SAHD: Full Throttle.

It’s been almost two months since I bounced from full time work, and things keep changing. One of my main post FIRE goals was to be a more involved father, ratcheting down the time both of my kids spent in daycare, with me picking up the slack. This happened much quicker than planned.

I was a pretty involved Dad before leaving work. Since our 5 year old was born, my wife and I have always tried to split the parenting as equally as possible, and the same went for domestic stuff. When I went back to late shift for the last year of work this changed; I had increased difficulty handling the sleep deprivation, and my wife ended up picking up more on her end to help me out. I was looking forward to making up for that once I finally did the RE part of FIRE.

Before I left work, our kids were in full time daycare. I was never happy with outsourcing the raising of our children, but it was a necessity given both my wife and I holding down jobs. Luckily, with me working odd shifts and my wife working 20-30 hours a week, our kids only spent 7 hours a day being raised by others. Not great, but it could have been worse.

 We felt bad for the parents who had no choice but to leave their kids somewhere else for 12 hours a day. I get it; no matter how much you make, it can feel like you’re just barely making ends meet, making both parents feel like they need to work as much as possible and leaving them with little choice but to pay someone to watch their kids full time. Such is the influence of consumerism, culture, society, and whatnot. We were lucky to have found the whole FIRE thing before kids, so at least we were able to avoid that lifestyle and the resulting intensive outsourcing of everything to include much of our children’s rearing.

The original RE childcare plan was for us to continue to take our kids to their 7 hours of daycare for a few months, giving me a nice little vacation after having worked for decades, and also allowing me to completely switch from working nights to a normal sleep schedule. Then I’d start taking one kid out one day a week to go do other stuff, up until our oldest started kindergarten later this year. At that point I planned on dropping our youngest down to 3 days of daycare a week, and maybe 2 depending on how that worked.

Besides the desire for continued socialization of our kiddos, this original plan was largely based on my during-work parenting stress. Look, I love my kids, and much of the time I really enjoy the whole parenting thing. But sometimes I felt like I was losing my mind. You know: both kids synchronizing cat 5 meltdowns, poop in underwear and diaper, and oh shit-we just ran out of baby wipes stuff. Blerg!! Hence the plan to ease into basically being a part time stay at home dad. I really wanted to take my time and feel it out. I knew that yes, in the worst case scenario I could always take care of my kids full time with no paid support, but I worried that I’d just end up being angry dad half the time and maybe not be the best parent. Looking back, I now see that much of this stress was from the sleep deprivation and the accumulated work stress, which bled over into parenting. Still, I wanted to ease into it.

Then, like every plan since the beginning of time, shit happened.

Long story short (because the whole fiasco could take up a post of its own and I don’t want to turn this into a bitch session), we found out our daycare was doing some shady stuff and we didn’t feel like we could trust them with our kids. The issue popped up on a Thursday before a three day weekend, we scrambled to get confirmation of what we thought was going on, and once we had confirmation we pulled them out the following Tuesday.

Right now, this means my oldest will be solely under my care for the next three months until they start kindergarten. We found a new three day a week provider for our youngest, but that won’t start for over 4 months. Yup, it’s just me and the two kiddos for pretty much the whole summer.

In the middle of this, my wife’s work has gotten busy. Last year she averaged 20ish hours a week; when we knew I was pulling the trigger on RE’ing last winter, she had some really cool opportunity present itself but it would require over 30 hours a week of work for about a year. With her sacrificing so much to manage all the crap surrounding my crazy ass career, I was stoked she was finally getting the chance to do something that really lit her up. We agreed that with our then-current full time daycare situation and my impending retirement, she should totally go for it.

She went for it, and just like my immediate post-RE plans, stuff changed. She’ll probably average a tad over 30 hours a week, but the actual schedule turned out to be pretty lumpy. The same week daycare got weird also begins a month that my wife will be working well past 30 hours, including a week and half where she’ll be out of town. Therefore much of the time, it really is just me and the kiddos. So it goes.

I’ll probably change the “about” section of this page to: TL;DR Cop quits job, becomes stay at home dad.

I’m on week two of this thing, and obviously it’s been a big shift from chilling half the day to chasing around little ones and making sure they don’t start WW3. And also trying to teach them stuff or whatever. Despite this being a far cry from my original plan of slowly easing into being a stay at home dad, it’s been awesome. I’m about spent at the end of each day, but aside from the occasional meltdowns, it’s actually a lot of fun.

This whole situation illustrates yet another advantage to having our finances on lock. 

Had my wife and I been on the standard path of life, we’d be scrambling to find another daycare, then stuck on a waitlist, and in the intertim trying to juggle two kids between working full time jobs until we got a spot. In our sweet life that is the now, the daycare did some shady stuff, then tried to strongarm us into staying despite their wackness(they know everywhere has long waitlists-good luck finding a new provider on such short notice!!). 

Though many might have had to choose between leaving their kids in a situation they’re not comfortable with or trying to juggle kids and work while waiting for another place to open up, our choice was comparatively easy. When we lost trust with our kid’s providers, the choice was clear. It’s not like I was doing anything, and we figured I’d soon take a more active role in parenting anyways. 

Grateful and privilege seem to have become similar to corporate buzzwords like synergy was back in the day, so I’ll go with lucky. I feel very lucky that we bumped into the FIRE movement all those years ago, then went all in, which then put us in a position to easily do what we thought was right when daycare went sideways. I also feel very lucky to be able to spend all this time with my kids, even if they occasionally try to paint the walls with shit. Especially lucky to have two healthy kids, an amazing wife, and nothing of actual import to complain about in my life. I am truly lucky as fuck.

Yeah, I’d love to say everything is rainbows and unicorns being a newly minted full time SAHD( at least until the fall, maybe longer if I like it!). This is reality though; I will admit that I’m moderately bummed to lose some freedom over my time, and put on hold various other plans like possibly becoming a part time research assistant, volunteering with those Team Rubicon peeps, or whatever other tantalizing challenges tugs at my type A conditioning. Losing those prospects, at least in the near term, has helped put stuff into perspective though. It’s ok if I don’t do anything, besides maybe update this blog now and then. Because I have other priorities. Like supporting my wife, and taking care of my kids.

Which for right now, is enough. And that’s pretty fucking awesome.