My 5 Kids Will Be in Gym Daycare for 10 Hours a Week During the Summer
Because Nothing is More Helpful than a Stranger on the Internet Telling You that Her System is Going to Fix your Problems
Don’t ingest any serious parenting advice from any woman whose oldest child isn’t older than your oldest by 10 years.
This means I can’t give any serious parenting advice to anyone, because my oldest child is eight. This post is not “serious parenting advice,” this is *supposed* to be encouragement in the form of outside the box, off the wall, take it or leave it ideas for summertime that will include at least as many more cliché phrases as I’ve already used in this paragraph.
As previously stated, a chunk of my kids’ summer will be spent in gym daycare. I’m using the word “daycare” purposefully, as a description, even though the gym itself uses the phrasing “Kids Club Childcare.” The reason I am bothering to write about this at all is not because I think everyone should do it. Sometimes, hearing the details of someone else’s system can help you springboard to a different solution that is worth trying.
So, a little more context: we’re a school family—my husband is an educator (this word means “he teaches one class of physics and also works in admin in the educational philosophy realm at a K-12”) and my oldest two kids are in school. For us, summer means downshifting from superstructure to pseudo-structure, and I have a few tricks up my sleeve. But, really, who knows if any of them are going to work. This week, I busted the back windshield on the minivan by shutting the trunk on bike handlebars that I didn’t arrange correctly. What am I saying? It’s summer. Expect the unexpected. Also, sometimes I break things, including my systems.
Skip to the gym daycare part if you want (I put a heading down there), but FIRST—
Other items in my SUMMER STRATEGIES GRAB BAG
The Weekly Plan Excel Sheet Jonny Made Me Because I Forgot to Download the One I Really Liked and Could Not Find it Again. I have this one child who just feels so much better about life if he knows that there is a plan for the five separate times (Breakfast, Tea [sorry England], Lunch, Snack, and Dinner [Dessert sometimes]) that we are going to eat that day. We fill this sheet out together once a week before I do our grocery order. A++
Nothing to Do Jar. I keep a jar of colored popsicle sticks (blue, red, and green) on the bookshelf that I hand to any child who says they are bored or have nothing to do. The colors represent the categories of the activities that are written on the stick in sharpie: things I can do alone (red), things I can do to help (blue), things I can make (green). There’s overlap in the categories, but three cheers for opting in. These aren’t orders, they’re just ideas. The kids can pick through the whole jar if they want to before deciding to do something else, but it has cut down on all of the “Mom, there’s nothing to do…” Here’s the full list of what’s in our jar.
Accept/Reject Stamps and the “I Want to Make a Plan” Sheet. One of the green sticks in the jar is “plan.” We are making memories over here this summer with the “I Want to Make a Plan” sheet, and accompanying “accepted” and “rejected” stamps (Amazon has everything). The kids who can write must use full sentences and be willing to revise the sheet according to our responses (the kids think the stamps are hilarious). Implementing this has done something to stem the tide of “WHY DON’T WE OWN A WATERPARK, MOM?” ideas. Here’s the sheet. Notice I don’t let them say what time we should do their plan.
Trident Tropical Twist Gum – Have you ever been driving and the kids are just winding up in the back seat and thought to yourself, “I would absolutely pay $0.078 per child to take whatever is going on back there down a notch”? Trident Tropical Twist, baby.1 Keep a pack in the console to just toss back there and say, “Everyone gets one piece of gum!” because it’s harder to yell at your siblings when your mouth is full.
LIGHTNING ROUND: library cards, audiobooks, FLY RIBBON, running the dishwasher twice a day *and* putting pans in it, a stack of paper plates in the pantry, constantly leaving the house (a bad strategy for some temperaments but a great strategy for mine), shoes that cover toes but don’t require socks, fun bandaids (until they run out, then it’s back to boring), living in the same town as my parents.
Now for…
GYM DAYCARE
A good friend is fond of the phrase “the funny third thing.” What she’s talking about when she says this is that sometimes, none of the available options (of jobs, houses, schools, what have you) are feasible. Then you start looking for the “funny third thing.” And when it comes to childcare, to “I need two hours to myself to clear my head,” gym daycare is a “funny third thing” kind of thing.
