Baby Julia and I have been fighting the bottle battle lately. I can hardly blame her for preferring the breast, but the best I can do is to offer time shifted breast milk.  Today, Julia drank milk that was pumped on December 14, 2009. This mundane form of time travel has benefits for the working mother, who is able to be away from baby for more than a few hours at a time without jeopardizing comfort or sacrificing production.

My wife and I have decided to shuffle our shares of market and non-market labor once again, and we are now running a co-provider economic model rather than a primary breadwinner/caregiver duo.  We are each working around 32 hours a week at paid labor, caring for our children and taking turns picking up after toddler tornados the remaining 136 hours per week. Basically what this means is that I am working more hours than before and Janelley is doing more laundry.  One of the great things I am finding with this arrangement is that since we have similar time at home with the kids, the misleading label of stay at home father is out the window.  I haven’t been demoted, rather my time has shifted.  I still get to engage in the alchemy of transforming time into love much more than turning time into money, a bargain at any price.