physical, climbing on everything.
One of my co-workers has a nanny for her little 4-month-old. We were chatting and I was realizing that having a nanny or a tiny daycare is really the way to go when you have a baby. When Linus was tiny, we had him at a very small daycare. When he started, there was only one other baby in the infant room, so he had a ton of individual attention. He needed that at 4 months. He needed to be carried around and hugged and nurtured.
When he started moving around the world, first crawling and then walking, he quickly became interested in how to conquer the next physical advancements. He started watching other kids a lot to see what they did, and then he started to try those things. When he turned a year, especially, I realized that he needed to be around other kids. This was problematic when we were a one-income family in the Bay Area, because we didn't have a lot of money to throw around at toddler activities. We went to the local libraries for baby story times on a regular basis, and we went to mommy-baby yoga and pilates classes (thank you, Groupon!). But these weren't really the right places for him to explore his physicality.
This was around the time when I realized it was time for me to head back to work so I could get the adult interaction I desperately craved, and he could get the kid interaction that he needed. In June, I interviewed for and accepted this position at Stanford Med, which I started in August. We spent July looking for the right fit of a daycare, and found it rather quickly.
Linus started daycare half-time the week before I started work. And he thrived. He was so ready. The first day I brought him in, he just let go and sailed into the crowd of faces and toys. For a couple days after that, he remembered that I was leaving, so he was clingy and sad, but it took him no time after my departure for him to be smiling and happy again. We arranged it so that my husband would drop him off in the mornings and I would pick Linus up in the afternoons when I started work. At the end of Linus' first full-time week at daycare, he was pushing my husband away and running into daycare to go play with the kids when he got dropped off.
He was ready. And I'm so grateful that I've found a great opportunity that I was ready for.
I'm working for a brilliant, optimistic, supportive, fantastic orthopaedic surgeon as a biostatistician. It's really more of an epidemiologist position, which I am glad about. While I'm not working in epigenomics, which I do miss, I've found a boss who wants me to push myself in the ways that I want to be pushed. She wants me to find myself and make a career as I want it, and she's willing to give me the tools and resources I need to get the job done. It's going well so far!