Gym daycare is not a three-star Montessori restaurant. I don’t have any illusions about that. The kids color on coloring sheets and play on the plastic playground and scoot around on those scooter things in the “kids-only” gym. There is a room with a Wii, and they rotate them in there by age group. I’m not saying that the time spent there is any given child’s favorite thing. I’m also not saying that 10 hours is an insignificant chunk of time—it isn’t. But I am saying that the staff are kind and respectful and that I’ve been very grateful for this system.
Yes, I squeeze in a couple hours of freelance writing in the gym lobby, but that is not the only reason I’m there. I’m looking at my sixth birth in (slightly) less than nine years right at the end of September. Last time around, I had an emergency C-section (placental abruption). I’m not going to call a VBAC a “goal”— “preference,” yes. But I am going to call being more prepared than I was in my previous third trimester and postpartum a “goal.” Being in shape is going to be helpful, no matter what happens after I walk into that hospital. So that’s why I’m there: to work out harder and more consistently than I would on my own.2
But it’s worth saying that I’d do this even if I wasn’t pregnant.
I’d do this if I had two kids instead of almost six.
I’d do this if I was homeschooling.
I’d do this if I never took on another freelance project.
I have a legion of people helping my family—grandparents and in-laws and sitters and godparents and friends and priests and nuns oh my. I could be the case study of “The Mom in America who Actually Has Enough Support.” AND I STILL USE GYM DAYCARE.
Let’s run the numbers on gym daycare. Childcare for five children costs $20/ hour, if you have a babysitter who is remarkably generous with her time and already likes and knows your children.3 Otherwise, it can be a lot more than that. So, let’s say, for the ostentatious amount of 10 hours of childcare a week, for something like 4.5 weeks in a month… that’s $1000. Tangent: I would 100% support a mother spending her resources to get *all* the help, even if she “wasn’t doing anything else” (the most ridiculous way to describe what a woman taking care of children does at home—ya’ll know that there’s enough work for one mother and another person). I think there are creative ways to get help, too, up to and including having someone (family member, grad student, what have you) living with you and trading childcare for room and board. The trickiest part about something like that isn’t the money, it’s the delegation of tasks and the communication surrounding said delegation of tasks. Living with other people is both good and hard and, culturally speaking, we’re kind of out of practice.
Anyway.
The price of a monthly gym membership—for a ritzy gym—is going to cost 1/3 of the cost of 40 hours a month of generous babysitting for a family of seven. We’ve bounced around to several gyms over the last five years and we’ve landed at this gym that is its own funny third thing. It’s not trying to be a country club, but it offers more amenities than the YMCA. It has a zero-inch clearance outdoor pool (the kind that slopes up like a beach), which is the best kind of pool to take a bunch of babies to swim in.
Yes, we budget for this. The trade-offs? Well, we don’t do a lot of takeout or packaged snacks or new clothes. The place we really find the resources for the gym is probably by driving around in cars that were manufactured when we were in high school (or before). Also, see previous enormous list of in-person support. That helps a LOT.
So, we get the ten hours, the pool, the workout classes… well, we actually get 17.5 hours of childcare per week per child, it’s 2.5 hours per day per kid (pretty standard across gyms).
YMCA memberships for a family (no size limit) around here cost $150/month (and there are military discounts and sliding scale income discounts). Let’s say you have five children, so we’re working with that $20/ hour number again for comparison, and let’s decrease the hours you spend in the gym to only 5 hours a week, say, you go in for two mornings.
4.5 weeks in a month x 5 hours a week = 22.5 hours per month total.
$150/22.5 hours = $6.67/hour.
So, childcare for all children for $6.67/ hour, all told. I guess we can call the workout classes and the access to the showers you don’t have to clean free. The ambiance is not your favorite coffee shop, but there is a local Y location that has a lobby with a gas fireplace and armchairs.
