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Affluent Brooklyn Dad Complains He’s Spending Too Much Time With 9-Month Old, Blames COVID

Writer Ian MacAllen wrote an article for Insider on January 8 detailing the hardships of taking care of his own baby for three weeks. He said that his Brooklyn neighborhood was hit with the omicron variant of COVID-19, despite the fact that both he and his wife received two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine and wore face masks. 

The couple pulled their nine-month-old son out of daycare a week before Christmas due to COVID concerns. Case numbers kept rising, so they “fled to my parents’ summer cottage on Cape Cod to celebrate the New Year in isolation.”

It doesn’t seem too rough if you live in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the nation and your family has a second home on a beach. But anyway, apparently the MacAllens hid out for a while, waiting for the COVID situation in the city to calm down. Numbers kept rising, though, and some parents at their baby’s daycare tested positive for COVID, so they chose to remain at the cottage for a couple more days. 

MacAllen wrote that, “By comparison to our Brooklyn apartment, the tiny cottage had plenty of room for the baby to practice walking with fewer dangers.”

But then they went back to the city and, “Back in Brooklyn, our apartment had so many more ways for a toddler to injure himself: bookcases teetering with too many books; Metro Shelving with heavy Le Creuset pots; a metal staircase to the bedroom. Still, chasing our baby around avoiding harm was preferable to acquiring COVID from his classmates, and so we kept him home again.” 

So, MacAllen is saying he’s worried his child could injure himself with household objects. He and his wife could babyproof their home, like basically all American parents do at some point. It actually isn’t that difficult, and most supplies can be purchased at any Walmart (or Pottery Barn or wherever Brooklynites buy overpriced baby supplies). At the very least, he could stop complaining about owning expensive French cookware. 

MacAllen continued: “We were reaching our breaking point. The baby had been out of daycare for almost three weeks. We hadn’t spent this much time with him since his birth.” 

He and his wife took turns working from home and switching off caring for their sole offspring. He wrote that she held the tot while sending emails; MacAllen took a turn holding his sleeping son while he wrote on his phone. I guess that counts as a hardship if….no, wait, in no world does that count as a hardship. 

“We want to return him to daycare, not because a 9-month-old is missing a critical school curriculum, but because his parents are missing a huge amount of sanity,” wrote MacAllen. 

Three weeks. Three weeks, people, is what it took for MacAllen to lose his sanity while co-caring for one baby with another adult. I double checked, but no, this article was not filed under “Satire.” He’s just really upset that he had to take care of his own kid for nearly one month. Shhhh, let’s not tell him that after his son starts public school (“free” daycare!) his son will be sent home for three months. Every year. Until he graduates. Hehe.