Snow Day with Sasha: Time to Drink!

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? A while since we took on that hoary, divisive subject: babies in bars. Well, if you’ve been waiting for a chance to foam at the mouth about the diaper-clad set occupying the dive where you get sloshed, then wait no longer!

First, send a thank you to Bloomberg’s Board of Education, which in the face of a minor blizzard canceled school yesterday, triggering a cascade effect throughout the city’s private schools, which shut down as well. So, Sasha was stuck at home with me, and I got stuck at home with Sasha.

Overall, it was a fine day. In the morning, we visited Earle, the 2-year-old who lives downstairs, and were joined by Rebecca, the almost-2-year-old who lives even farther downstairs. (Down in the basement, there’s also a 16-year-old we keep in a cage, next to the bicycles, but we didn’t think she’d enjoy this playdate.) The three toddlers got along great, and we rarely had to remind them to share. At the end, Sasha and Becca hugged good-bye. Awwwww….

After lunch and a nap, however, we needed to get out, and since I was supposed to meet up with Jeff Koyen, a fellow travel writer who lives in my neighborhood, I figured I’d bring Sasha along. To a bar! God, we hadn’t been to one in so long. Would it be a disaster?

Reader, were you at Bar Great Harry yesterday afternoon? If so, you probably noticed Sasha dancing to the Ramones. You also probably noticed no one else dancing to the Ramones. What I mean is, Sasha did spectacularly well at the bar. Almost no crying (thanks to my provision of a lollipop, pretzels and an iPad loaded with “Yo Gabba Gabba”), not too much wild running around, no drinks spilled. She was, as toddlers go, a model barfly.

No idea, however, if every other patron felt that way. One woman told me she wanted to bring her own granddaughter there, then asked if Jeff and I were the “daddies.” (Tee-hee!) Another, younger woman marveled at Sasha’s cuteness, and the bartender filled Sasha’s sippy-cup with O.J. and vodka water, which Sasha used to clink glasses with me and Jeff.

But there was this one guy toward the back of the room who kept making comments. Totally ambiguous comments, though. I couldn’t tell if they were directed at me, or were part of his conversation with his friend, but they always seemed to come out just as Sasha and I were walking by. If I hadn’t been so drunk, I’d be able to remember precisely what he said. (Kidding!)

Honestly, I think everything went well. Sasha had gotten her exercise, and I’d gotten to hang out with a new friend. We were out of there at 5:30, with no fireworks and no tears. And, if this weather keeps up, we’ll be back there before long. Cheers!

School Dazed

Over at DadCentric, The Holmes wrote an appropriately pissed piece this week about the school budget crisis in Austin, where he lives:

Now the situation is looking downright grim. The State of Texas faces a budget shortfall of no less than $15 billion, a number so large that it doesn’t even seem real. People who study these things have calculated that you could close every prison in the state and still not close the gapEvery prison in Texas, y’all! And you know how we love us some prisons.

Of course, this spells trouble for school districts across the state. Here in Austin, the school district is looking down the barrel of a budget gap of $100 million. They’re talking layoffs of hundreds of employees. They’re talking school closures, and not just for poorly performing-schools. In short, they’re talking about major reductions in one of the most important government funded services in existence, reductions which have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of said service. Even schools that are doing a lot of things right are on the chopping block.

..

While I know there are amazing innovations happening quietly in classrooms all over the city, the ones we’ve been hearing the most about lately are being done with scissors and red ink. Cut, cut, slash.

I love that line, and he’s right. The most “amazing innovations” do seem to be in new ways to screw public education. It’s like the Kama Sutra of school-budget-slashing.

I was hoping to respond to his post a little earlier, but I didn’t get to in part because I was finishing a feature—in the new issue of Time Magazine, but not yet available online—about the very similar fecklessness of Arizona’s politics. That state faces a $2.1 billion deficit, which isn’t surprising or particularly unusual. What is unusual is the pledge of most of the leading politicians not to raise taxes no matter what.

