My wonderful, beautiful, wicked smart son has a great imagination. And he uses it. Often. As a parent, how do *you* differentiate between exaggeration/story telling/imagination and plain ol’ lying?

N is starting to tell stories, and when I try to get to the truth, I try as hard as I can not to lead the witness. For instance, the other day, his Daddy told me that a little boy in N’s daycare had been hitting N in the head. William was really worried because N said he’d told his teacher and she didn’t stop the hitting. As William and I talked about it some more, and tried to figure out what was going on (his class is really small and highly supervised, but hitting is a fact of life at school); it came out that it was “Jacob” who was hitting N. Umm, there isn’t a boy named Jacob in his class…or even in his school. When we told N that there isn’t a boy named Jacob in his class, he looked at us like we were nut jobs and said, “Nobody is hitting me at school.” Apparently, *we* had made the whole thing up.

Sometimes the stories are a little easier to identify. He came home with a pretty good bruise Wednesday. When I asked where it came from, he said he’d been hit by a car. Yep, hit by a car. I got to hear this fantastic story about how he’d been in his classroom when a giant car came flying into the building and smashed into his leg. On Thursday, when his Aunt was babysitting him, N changed the story to one where I had hit him with a car.

Obviously, I can discern the really outrageous ones, but how do you figure out which ones are real and which ones are Memorex? [Does anyone younger than 30 know that tag line?]

I would love to know what you guys do. How do you interrogate your kids without making them suspicious or worried or any of the other 457 emotions you can feel when someone is questioning you?

Sherry Carr Deer is a Mommy to Nicholas who just turned 3, fiance to William, the widow of Mark, and a PR professional at a non-profit hospital. You can read more of her posts here.

Sometimes the choice of daycare is hard. Not the choice of daycare facility, because that’s an entirely different conversation, but having to use daycare at all.

Difficult Choices

I’m reminded this week, of that difficult choice, as my friend goes back to work and leaves her new baby. She’s a first-time mom, and wants to extend her materinity leave, but doesn’t have the financial resources to do it. She’s lucky, though, and gets to leave her daughter with her in laws (yes, she really is lucky). The difficult part is that my friend’s mother just died, and she ran a home daycare forever. She helped raise dozens of children, and was supposed to help with her new grandbaby. My friend and her husband had the great option of having his parents take care of their daughter, but it “should” have been my friend’s mom doing it.

Making the Call

I can distinctly remember the feeling when I realized that I needed to find daycare for my son. It felt like I was falling down a very deep hole. Nicholas’ Daddy Mark was a stay-at-home dad. He had been taking care of N, and that was supposed to be his role until N went to school. Instead, I had to find a place or a person to take care of our boy. Even as Mark lay in a coma, and knowing from the doctors that the outlook was poor, I told myself it was just until Mark got better and stronger and could resume taking care of our son.

I called the first daycare for an appointment from Mark’s hospital room. I sat and held Mark’s hand while I talked with the facility. I guess I wanted to feel like he was part of the decision, and not just a victim of circumstance. It was one of the hardest calls I’ve ever made. Making that call was admitting that Mark might never come home. Might never leave that room, that bed.

We were lucky, and found a wonderful woman who stayed with N in our apartment every day. She was caring, funny, and loved Nicholas. But, she wasn’t his Daddy. And N wasn’t “supposed” to be taken care of by anyone but Mark.

I’ve never understood the judgement that some people dish out because others have children in daycare. That judgement is especially confusing to me because you may never know *why* someone has their child there and not at home where they are “supposed” to be. Sometimes the choice of daycare isn’t much of a choice after all.

Sherry Carr Deer is a Mommy to Nicholas who just turned 3, fiance to William, the widow of Mark, and a PR professional at a non-profit hospital. You can read more of her posts here

Kate Olson is a mother of 2 toddlers and lives in rural Wisconsin. She balances motherhood & working from home in a semi-functional fashion - you can read more about Kate on our contributors page. She blogs about education and lots of business/tech stuff at Kate Says . Want more? Read all of Kate’s posts!

Last night I was reading this great post at Sparkplugging that really hit home for me. It’s about handling summer break when you’re a WAHM and the kids are home. I’m a WAHM and my kids are in daycare during the school year, but our sitter takes the summers off. That’s fine, since I used to be a teacher - I LOVED the idea of not having to pay to hold our spot during the summer when I wouldn’t be working. Now, I still don’t want to have my kids in daycare full-time in the summer, but not having ANY daycare is just about killing me!

I made it through June and the first part of July with NO daycare - I was only working before the kids got up in the morning, during nap, and after they went to bed. Well, as the post I mentioned says, summers for WAHM = NO SLEEP. That’s right - working is done when kids are sleeping. You know what? That doesn’t really cut it for me. No sleep means crabbiness and sloppy work. I’m not a good mom and I’m really not at the top of my game when I have to pack a full day’s work into those tiny nooks and crannies of time.

Enter my new best friend, T. T is actually a high school girl who for some reason, is willing to come to my house and watch my kids - and seems to enjoy it! I have given in and realized that it’s just not good for anyone for me to try to do it all for 3 months - I now have T. coming over for 4 - 8 hours each week to watch the kiddos while I work. The only catch? My children don’t seem to get that when T. is over, SHE’S in charge. That means they still want me for everything - no productivity earned in that! My home office doesn’t have a door (don’t ask, this house is over 120 years old) so there’s no way of hiding and working while I have the sitter here.

The solution? I drive 30 minutes each way to sit at Caribou and use their free wireless and furiously try to get a couple of hours of work in each time. Yup, that’s right. I waste up to 2 hours of paid babysitting time each week to drive to a coffee shop to work! Luckily this will all change in September when I have full-time daycare again (a woman who takes my kids into her home and treats them better than I do -I worship her).

Until then? I need a volunteer to come over and build me an office right next to my house. Any takers?

This is something that has been eating at me for a few weeks. One of my good friends (and husband of my best friend) is a stay-at-home dad and an EXCELLENT father. I’d trust him with my kids wholeheartedly and know he’d probably do a better job of doing fun, creative activities than I would!

When I mentioned to another friend that this guy would do a great job at doing childcare, her immediate response was, “Well, no one would go to him, you know that.” Say WHAT? Her response to that was that no one would take their children to a guy doing in-home daycare. I seriously don’t believe this, but what do I know, I haven’t polled the world yet. It infuriates me that this may be the case as I know that this guy would do a MUCH better job at in-home childcare (as would my husband) than I would  - why should gender matter?

Weigh in - would you take your children to a full-time stay-at-home dad for in-home childcare? Thoughts? Reactions?