My nephew and his wife had their baby about a year ago, and my sister-in-law has been taking care of him while his parents are teaching middle-school and high-school in their local public school system. Now and then I stop by when I'm in town and help her take care of him for a bit.
Monday I went up and helped all day, since my SIL (I should give her a blog alias) had caught a cold from my nephew and his wife (schools are huge disease vectors, as we all know). The baby is about ten months old now, a very happy child, who crawls everywhere and stands up for brief moments. He doesn't talk yet, but he knows five or six signs from ASL, which he uses to good effect. (This is a thing now, to teach your infant sign language, since they can do signs before they talk, apparently.) When he's tired of doing something or being somewhere, he does the "all done!" sign with great vigor. He can also knock down blocks and turn pages in books. He's a talented child! And very active.
About halfway through the day, I commented to SIL that I'd forgotten how exhausting taking care of a tiny child could be. "Well," I said. "Forgot. I guess I never knew."
This is because I never had the full-time job of taking care of a child. I was working when my kid was tiny; Dr. Skull was home with him all day. Then later he was in pre-school, so again, I wasn't with him all day, except for brief periods -- winter break, that sort of thing. The SIL reflected that this was the case with her, too. She was working full-time, and my mother and my brother and preschools were dealing with the kids (two for her) much of the time.
All this to say that while babies are delightful, and I really enjoyed my day with the baby, the ratio of adults to babies in a caregiver situation clearly needs to be something like four or five adults for every one child.
They're looking into preschools for him, which will give SIL a break; but my god are those things expensive. The least pricey one available seems to be a thousand dollars a month.
