Well there I was all excited,
thinking I had coined a new phrase ‘baby pooling’, but when I Googled it to see
if it already existed, it seems some Chinese mums have got there before me. I
say that, but there is only one tiny paragraph I could find on baby pooling and
somewhat dissimilar to the idea I had in mind. I thought that this idea would
be all over America with city moms etc. but apparently not, so I will take all
the credit!
My ‘baby pooling’ concept comes
from a slightly different angle. The Chinese article was about sharing the
parenting of children. Mine is about allowing you to have the best of both
worlds- staying accessible to your child during the day and earning
money/pursuing your freelance career at the same time.
When Esmé
hit 7 months, the end of maternity leave was looming closer and closer. Many of
my new mum friends were heading back to work and were feeling quite emotionally
torn. I had already decided that I wasn’t going to go back to full time teaching and that I wanted to focus my time building my writing career.
As a freelance writer, work is very flexible. I can
work from home while Esmé is napping, in the evenings and on weekends when John
is home. However, there are those times when I have just gotten into a certain
frame of mind and the creative ideas are rolling when I hear the wake-up cry
from upstairs. This is what led me to come up with the idea of baby pooling.
You’ve heard of car pooling I’m sure? Well my idea for baby pooling is that
mums who work from home can pair up with other mums and baby share.
Here’s how it works: You meet
at an agreed daily time, I think work hours work best so that you can stick to
a routine, which keeps you in a professional frame of mind. You might decide to
meet at 9am at one person’s house. One mum looks after both babies from 9am-12
noon. While she is with the babies, the other mum is working in another room.
At 12, everyone can have lunch together and have some play time/ story time
etc. Then from 1pm-4pm the other mum works for her 3 hours. This would give
each mum 15 hours per week without any daycare costs
and it would mean that breastfeeding mums could carry on feeding.
You would just pop your dependent other on the boob for 10-15 mins and then
back to work you go. The hours could also be tweaked so that mums with older
children could pick them up from school. Or the mum ‘in charge’ for those hours
could do the school run if the mums lived in the same school district.
This is something I am looking to set in place as work
picks up pace. The concept works well for mums like me, who just need a laptop
and internet connection to work. If there are mums who need their own home base
to work from, hopefully they would be able to pair up with a mum who is more
flexible in terms of location. What do you think ladies? Is it something you
think could work for you- a daily timetable, access to your child at any point
during the day, no day care fees, continuing to breastfeed on demand?
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