Parenting on $6 a day

Remember those old travel books that used to promise, for instance, "Europe on $5 a Day!"? I have a vivid memory of flipping through one in the 1970s and imagining myself grown up and drinking wine in a fancy Paris restaurant.

I still remember that sometimes as I change a poopy diaper or put on a load of laundry. I especially remember when I sit down with a glass of wine at the end of the day, and when I open my statement from the Children’s Aid Society at the end of the month.

You see, although I’m a bona fide Mom with a fourteen-year-old son, I’m also a foster parent. We have a three-month-old baby living with us right now, and the Society pays an “all-inclusive” per diem of $6 for an infant. Some magic switch is flipped on a computer screen when a child is placed with us, and early in the month from then on we get a direct deposit of the accumulated amount from the previous month.

My bemusement comes from this fictional $6/day. You can’t go to the grocery store and buy a little $6 kit of baby stuff that will last one day. If you want to get a good price on diapers, you buy the huge box of 276, not a dozen. Like every parent I scrutinize the growth charts and count diapers per day to see whether I should buy the huge or extra-huge pack, but I have the additional wrinkle of not knowing how long he’ll be living with us.

Let’s say you buy the huge $45.99 box of diapers. Voila! You’ve just spent his first week of per diem. What about wipes? Do you spend another five days on the big refill pack? Do you spend one day on the small Penaten, or spring for the more-than-twice-as-big one for twice the price? Of course you have to buy the better value, but you’re already hoping you’ll get paid for at least two weeks, and only his bum is covered so far.

Through the extraordinary generosity of friends, I have only had one Naked Baby day, and that was on purpose (the remarkable April day that reached 24 degrees). I’ve been touched and moved by the friends who dropped off bag after bag of sleepers, onesies, and flannel blankets. A bath tub, toys, books, and even a stroller have found their way to us.

What nobody has is bottle-feeding supplies, since my friends are generally staunch breasties. That wasn’t exactly an option for me, so another couple of week’s worth of per diem went for bottles and nipples – all the while I was hoping the cheapest ones wouldn’t give his newborn tummy gas, in which case I would have to pitch them and start over.

$6 a day works out to $2190 a year. I read a statistic, years ago, that families tend to spend 10% of their after-tax income on a new baby. If my income was $21,900 a year, that would put me solidly under the poverty line. What does that say about how we treat babies in foster care, I have to wonder?