This has left, of course, cuts, some of them truly ugly. In the educational arena alone, college counseling has been cut, dropout prevention programs slashed. All-day kindergarten is a thing of the past (just think what that does to working families, who suddenly have to pick up a child hours earlier each day, with no extra support for child care). All of this hitting a school system that was already one of the poorest-performing in the nation. It got ugly enough that the voters of Arizona actually went to the polls last year to raise taxes on themselves in order to fund education. For anyone familiar with California’s proposition system, the idea that the public would make mature decisions—the kind of tough choices their leaders are too afraid to make—at the ballot box is pretty stunning.

One education program hasn’t been touched, however: a program that gives income-tax breaks to any family who sends their kid to private school. That’s right: wealthy families who were sending their kids to private school anyway get a tax break for it, which means less money for the state’s general fund, and, by extension, for public schools.

I appreciate holding public schools accountable. And I am no Randi Weingarten acolyte. But one big problem with the education debate these days is that it is often very hard to tell who is in favor of shaping up the public school system and who just wants to blow it up.

While I was reporting on that piece, I was getting a very different bit of news back home. Having been stymied in our attempts to enroll Dalia in public pre-K last year (as we’ve talked about here before, Universal Pre-K is not quite Universal if there isn’t money for enough seats), we had to send her to private pre-K this year. It actually worked out great—we love the school, the teachers, the parents, the administration. The price tag was manageable, in part because we were given help by the school. But while I was working on the Arizona reporting, we got word that, if we were going to try to enroll our son in preschool, there wouldn’t be any financial aid. And tuition, in a delightfully countercyclical fashion, has gone up yet again. The price tag: $31,000 for preschool, almost three times what we paid this year for our daughter.

$31,000 for preschool.

I know–it’s a private school in Manhattan, a town that somehow still has obscene firehoses of wealth that wash away the rest of us. And we are thrilled to be sending our daughter to public kindergarten next year (although there was a waitlist at our zoned elementary last year). But where does that leave our younger kid? He’s a preschooler. He wants school, he’s ready for it. We can’t afford a fulltime babysitter much longer, so we’re ready for a school for him, too. But there’s no public option, except for the low-income families who are under the very needed umbrella of New York’s Administration for Child Services.

We found a Montessori school that seems to have less usurious rates. I hope it takes him in. But I have a feeling that throughout this city, this state, and this country, there are a lot of families going through different versions of this: how do we find the money to be able to work and have our kids looked after and educated? I suspect things will work out over here, after a little hustling. And most people probably patch together solutions. But as our own individual little dramas solve themselves, it’s still worth asking: why don’t we solve all of them once and for all? Recognize that families are facing impossible decisions. Make early childhood education a priority. Make it available, affordable. I’ll pay more taxes if that’s what it takes. Beats the hell out of paying $31,000.

Crime & Punishment: Toddler Edition

Crime and Punishment: Raskolnikov for Little Rascals

Sasha is generally a good kid, so we don’t spend much time disciplining her. Sure, she’ll occasionally cry and scream to get her way, but then she’s no different from her mother. Only when she’s truly defiant—say, throwing food on the floor even after we’ve warned her not to—do we get mean, and issue a Time Out.

But this is becoming problematic. For one, although our apartment is spacious by most New York writers’ standards, it’s not huge, so we can’t easily place Sasha in a corner. And the corners we do have tend to be so full of tchotchkes that she can amuse herself by examining them.

Second, the only chair we can bind her to so that she won’t escape the Time Out is her high chair. And we don’t want her associating her high chair with punishment—then she won’t eat, right? And last time we did that, she gave us a mournful “I’m sorry” so quickly that her punishment was over before it began.

Worst of all, she seems to like Time Out. They use it as punishment at her school, so she’s become familiar with the term, and last night, when I was giving her a bath, she started saying “Time Out, Time Out.” Meaning, I guess, that she wanted to stay there in the bath on her own, even though she was all done and ready for pj’s and a round of “Yo Gabba Gabba.”

So, what to do with a kid who’s literally a glutton for punishment? Do we force-feed her cake and ice cream when she refuses to share? Thrust new toys at her when she pushes another kid? Or simply let her do whatever the fuck she wants, with no consequences?

Or, I suppose, do we get another chair, clear out a blank section of wall, and do Time Outs the right way?

Nah.