Six months

Oscar turned six months old today and Jen went back to work. Tomorrow morning, he starts daycare.

It's a tough transition for us, giving our little boy over to the care of strangers for the first time, and for Jen, it's her first real seperation from him. Sue looked after him today, and they visited Jen at work a couple times. Even so, she later found herself breaking down crying, out of the blue, while standing in line to get coffee.

We got him into a nice new place on the Lower East Side three days a week. It's a bit of a schlep in the morning -- a 20 minute walk over there, then double back to work -- and it's not cheap, but they seem kind and attentive. We thought about looking for a nanny, which would have been more convenient for us (no morning schlep, no strict pickup times with exorbitant late fees) and probably no less affordable. But I like the thin patina of socialism that daycare has -- it seems like a more economical model of child care, even if it isn't financially so. And I like the principle of collective responsibility -- knowing that three people will be looking after him and not just one person, so that there's some checks and balances, some accountability when we're not there.

I'll visit him tomorrow mid-day to see how he's acclimating. He's such a sunny, sociable little fellow that I can only imagine this will be much harder on us than on him. Still, we worry: will he lose some of his exuberant self-assuredness? Will he be less trusting, less perfectly confident of his safety and specialness?

Of course, all parents go through this sort of seperation anxiety, though probably most wait until theirs are off to college. In New York, however, child-rearing is a highly competitive endeavor, and guilt-ridden neuroses being a civic religion of sorts, we're starting early to give him a jump on the competition. He'll probably need his own little shrink before he's two.

Complicating things, we totally screwed up on the bottle-feeding front. We let it go for a couple months, against his doctor's explicit advice, and now he won't take the bottle, so we're a little nervous about what they'll do for feeding him tomorrow. We've been frantically trying to get him back in the habit of taking a bottle a day, but he's having none of it. It's breast or bust for him.

On a happier note, this weekend, Oscar's great aunt Karen (or "fabulous aunt," as she prefers) came down from Massachusetts. Here she is with the boy at The Pink Teacup, the venerable Village soul food place where we brunched on Sunday with the godparents:


As always, there was a long wait. When they were finally ready to seat us, Karen, Patrick and I scooped up Oscar and hustled inside, leaving Jen and Lizzy to try and figure out how to collapse our new light stroller (we went with a bougie, annoyingly branded but not quite ostentatious status stroller MacLaren model). He faces forward in it -- and away from us -- which we're sad about. But again, we've got to stop being selfishly overprotective and turn him loose upon the world, right? Anyway, the guys behind us in line were first amused at the gender role-reversal -- menfolk take the baby, women fiddle with the stroller. Then, seeing Jen plainly clueless as to how to operate the contraption, they jokingly accused her of stealing him. "Wait a minute," the one guy snorted. "That's not your baby. He's a missing baby."

After clogging our arteries up real good, we wandered over to Washington Square Park to check out the swingsets. They have the baby ones with secure seats -- only they were much too big yet for little Oscar:


He was swimming in it, so we jammed a pack behind him so that he was snug:


He was having a blast. The kid just loves motion. Craves it. All the time. He did seem somewhat puzzled that he couldn't move vertically, like he can at home in his jumper seat, but he was hardly disappointed. Definitely a regular destination as long as the weather holds.