plans

I have made some changes to my plans for day care for the upcoming year. My original plan was to go at it full-force - to take the maximum number of children I was allowed to take, to put all my energy toward it. Now, I've decided that I am going to limit myself to 4 children instead of 6 during the day - that is 3 plus Samuel. I think this will be more manageable and keep me from getting too overwhelmed or stretched thin, insuring that I have the energy I need for my own family, too. However, if at some point all the children I'm caring for are potty-trained 3 and 4 year olds, then maybe I could consider caring for more than 4 during the day. It's been harder than we expected to do housework in the evenings - after feeding the kids and putting them to bed, we are both more than ready to quit working for the day. So, maybe taking four instead of six children will allow me to keep up on some of the cleaning necessary for day care during day care hours.

Right now I only have one extra child I am caring for. I purposefully didn't advertise my openings until just a couple of days ago, because I wanted to have a light load during the last couple of weeks before school started. Part of me thinks I should have waited to start day care until my big boys started school. This summer, having them home and doing day care, was harder than I thought. Yet, I don't know if I could have done anything more for/with them had I not had day care children here. I still couldn't have taken them to the pool for long periods of time every day, unless they wanted to stay in the baby pool with Samuel and I the entire time, since I can't keep all three of them safe by myself in the deeper water. And I don't think I could have done any more to manage their fighting without day care kids here. At least caring for day care kids reassured me that I was still doing something well, despite being unable to prevent or control my big boys' fighting at times. How can they love and rely on each other so much and still torture each other the way they do? Having breaks from each other now that school has started certainly helps their relationship and my tension level.

Work and money are funny things sometimes. I read an Amish fictional book recently, as I do from time to time, and I was reminded of how much our work can make us feel important or unimportant, powerful or powerless. The Amish purposefully chose jobs that keep them humble. They don't educate their children beyond 8th grade because there is no job in the Amish life that requires higher education, and they believe that higher education would only serve to make members of their community proud and elitist. It is an interesting thing to ponder, I think - how much we choose our jobs because of the importance and power they confer, or how much we choose them simply to provide for ourselves and our families. I don't want to be poor -- I don't think any of us does, really, just for the sake of being poor, although some choose it to draw closer to God. I think providing for our family is the main reason Heath and I work, and in the fields that we do. But the element of gaining prestige or significance from one's work does creep in at times. However, even if we wanted to choose a very simple, humble life now, scaling down our housing, rarely eating out, getting rid of our tv service, high-speed internet (gasp!) and our iphones (gasp!), we would still have the little matter of our debts, mostly education debts. So we work to pay them off, and in the process we become accustomed to a lot of other perks. But I also get mad at the money and the work it requires, sometimes. Why do we need so much of it? Why does it seem we can't live on less? No matter how much we make, why is the debt still so hard to pay off? It shouldn't be so mysterious or difficult, but sometimes it seems like it is.