Week 20 - Finding Balance

This week, Ellie has been trying to find her balance with sitting up on her own. Currently, she will struggle and sit up for a few seconds, then tip over. With each day though, the seconds she spends up on her own grow longer and longer. It’s quite an achievement for her and fun to watch and encourage. Ellie’s parents are also trying to find the right balance – but for them, it’s between nurturing and independence. Whether it’s getting Ellie to sit up on her own or soothe herself to sleep, each day is a push and pull of wanting to help her and letting her struggle a little bit so that she learns to do it on her own. It can be agonizing sometimes for everyone involved.

Like all parents, we want the best for our child. Knowing that we want her to be the happiest, healthiest, strongest, smartest baby she can be – that’s the easy part. Figuring out how to do that for her is the hard part. When we put Ellie in daycare two months ago, it was based out of financial necessity. However, times have changed (that was quick) and we reignited a conversation with our neighbors around sharing a nanny. Their little boy, Miles, was born two weeks after Elise and starting in January will also need childcare three days a week. The timing is perfect, as we need to decide by December 1st if we want to enroll Ellie in daycare through August 2007.

There are pros and cons to both daycare and a nanny that we’ve explored in this blog before when we were agonizing about this decision a few months ago. But now that Ellie has been in daycare for a few months, it’s not as simple a decision as we once thought.

Wednesday night went over to have dinner with Miles and his parents, John and Karen. We set to work through the decision-making process and to see if the four of us were all on the same page with the needs of our respective families. It was a very interesting evening as we compared our two children who are similar in age but so different in personality and development. While Miles weighs in as a heavyweight at 16 lbs, Elise is a mere featherweight at 12. Ellie is much more agile, active and coordinated then her buddy too. For example, Ellie stands in our laps, can sit up (with our help) and remains quiet and engaged for long stretches. Ellie grasps and holds onto toys, often putting them to her mouth to suck on them. Miles in comparison is more laid back, literally and prefers to cuddle with his mom. Miles was having a fussy evening and has not reached milestones like reaching for and holding onto toys yet. Two weeks is a long time in their short lives, but Ellie has been doing her things for many weeks now.

Since the dinner, Meredith and I have talked a great deal about why there was such a difference between our two bundles of joy. While some of our questions lead us down a nature path like, is it that Ellie is a girl and females simply mature and develop faster than boys? Are some babies just born with different abilities? I mean, Ellie has been standing on our laps since day one and freakishly strong in her grip. On the other hand and for purposes on our daycare decision, we have questions of a nurturing quality. Can Ellie play more independently because of her time at daycare? Is she learning by observing the older children at daycare? Is daycare helping her advance? It’s probably a small combination of many things including items we are leaving out.

Our conundrum is that we don’t want to hinder our child’s growth and independence, nor do we want to miss an opportunity to give Ellie a more personalized and nurturing setting. After weighing the pros and cons, we’ve settled on sharing the nanny with our friends – we decided to speak again on Monday to finalize things for sure. It’s an emotional decision either way since she’s gotten used to the providers at daycare and we are stepping into the unknown with a nanny. After all, it is easier to stick with the devil you know. We just figure that Ellie is naturally an independent little girl and she will continue to be so, as Miles, (we expect) will be the higher maintenance baby for now. The allure of having one person to hold and teach and nurture Ellie is just too much to pass on. Our daycare stated that they provide a 3 to 1 ratio for the infants, but the reality is different in practice, as we have observed. The ratio is 4 and even 5 to 1 sometimes. With a nanny, we can be certain that it will always be 2 to 1.


Our hope is that a nanny will be more of an extension of the type of care that we would provide and we would have more control over the parameters of care. It won’t be perfect. There will be times when we have to compromise and we end up tipping over like Ellie trying to sit up. In the end, there is always going to be adjustments and compromises that have to be made so that we can all find our balance.