I suppose it’s actually pretty easy to figure out when changes are afoot in the Yates household, as we either begin posting manically (such as when we’re in the matching process with a new au pair), or stop altogether.  In the case of the last 35 days, we appear to have gone silent running.  Actually it’s worse than that – the August 20th post was just an anecdote, so we haven’t really updated things since late July.  Oops.  This wasn’t exactly intentional – there wasn’t a conscious decision to do a news blackout.  We were just preoccupied.  Rest assured, the boys still live, and Katie and Joel are both still hanging on.  But things they are a changing.

Last Saturday morning we drove Michelle to the airport, hugged her goodbye, and sent her off to a new family in New York.  Or New Jersey.  I’m not sure, and can’t really tell the difference.  By all accounts they look like a great family, with beautiful children, and I hope Michelle will be very happy there.  They called her asking her what kind of iPhone she wanted, so clearly we’re the cheapskates and she now has it made.  Michelle’s departure wasn’t due to anything like the challenges of our last two placements.  With Malina’s departure, Katie and I were both struggling to get back into the frame of mind of being excited about having another au pair.  With Laura and Malin, we learned what the upsides could be, but we’d spent the last 18 months having a very different experience, and it was wearing us down.

Last February we were struggling with the question of whether or not we wanted another au pair.  We were looking into full-day preschools, or Katie staying home.  The day after Katie decided to quit working and be a stay at home Mom, she got a new job offer.  We came to the decision that we’d try again with an au pair because we knew how good an experience that could be, and maybe with both Katie and Joel in new jobs we’d all be in a better place and the family would be better off for it.  Six months later, some of those conclusions were still valid, but none were unequivocal.  Katie liked some parts of her new job, and very much liked her new management, but wasn’t find enough satisfaction at work to make up for the missed opportunities of spending more time with the boys.  About 4 weeks after Michelle’s arrival we reached the conclusion that Katie needed to stay home.  We felt very guilty about this, thinking that it was very unfair to Michelle, who afterall was making a very earnest effort and proving to be a very pleasant housemate.  Nonetheless, it came down to realizing that 10 years from now there was no way we were going to look back and say, “I wish we’d spent less time with the boys and worked more.”

So we pulled the trigger.  We talked to CultureCare and tried to arrange things to give Michelle the maximum possible opportunity to rematch.  Actually that part was kind of interesting – we’d never really been on the other end of that before, trying to help and Au Pair feel out other potential host families.  In the end she found a couple who live 30 minutes outside of New York City, with boy/girl twin 5 year olds and a 6 year old daughter.  The parents, Joe and Brent, seem like really nice guys, and Michelle was very excited for her next chapter.  On the plus side, she spent 10 weeks in Seattle and had only 1 day of rain, and left before Autumn really started, so she called that one pretty well.

For the next 2 weeks, Grandma Marilyn has graciously agreed to watch the boys, and on October 4th Katie starts her leave-of-absence from work.  A week later we go to Disneyland!  And even better, Marilyn and Carter are going to meet us there for the last half of the trip, and I think Uncle Ryan as well. Very sadly, we’ve recently learned that the Casey Junior train is closed for refurbishment, and Dexter want’s to cancel the trip.  But the new Cars Land will be open at California Adventures, so I’m hoping we’ll be able to pull him out of the funk.

It’s a little stressful trying to figure out how we’re going to drop down to 1 income, and how insane Katie’s going to go without the controlled-outlet of the quarterly forecasting cycle at Boeing, but I think we’ll manage it, somehow or another.  We might have to start clamping down a bit on the toy buying, and the Disney trip is probably our last big vacation for a while, but on the other hand Katie is excited about all the things she wants to do with the boys and places she wants to explore with them.  She’s perhaps a little over-ambitious on the things she’s hoping she’ll be able to get done on the home front (such as keeping this blog updated), and we’re both dreading the day when we have to cancel Kyla’s every-other-week house cleaning, but maybe now we’ll see if the boys are ready to wash some toilets.

And despite being very preoccupied with this decision and the preparations over the last two months, we have been busy.  We had another camping trip, spent a weekend with the Hollenberg’s at their palacial estate on the East side of the state, celebrated the boys’ homecoming days at the Evergreen State Fair and later the Pumpkin Hurl (otherwise known as the world’s smallest renaissance festival), and I’m sure some other things if I can just remember them.  We’ll try and get some of the pictures up soon.

Sorry again for the long silence, but hopefully you can understand.  Here’s to hoping we survive the next year!

-Joel