Entries tagged childcare

This post is a departure from the regular content, which is supposed to be "Debian and Free Software", but has accidentally turned into a hardware blog recently!

Anyway, we have a child who is now about 14 months old. The way that my wife and I care for him seems logical to us, but often amuses local people. So in the spirit of sharing this is what we do:

• We divide the day into chunks of time.
• At any given time one of us is solely responsible for him.
  • The other parent might be nearby, and might help a little.
  • But there is always a designated person who will be changing nappies, feeding, and playing at any given point in the day.
• The end.

So our weekend routine, covering Saturday and Sunday, looks like this:

• 07:00-08:00: Husband
• 08:01-13:00: Wife
• 13:01-17:00: Husband
• 17:01-18:00: Wife
• 18:01-19:30: Husband

Our child, Oiva, seems happy enough with this and he sometimes starts walking from one parent to the other at the appropriate time. But the real benefit is that each of us gets some time off - in my case I get "the morning" off, and my wife gets the afternoon off. We can hide in our bedroom, go shopping, eat cake, or do anything we like.

Week-days are similar, but with the caveat that we both have jobs. I take the morning, and the evenings, and in exchange if he wakes up overnight my wife helps him sleep and settle between 8PM-5AM, and if he wakes up later than 5AM I deal with him.

Most of the time our child sleeps through the night, but if he does wake up it tends to be in the 4:30AM/5AM timeframe. I'm "happy" to wake up at 5AM and stay up until I go to work because I'm a morning person and I tend to go to bed early these days.

Day-care is currently a complex process. There are three families with small children, and ourselves. Each day of the week one family hosts all the children, and the baby-sitter arrives there too (all the families live within a few blocks of each other).

All of the parents go to work, leaving one carer in charge of 4 babies for the day, from 08:15-16:15. On the days when we're hosting the children I greet the carer then go to work - on the days the children are at a different families house I take him there in the morning, on my way to work, and then my wife collects him in the evening.

At the moment things are a bit terrible because most of the children have been a bit sick, and the carer too. When a single child is sick it's mostly OK, unless that is the child which is supposed to be host-venue. If that child is sick we have to panic and pick another house for that day.

Unfortunately if the child-carer is sick then everybody is screwed, and one parent has to stay home from each family. I guess this is the downside compared to sending the children to public-daycare.

This is private day-care, Finnish-style. The social-services (kela) will reimburse each family €700/month if you're in such a scheme, and carers are limited to a maximum of 4 children. The net result is that prices are stable, averaging €900-€1000 per-child, per month.

(The €700 is refunded after a month or two, so in real-terms people like us pay €200-€300/month for Monday-Friday day-care. Plus a bit of beaurocracy over deciding which family is hosting, and which parents are providing food. With the size being capped, and the fees being pretty standard the carers earn €3600-€4000/month, which is a good amount. To be a school-teacher you need to be very qualified, but to do this caring is much simpler. It turns out that being an English-speaker can be a bonus too, for some families ;)

Currently our carer has a sick-note for three days, so I'm staying home today, and will likely stay tomorrow too. Then my wife will skip work on Wednesday. (We usually take it in turns but sometimes that can't happen easily.)

But all of this is due to change in the near future, because we've had too many sick days, and both of us have missed too much work.

More news on that in the future, unless I forget.

Tags: childcare, finland | 1 comment

In my previous post I talked about how our child-care works here in wintery Finland, and suggested there might be a change in the near future.

So here is the predictable update; I've resigned from my job and I'm going to be taking over childcare/daycare. Ideally this will last indefinitely, but it is definitely going to continue until November. (Which is the earliest any child could be moved into public day-care if there problems.)

I've loved my job, twice, but even though it makes me happy (in a way that several other positions didn't) there is no comparison. Child-care makes me happier-still. Sure there are days when your child just wants to scream, refuse to eat, and nothing works. But on average everything is awesome.

It's a hard decision, a "brave" decision too apparently (which I read negatively!), but also an easy one to make.

It'll be hard. I'll have no free time from 7AM-5PM, except during nap-time (11AM-1PM, give or take). But it will be worth it.

And who knows, maybe I'll even get to rant at people who ask "Where's his mother?" I live for those moments. Truly.

