About 9 months before I got pregnant with LeLe, I put our names on two wait lists for daycares near where I work. By the time she was born, we had barely moved up the list at either place, so for the first 9 months of LeLe’s life, she was with my mom and my mother in law for most days. I finally found a babysitter and LeLe started going there two mornings a week. About two months before Little Bug was born, the babysitter moved to a nearby town, which meant that I had to drive 40 minutes to drop off and pick up. This was seriously cutting into my work time, so we had to find another solution.
I asked around to a bunch of friends, and one of them recommended a nursing student who was taking a leave of absence from school for a year. This was last November. B came over for an interview and Little Bug was immediately in her lap and happy and LeLe was intent on showing B every single toy she owned. The kids loved her and I liked that she was medically trained and had flexible hours. Well, we are now almost a year into the arrangement and our beloved B will be going back to school at the end of this month. She has Mondays off, so we will still have her on Mondays, but it means that we will have to find another arrangement for some of our mornings.
LeLe is starting preschool in September on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, I work from home Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, my mom has both kids on Fridays, and my mother in law has both kids on Wednesdays (she drives 2 hours each way just to have the day with them. We love grandma T!). My mom agreed to have Little Bug on Tuesday mornings while LeLe is in preschool. I am actually pretty excited about this because he has never really had one on one time with my mom and I think it will be really good for him.
So that leaves Thursday mornings to figure out. I’ve looked into a number of options, but I haven’t found a good solution yet. Ideally, I would want a person who can come to our house and stay with Little Bug there, but I would also be fine taking him somewhere for the morning. The hardest thing about this is that we do not have a ton of extra money for childcare. The daycare centers we initially applied for are way out of our budget (even with subsidies for working on campus), and in home daycares around here typically don’t have spots for a single morning.
Having two young kids in childcare and juggling our schedules is hard. I look forward to the days when I can drop both kids off at school and not worry about it for the whole day.
What are your creative child care situations?
cherry / 141 posts
currently I stay at home with my almost 8 month old. BUT my daughter goes to prek 3 days a week. Her days are long and I miss her. I think how good it will be to have them both in a school program so I can easily do other things BUT then I remind myself that I’ll just miss them all day long. We can’t really win as parents can we?
blogger / apricot / 482 posts
The waitlist situation for childcare is amazing! I was shocked when we ended up on a waitlists for well over a year.
persimmon / 1445 posts
Have you looked into mother’s morning out programs?? A few churches in my area have drop off childcare from 9 am- 12 or 1 for less than $20/day. I will be using this for my older daughter after the baby is born so I can have some time to bond with baby, take naps, and run errands without having to wrangle a 3 year old and a newborn.
guest
Could you find a stay at home mom interested in making a little extra $ by watching your child for one day a week? We have our kids in daycare full time and I can certainly say that childcare costs are outrageous. That said, it is horrible knowing how little $ our childcare providers make, and with college degrees.
blogger / apricot / 389 posts
We’re still struggling to find out for our little one as well. It’s hard to find providers that will take babies before 1 because most Canadian women have the full year off, and we need someone to take our babe when he/she is 6 months old. We have some leads, but have been getting less than stellar communication even though I know she runs an amazing centre, it’s hard not to think maybe I need to go in another direction.