Jinx!

I am the stupidest woman alive. Seriously, the absolute stupidest. Yesterday, I had the nerve to tempt the Universe by saying this: "After just a week of leaving him at Natasha's, I find myself already more at ease. So, with the daycare situation hopefully resolved, I can focus on other problems." (Yes, I'm quoting myself. From yesterday's post.) The Universe took less than twelve hours to laugh in my face. "You're at ease?" the Universe snickered, "You think that your daycare situation is resolved? Here -- let's see what you do with this!"

LL's new daycare provider, Natasha, called last night. Her father suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. She's shutting down her daycare for the next several weeks so that she can fly back to the Ukraine.

I'm going to pause here to say that, obviously, Natasha is suffering more than I am. She's basically around the same age as me (thirtysomething) and I can't imagine losing a parent at this point in my life, especially while living so far away. I feel terrible for her. Also, she's probably going to lose some clients. All of her clients, myself included, are going to have to find alternative daycare solutions for the next several weeks, and odds are, some of them aren't going to come back. So when she gets back from the Ukraine, she's going to have to fill a lot of open slots. It's probably going to suck for her. In a minute I'm going to resume pouring out my anguish over how the situation is so incredibly sucky for me and S and LL, but I want to be clear that I understand that it isn't all about me.

Having said that... this situation is totally sucky for us! To recap, LL has had one week at crappy Baby Factory, then one week sick at home with me, then one week at Natasha's, and now another week at home with me. And next week, he's going to have to be in yet another new place (if we can even find someplace decent, again, on incredibly short notice). I don't know how many times I can expect him to recover from us totally scrambling his little world.

I have no idea what to do now. Natasha thinks that she'll be gone for at least three weeks. I have a huge deadline at work in eight weeks. It is absolutely not negotiable, and I'm barely going to meet it if I work straight through. It would be impossible to meet the deadline if I took the next three weeks off. S's situation isn't much better. He was just transferred to a new leadership position at work, and taking on a huge responsibility only to immediately take several weeks off would be, um, career-limiting, to say the least. So we need to find a new daycare, and fast.

We could probably cobble together care for LL among several friends and neighbors, but I really really don't want to make LL adapt to that many new caregivers in quick succession. Having four caregivers in five weeks is bad enough. Having a different caregiver every day for the next three weeks would be way too hard on him.

So. Tomorrow I start calling daycares. Again. And hoping that I can arrange to visit, interview the caregiver, call references, make a decision, and start easing him into a new place next week. For this week, I'm just screwed. I probably won't be able to work much next week, either.

Yes, Universe, you got me. You win.