I didn’t do it early. I did it in month four. It still worked out, more or less, but it was harder than it needed to be.
I’m noting this not to beat myself up about it — my choice to keep saying yes was an expression of love for my niece and nephew, which is not a flaw — but because I think it’s the honest part of the story. I wasn’t trapped. I had choices. I made them in the direction of yes for longer than was strictly good for me, and that’s on me as much as anyone.
## The Stuff Nobody Talks About: Calendar, Identity, Grocery Logic
Everyone talks about childcare in terms of the big things: school pickups, doctor appointments, homework. Nobody talks about the grocery logic.
Before Max and Ella, I shopped the way a single adult without children shops, which is to say: I bought what I was going to eat in the next four days and approximately half of it was edible and the other half was aspirational produce that I intended to cook into something before it went soft. This system is inefficient but requires almost no planning.
Feeding children is a different exercise entirely. There are preferences. There are phases — Ella went through a phase in February where she would eat exactly three vegetables and the others were non-negotiable. Max’s food preferences were more stable but required specific versions of specific things: the right brand of cereal, the right kind of bread for the kind of sandwich he would actually eat, as opposed to the kind he would eat around. I got this wrong for two weeks before I got it right, and the two weeks of getting it wrong involved more food going to waste than I would like to admit and one memorable Tuesday evening where I made pasta with a sauce Ella described as “wrong” without further elaboration.