Daycare

Ugh, this daycare thing is really causing me grief. My kids have such a crazy schedule this summer, that it is hardly worth sending L to daycare. M can be home alone, but not with L there. The two of them together would really be a bad mix. M is visiting grandparents for part of the summer, several grandparents are visiting us for several days, and we have the county and state fairs, and a couple of weeks of camp…

L’s daycare has a policy that you can take 2 weeks off in the summer without having to pay, but you have to let them know in advance what weeks those will be. And, any additional weeks off you have to pay for.

I’ve calculated that through the 10 weeks of summer, they will be busy for 5 of the weeks. Of course, the days are hit and miss—sometimes it’s 3 days a week, sometimes it’s the whole week, etc.

We pay L’s daycare $120 a week for the summer (he is not in daycare except for the summer). But if you tried to ask someone to come to your house and pay them that wage hourly, for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, that amounts to less than $3.50 per hour! Putting an ad in the paper for a job paying $3.50 per hour is likely to bring only laughs, rather than applicants.

So I am stuck.

What do you do for summer care? I wish I could take the summer off…