I pencil in 2.5 hours of gym daycare, four times a week. For three mornings, I’ll use that time for a workout, a shower, and an hour or so of work—a time Jonny has nicknamed “write or die.” I either write, or I stare at my computer and die (= don’t check my email inbox or Substack feed, and if I can’t write, just wait until something breaks loose and I can).
Once a week, we utilize gym daycare in the evening for a pool date. We eat an early dinner, then drop off our five children, wave goodbye, and go swimming. Just us. They have a 90 degree outdoor “adults only” pool.
Just an option. Never said it works for everyone, never said it had to.
But here’s what I will say: you don’t have to beat yourself up with the I should be able to make this work rigamarole before you start considering “funny third things,” whether for schooling or childcare or healthcare or exercise or therapy or meal planning or housekeeping or whatever it may be. “Should” is a mean thing to say to someone who’s just asked for help, and that goes for the conversations taking place in your own head, too.
On the Calendar: The Ascension
You are exactly where you are meant to be, and you are already doing more than you think.
The Gospel for Sunday is 🐂Luke 24:46-53, which tells the story of the Ascension, of Jesus returning to heaven, his mission on earth complete .
I found some conflicting accounts of whether we’d read St. Luke’s or St. Mark’s version tomorrow, but, I must say, I’d be grateful if it wasn’t St. Mark’s, because the verse about snakes and poison really confuses me (Mark 16:17-18, if you have clues, please share). Here’s the end of Luke 24:
50 When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. 51 While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. 52 Then they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. 53 And they stayed continually at the temple, praising God.
Also, today (May 31st) is the celebration of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary—the only bit I have to add here is that this is the second joyful mystery of the rosary, Elizabeth and Mary embracing in what I (despite myself) imagine as Elizabeth’s driveway. It’s a mystery I have dedicated (since, maybe 2018) to asking God for companionship and friendship, with women my age, younger than me, and older than me. I started praying like this when I was running around the 1/10 mile track over the basketball courts at the YMCA, while my kids were in… you guessed it… gym daycare. It’s difficult to believe the manifold ways God has honored that prayer. It would take its own essay.
In the last poll, I learned that slightly more than half of you are leaving the state, the rest are staying home, which gives me some leverage over my seven-year-old. Not everyone is leaving, little one…
Today, I want to know…
My books: Eucharistic Saints, A Saint A Day
Not affiliate links or Amazon links. By all means, buy the books on Amazon, I just figure you know how to get there on your own. Sometimes TAN and Thomas Nelson run deals, though!
+ Saint Sessions for YDisciple (co-written with Tanner Kalina)
We partnered with January Jane for the inspiration for the content!
Discovered this flavor when same child who loves making the schedule added “mint” to the list of hated things, which also includes sunscreen, mayo, ketchup, mustard, and most condiments, actually, with the exception of Cholula.
Alright I have no qualifications that should make you consider my MatERnAL mEnTAl hEAlth AdVICe, except for maybe a pretty intense history of my own. Okay. That said, one of the really common symptoms of maternal mental health struggles, postpartum or otherwise, is dissociation—that very strange, out-of-body feeling that you are watching someone else live your life instead of living it yourself. Exercise is a really good antidote for this, exercise of really any type, because it forces you to “be in your body,” and, ultimately, to show some gratitude for it.
I’m partial to Les Mills workouts myself. I’ve had the same instructor (she moved around gyms, too) since 2019.
If number this makes your jaw drop in the “ONLY $20?” sense, I’d suggest you prayerfully consider converting to a religion where large families are not just the exception, in which there are plentiful responsible eighth grade through sophomore girls who’d love to make some extra cash and think of five kids as “kind of a small big family.”
I love your writing. I have adult children but remember feeling so overwhelmed about 20 years ago. I was working full time as health care provider (which meant way more than 40 hrs per week) and two babies close in age and I was drowning. Hired a housekeeper two times a month and I could then be happy mom instead of maniac mom. I also learned to never judge a mom for the decisions she makes but to support her and encourage her instead.
We also recently discovered Trident Tropical Twist and I'm here to say it's an absolute GAME CHANGER! 😂 I will also be happily downloading every attachment in this post. THANK YOU! May the odds be ever in your favor this summer!