Tags: bytemark, childcare, finland | 4 comments

Nothing too much has happened recently, largely as a result of the pandemic killing a lot of daily interests and habits.

However as a result of Brexit I'm having to do some paperwork, apparently I now need to register for permanent residency under the terms of the withdrawal agreement, and that will supersede the permanent residency I previously obtained.

Of course as a UK citizen I've now lost the previously-available freedom of movement. I can continue to reside here in Helsinki, Finland, indefinitely, but I cannot now move to any other random EU country.

It has crossed my mind, more than a few times, that I should attempt to achieve Finnish citizenship. As a legal resident of Finland the process is pretty simple, I just need two things:

• Prove I've lived here for the requisite number of years.
• Pass a language test.

Of course the latter requirement is hard, I can understand a lot of spoken and written Finnish, but writing myself, and speaking a lot is currently beyond me. I need to sit down and make the required effort to increase my fluency. There is the alternative option of learning Swedish, which is a hack a lot of immigrants use:

• Learning Swedish is significantly easier for a native English-speaker.
• But the downside is that it would be learning a language solely to "cheat" the test, it wouldn't actually be useful in my daily life.

Finland has two official languages, and so the banks, the medical world, the tax-office, etc, are obliged to provide service in both. However daily life, ordering food at restaurants, talking to parents in the local neighborhood? Finnish, or English are the only real options. So if I went this route I'd end up in a weird situation where I had to learn a language to pass a test, but then would continue to need to learn more Finnish to live my life. That seems crazy, unless I were desperate for a second citizenship which I don't think I am.

Learning Finnish has not yet been a priority, largely because I work in English in the IT-world, and of course when I first moved here I was working (remotely) for a UK company, and didn't have the time to attend lessons (because they were scheduled during daytime, on the basis that many immigrants are unemployed). Later we had a child, which meant that early-evening classes weren't a realistic option either.

(Of course I learned a lot of the obvious things immediately upon moving, things like numbers, names for food, days of the week were essential. Without those I couldn't have bought stuff in shops and would have starved!)

On the topic of languages a lot of people talk about how easy it is for children to pick up new languages, and while that is broadly true it is also worth remembering just how many years of correction and repetition they have to endure as part of the process.

For example we have a child, as noted already, he is spoken to by everybody in Finnish. I speak to him in English, and he hears his mother and myself speaking English. But basically he's 100% Finnish with the exception of:

• Me, speaking English to him.
• His mother and I speaking English in his hearing.
• Watching Paw Patrol.

If he speaks Finnish to me I pretend to not understand him, even when I do, just for consistency. As a result of that I've heard him tell strangers "Daddy doesn't speak Finnish" (in Finnish) when we've been stopped and asked for directions. He also translates what some other children have said into English for my benefit which is adorable

Anyway he's four, and he's pretty amazing at speaking to everybody in the correct language - he's outgrown the phase where he'd mix different languages in the same sentence ("more leipä", "saisinko milk") - when I took him to the UK he surprised and impressed me by being able to understand a lot of the heavy/thick accents he'd never heard before. (I'll still need to train him on Rab C. Nesbitt when he's a wee bit older, but so far no worries.)

So children learn languages, easily and happily? Yes and no. I've spent nearly two years correcting his English and he still makes the same mistake with gender. It's not a big deal, at all, but it's a reminder that while children learn this stuff, they still don't do it as easily as people imagine. I'm trying to learn and if I'd been corrected for two years over the same basic point you'd rightly think I was "slow", but actually that's just how it works. Learning languages requires a hell of a lot of practice, a lot of effort, and a lot of feedback/corrections.

Specifically Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns, the same word is used for "he" and "she". This leads to a lot of Finnish people, adults and children, getting the pronouns wrong in English. In the case of our child he'll say "Mommy is sleeping, when he wake up?" In the case of adults I've heard people say "My girlfriend is a doctor, he works in a hospital", or "My dad is an accountant, she works for a big firm". As I say I've spent around two years making this correction to the child, and he's still nowhere near getting it right. Kinda adorable actually:

• "Mommy is a woman we say "when she wakes up"..."
• "Adriana is a girl we say "her bike".."

Tags: bilingual, brexit, childcare, english, finland, finnish, languages, oiva | 3 comments