Outside the village...

[jay]

I'm frankly envious of parents with community support... for example, dawnd and akienm are able to find a series of sitters for Allegra so that they could go to a weekend workshop in LA. Without having to, say, fly in Dawn's mother from back East... it's great for them, and I think they'll add a lot to that workshop. But I know that I couldn't do the same thing, and that Pat and I are pretty much on our own as far as child-raising goes... no net, here. When crises have hit, my only option has been to fly in one or the other grandmothers for a while, and/or take vacation time and stay home as well.

Still, that's a natural consequence of not being a part of any particular community, other than sort of tolerated on the fringes... I have only myself to reproach, arguably, for not giving enough or conforming sufficiently.

Comments

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

I've been part of two families (one as a kid, one as a latecoming-parent) which had trouble finding babysitters. I saw two causes. One, the kids were particularly challenging. Two, the family got into a habit of not having babysitters, which meant that if the parents wanted to do something special, they didn't have an on-call list of people who'd already watched their kids for an hour on an ordinary night, and also the kids weren't accustomed to behaving appropriately with a babysitter. I know that it can seem not worth the trouble to break in babysitters and kids for ordinary times, but in hindsight I wish I'd insisted that we get babysitters more often so that we kept up the list of who to call and felt okay calling them (and I wish my parents had too). When you feel so 'swamped' that you can't afford the ensuing chaos and disruption after one bad babysitter night, then you're unlikely to take the risks of extending the network.

I also like the idea of encouraging the oldest one to go out while you hire someone to stay with the younger ones, or to experiment with other combinations (such as taking one kid to run errands and see if the other two can cope on their own).

Are you (or is Pat) at all involved with a community of parents of special-needs kids? That might be the most productive place to network about finding additional babysitting, either by trading hours / setting up a co-op or by exchanging references for suitable adults to hire.

It's silly to reproach yourself for the situation with your church community. If you ever do have a family crisis and ask for help, you might be surprised how much help you get from that direction as well as others.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... there's probably a parent group for Asperger's/high-functioning autistic kids somewhere in the SF Bay area, we just haven't found them yet. That would be the best place to find trades for David, granted.

I wasn't reproaching myself about the church community... at the time, I was annoyed with them. Pat had put in hundreds of hours of volunteer work, taught classes, carried meals and visited others during crises... but when she had a tough time, the response was minimal for her. Granted, pastoral care is not a strong suit of that parish, but... I did wonder then if the lack of interest in helping Pat pertained to my being seen as too weird or strange, but dismissed the thought.