About the hired help: I suspect it may be easier to get by without this if one has older, helpful kids, though I could be wrong about that. At the very least, I imagine one can tell, say, a 10-year-old to play with the toddler for half an hour while one cleans the bathrooms, rather than having the toddler underfoot. (And this suggests that the kids are at home all day, too, which isn’t true of most families.) A couple of months ago, my MIL came in for a week and took care of DD (toddler) for an hour or two every morning. I was stunned by how much I’d get done. As I put it one morning when she walked in with DD: “I vacuumed the ground floor, dusted, mopped, loaded the dishwasher, started dinner, returned three phone calls, caught up on all paperwork, and still had time to relax with a cup of coffee and the Internet for twenty minutes! That was amazing!”
Based on that, I’m thinking of either putting DD in a MDO-type program next year, or perhaps paying a friend with other toddlers to watch DD for a few hours a morning or two each week. As it is now, phone calls are difficult at best (DD thinks that phone calls are a personal insult, and screams accordingly during them…you try dealing with an insurance company voice-operated phone system with a screaming toddler, much less discussing intricate billing details!), and paperwork ditto. And housework is so much simpler when one doesn’t have to plan every trip up and down the stairs as if one was invading Normandy. (“Do I take the toddler with me, not be able to carry very much, and take five times as long because she wants to walk up and down the stairs a dozen times, or do I do it by myself, get much more done in much less time, and have her throw a twenty-minute tantrum because she didn’t come?”)
